How it got easier for cops to shake down minorities
In the old days, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution required police to establish "probable cause" to lawfully conduct certain searches and seizures or perform arrests. As of 1968, police may stop you even without probable cause to believe you committed a crime. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio, justices formulated from whole cloth the less-than-probable-cause standard they called “reasonable suspicion,” aka "RS", which was comically and pedantically defined as the totality of specific and articulable facts and circumstances, taken together, that leads an officer to reasonably suspect a person may be engaged in criminal activity. Cops never even need to name a specific law they think has been broken, nor do they even have to tell the “subject” the basis for the stop, unless he’s arrested or cited. The court pretended to establish some boundaries by requiring that an officer’s suspicion must be “particularized” and not generalized,