Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/18-556_e1pf.pdf
Page Number: 24

Cite as:  589 U. S. ____ (2020) 

7 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

The majority today has paved the road to finding reason-
able suspicion based on nothing more than a demographic 
profile.  Its  logic  has  thus  made  the  State’s  task  all  but 
automatic.  That  has  never  been  the  law,  and  it  never 
should be. 

II 
The majority’s justifications for this new approach have
no  foundation  in  fact  or  logic.    It  supposes  that  requiring 
officers to point to “training materials or field experiences”
would demand “ ‘scientific certainty.’ ”  Ante, at 3.  But that 
is no truer in this case than in other circumstances where 
the reasonable-suspicion inquiry applies.  Indeed, the State 
here was invited to stipulate to the evidence it relied on to 
make the stop.  It could have easily described the individual 
or “accumulated experience” of officers in the jurisdiction.
Cf. Navarette, 572 U. S., at 402.  The State chose not to pre-
sent such evidence and has not shown that it could not have 
done so.  Accordingly, it has proved no harm to itself.2 

In fact, it is the majority’s approach that makes scant pol-
icy sense.  If the State need not set forth all the information 
its officers considered before forming suspicion, what con-
ceivable evidence could be used to mount an effective chal-
lenge to a vehicle stop, as the concurrence imagines?  Ante, 
at 4.  Who could meaningfully interrogate an officer’s action 
when all the officer has to say is that the vehicle was regis-
tered to an unlicensed driver?  How would a driver counter 

—————— 

2  The majority suggests that requiring the State to supply the missing
link  between  fact  and  suspicion  would  “considerably  narrow  the  day-
light” between the reasonable-suspicion showing and that required to es-
tablish probable cause.  Ante, at 7.  But that may simply be a feature of
this unique context, where the difference between a permissible and im-
permissible stop turns on a single fact.  Given that reasonable suspicion
and probable cause are not “reducible to ‘precise definition or quantifica-
tion,’ ”  Florida  v.  Harris,  568  U. S.  237,  243  (2013),  the  gradation  be-
tween the two is bound to vary from case to case.