Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear.
The discovery, recounted in court Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier.
Different levels of search. A “weapons pat down” does not constitute a search requiring a warrant or probable cause. Even then a weapons pat down can only be initiated on a detained or arrested person. The former simply requires “reasonable and articulable suspicion” that crime is afoot. That’s a lower bar than probable cause but should be more than just a hunch.
They’re also given lots of leeway under the guise of “officer safety” to do weapons checks on people and the driver’s area of a vehicle during a traffic stop for example. Not sure how that applies to something like a backpack though but it seems most judges prefer erring on the side of police in most cases.
And a tip is more than a hunch. I’m sure there was some illegal conduct during the arrest, but I don’t think this is it.
A tip is absolutely not “more than a hunch”. I can’t recall all the finer details about what elevates a tip from essentially “random gossip” to RAS or even PC, but it’s not as simple as cops receive a tip means they can search you.
Ah yes a hearsay hunch. Nobody positively ID’d anyone before submitting a tip. It’s still a hunch.