[Anderkent]

If I'm reading you correctly that's not parallel construction, that's planting evidence.

Now, I haven't followed the US law or police news closely, since my interest is at most academic, but my picture of parallel construction is that you first use unreliable/inadmissible sources to construct a picture of the situation, then using that general knowledge to locate actual admissible evidence.

So the cop might use inadmissible sources to know there's an person of interest somewhere. But he still needs admissible evidence to demonstrate probable cause if he wants to enter and use results of this second search to be useful. Otherwise he's exactly in the situation of the 'naive' cop from your example, where he can only say 'anonymous tip', doesn't have a record for that, and his 'real' investigation gets dismissed.

What you seem to be describing is taking inadmissible evidence and then somehow inserting it into results of a legal search - i.e. planting evidence. That's not a new idea, I guess, but is it really so common, and how is that caused by parallel construction?

[tptacek]

You are, I believe, correct about parallel construction. It is notably easy for police to find probable cause to effect a search, which is half of what makes parallel construction disquieting. But they do have to actually find some cause to conduct the search. They can't just go with the intel they get from inadmissible evidence; if they do, the new evidence from the unwarranted search is "fruit of the poisonous tree", and can be excluded from trial.