Tenth Circuit US v. Conner 12-1063

Decision here.

   A reporting party called the police at 11 PM, and did not give his name but did give his phone number and address.  The RP said that he had just seen a light-skinned black male wearing a fuzzy hunter hat get out of a black SUV and hide a pistol in his waistband after someone yelled "No, no!"  Officers would later testify that the area where this occurred is one of the worst neighborhoods in Denver.

   I am inclined to agree.  Any place where people where fuzzy hunter hats is no place that I want to be.

   Police officers responded to the call and found a light skinned black male (Conner) wearing a fuzzy hunter hat and walking away from a black SUV which was parked exactly where the caller had said it would be.  They detained Conner at gunpoint, searched him, and found that he was in fact concealing a pistol in his pants.  Conner was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.

   Conner moved to suppress the gun as the fruit of an illegal stop.  His argument was that the initial report was an anonymous tip, and therefore unreliable, and also that even if the tip were reliable it didn't establish reasonable suspicion.  Amusingly, Conner acknowledged that the police had enough information to necessitate an investigation.  He just thinks they should have tried a consensual contact instead of gunpointing him.  What bizarre logic.... Anyway, the trial court was having none of it, so Conner appealed to the Tenth Circuit.

   Conner's argument against the reliability of the tip leans heavily on Florida v. J.L. (the Supreme Court decision about the anonymous tip that someone at a bus stop had a gun.  I've been meaning to add that case to this site for a while now).  The problem with his argument is that the two cases don't have much in common with each other.  In J.L, the police had no information about the anonymous caller at all.  In this case, the police didn't know the caller's name but they did have enough information to go contact him if they needed to.  In J.L, the caller didn't say how he knew that someone had a gun, and there was no other information to corroborate the tip.  In this case, the caller claimed to have just witnessed the events he was calling in, and he provided a detailed description of the suspect and the circumstances, all of which were verified when the police found a suspect matching the description in the immediate area of the black SUV which was parked exactly where the caller said it would be.  The Court held that the tip was plenty reliable for the police to act on it.

   Regarding reasonable suspicion, the court again held that RS just requires a minimal level of objective justification.  Conner hiding the gun in his waistband right after someone yelled "No, no!" gave the police reason to suspect that Conner was involved in some sort of armed confrontation.  That was reason enough to justify the stop.

   I really loved the last paragraph of the court's decision, so I'm just going to paste it here (minus some internal quotation marks):

Therefore, we conclude that this is clearly not a case of police officers
arbitrarily stopping an individual walking down the sidewalk during the middle of
the afternoon.  Nor is this a case of police officers arbitrarily stopping an individual walking
down an alley late at night in a high-crime area.  Here, the officers had a
sufficiently reliable tip and a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity—they
believed Mr. Conner might have been involved in an armed confrontation.
Reasonable suspicion requires a dose of reasonableness and simply does not
require an officer to rule out every possible lawful explanation for suspicious
circumstances before effecting a brief stop to investigate further.

   Conner's conviction was affirmed.