What happened to you?

An arrest is a seizure and the Fourth Amendment forbids an unreasonable one. The claim turns on probable cause: whether the facts the officer knew at the moment of the arrest would lead a reasonable officer to believe an offense was being committed (District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48 (2018)), for any offense the officer knew of, not only the one charged (Devenpeck v. Alford, 543 U.S. 146 (2004)). A search of your home, your car, your phone or your person has its own rules, and so does a stop short of an arrest. An arrest made because of what you said, filmed or complained about is a retaliatory arrest, where the probable cause rule bends (Nieves v. Bartlett, 587 U.S. 391 (2019)). For an NYPD stop or arrest, the City's own 2021 law adds a claim with no qualified immunity defense (N.Y.C. Admin. Code §§ 8-802 to 8-806).

A prosecution begun or continued without probable cause is a malicious prosecution claim, and since Thompson v. Clark, 596 U.S. 36 (2022), the only "favorable termination" it needs is that the case ended without a conviction. Probable cause for one charge does not save a baseless second charge; the analysis is charge by charge (Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon, 602 U.S. 556 (2024)). A conviction or a detention that rests on evidence an officer fabricated is its own claim, and it accrues when the criminal case ends in your favor (McDonough v. Smith, 588 U.S. 109 (2019)). A conviction that still stands blocks a damages claim that would imply it was wrong (Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994)), which is why the criminal case has to be handled with the civil case in mind.