Today, I had the unfortunate occasion to call 911 because of an erratic driver. Specifically, I watched him slowly run a red light as if he were very confused, then turn onto a freeway and weave dramatically and often between the two right lanes and the shoulder, often causing other cars to swerve. Drunk, tired, distracted, other: I didn’t care. He was a danger to everyone around him. I wound up close enough to him at one point to read his license plate number, and I reported him to 911.
My hypothetical question is this (since I will likely never know the outcome of my call). Based solely on my phone call, if law enforcement ran across him but did NOT observe the behavior I’d seen, would they still have the legal ability to pull him over? Is my phone call equal to probably cause? And does it make any difference whether or not my call was anonymous or not?
Not LEO, but I do have a scanner and gave often heard dispatch describe a car and it’s behavior. Then they end with “make your own case”. This leads me to believe that the responding officer needs to observe the reported behavior.
The Supreme Court looked at a similar issue in this very term. The name of the case is Navarette if you want to google and read about their decision. If you want to read it, here’s the link (PDF):
Navarette was not really a departure from the existing caselaw, Alabama v. White. Briefly: anonymous tips will seldom have sufficient indicia of reliability to stand alone as the basis for the reasonable suspicion necessary to support a Terry stop, but in some specific instances they can.
In Navarette, the court considered the short time between the incident and the report as an indication that here was insufficient time to fabricate details, a strong inference of eyewitness accounting (the caller reported being run off the road by a vehicle driving wildly and specifically described the vehicle), and the caller used the 911 system, which allows police to identify and trace callers in many circumstances.
Thomas wrote for the Court in a 5-4 decision that the stop was justified under those facts, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Breyer, and Alito. Scalia dissented, joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan.
Based on my experiences, yes, they will make a stop, and they will explain why they made the stop, and make other observations to determine if the driver is impaired or subject to being detained for any other reason. But they cannot make an arrest or issue a citation on that basis alone, absent extenuating circumstances. The driver could just fight the citation in traffic court, and there would be no witness. Due process is still alive, if not well.
I’ve wondered about this with a similar scenario… You know how commercial vehicles often have those signs saying “how’s my driving” with an 800 number to the company? What’s to prevent some anonymous lowlife from calling in a false complaint and getting a driver disciplined or terminated? They could provide date time exact location and physical description of the driver then make up some dramatic story… Saw him pick up a hooker and swerve all over the road while getting a bj going 90mph on the freeway throwing beer cans out the window. YIKES!
I’m familiar with this procedure. It usually follows the calltaker asking the caller if they would be willing to make a formal complaint, which implies that they may have to appear in court etc. Most of the time they say no, which is when “make your own case” comes in to play.
If the officer locates the vehicle, they will usually stop it whether they observe the erratic driving or not. As Bricker explained, it’s grounds enough for a stop.
Non-US jurisdiction here, but I can give perspective from the 9-1-1 side of things.
The more specific the information provided, the more likely an officer will make a stop.
If a caller reports a “small black car driving badly” there is almost no chance an officer will make any stop unless the officer observes problem behavior.
If a caller reports a “mid-90’s black Honda Civic hatchback with custom rims, license plate number 555444 is swerving wildly and hit a mailbox in front of 1234 Main Street” then the officer has more information that could be independently verified and is much more likely to make a stop even if the offensive behavior is not observed.
We do have vengeful people calling about their ex, sometimes for driving related offenses and sometimes not. The caller tends to want to remain anonymous but I can usually see that their phone number has been used to make prior reports about the accused person. We can usually tell that the call is suspect because the caller is unwilling or unable to provide basic information that should be obvious (direction of travel of vehicle, or description of suspect’s clothing, etc…) to someone who is actually seeing an offense.
Alternatively the vengeful caller sometimes alleges facts that a mere bystander would not have any way of knowing. So a report that Joe Smith is driving with an expired license plate or is carrying an unlicensed firearm is a call I would suspect is motivated by vengeance.
In such a case I may be able to look up the license or vehicle information. I can still pass the report to an officer who may choose not to take action if the report is fundamentally unfounded. (Alleged that Joe Smith who resides on Mulberry Lane is driving a blue Ford pickup plate number 777888 with an expired registration. However the vehicle licensing computer system shows the registration is current and valid and records indicate the caller’s phone has been used by the accused’s ex to file prior reports. I’ll pass the complaint to the officer along with the info from the computer. The officer might decide to do nothing in such a case.)
Just to be clear, in my case, I was very specific about location, direction of travel, a description of the vehicle (it was a minivan, although I failed to give the make and model) including the full license plate, where he got off the freeway, and which way he turned. I was even able to describe the driver’s clothing as I passed him. And the 911 operator asked for my name, which I provided.
I guess I’m hoping that there was an active effort to find the guy, but LA’s a big city, and I don’t know how much effort would have been made. I never heard back from 911 or LAPD, so I’m assuming the driver didn’t manage to kill anyone.
Did you use a phone registered in your name to make the call? If so, in effect your tip was anything but anonymous. The authorities could very easily find out the identity of your phone from the phone company and subpoena all the information you’ve told the phone company. Most phone companies know your name, address, social security number, date of birth…enough information to trivially track you down.
A 911 call is only semi-anonymous if you use a burner phone (a prepaid phone purchased with cash) and turn it off afterwards and never use the phone again.
The question isn’t whether the police can track Asimovian down later to scold him for giving a bad tip, though. It’s whether the information available to the police, considering all the circumstances, gives the police a reliable basis to reasonably suspect that that other car is engaging in specific criminal behavior.
In other words, all the information that they might be secretly downloading about Asimovian is irrelevant to his question unless by finding out exactly who he is and what he’s all about they glean some reason to conclude that he’s an especially reliable eyewitness to traffic violations.
If you call the police and just say “hey, there’s a red car on I-80, super shitload of drugs in that bad boy,” you’re giving them effectively nothing, even if they know who you are. If you say “I don’t want to say who I am but I watched them put the drugs in, XYZ is driving but the car belongs to his friend Pooh Bear, I know exactly where they’re going and who they’re meeting there, they do this every Sunday, it’s exactly 10 keys of coke, bla bla bla,” then every little bit makes your information a little more reliable and gives the police a little more of a reasonable suspicion that there actually is criminal activity afoot. But your bank account and social security information probably won’t give them a head start in that direction.
What’s to stop the cops from making a stop to check on the welfare of the driver? Your description could apply to a person with a medical emergency as much as one who was intoxicated.
About 3 weeks ago, as I was approaching the George Washington Bridge, a driver passed me on my left close enough to knock off my mirror. I motioned to her to pull over and she motioned to me that she wasn’t going to do that and kept going past me. So I pulled up close enough to get her plate number and asked my wife to call it in to the local police via 911.
What the police said was that they weren’t going to do anything about it. Wasn’t practical - by the time they got someone out she’d be somewhere else and so on. What I could do was to go into the station and make a report. That’s it.
[What happened next was that the lady - apparently in response to seeing me tailing her with my wife on the phone - pulled over and offered me a wad of cash. Which turned out to be over $250, so all ends well :)]
It’s possible that a report about erratic driving is more of a priority than a leaving the scene claim. But that depends a lot on how seriously they take your assessment that someone’s driving is erratic. Might not be very seriously at all.