Wow. A Terry stop, you say? Huh. Never heard of that one.
Probably it was pure happenstance that I used the precise language that Terry uses to distinguish stops made under that rubric with arrests, eh?
It’s true, as you suggest, that the contents of the 911 call, even if anonymous, can provide a reasonable, articulable suspicion for the stop. The assumption that drove my OP was that the contents of the 911 call were as the officer reported: “white man walking down the street holding black toddler’s hand”, and nothing more. But if the call did provide more information, then the correct answer to “Am I free to go?” is “No, sir. We’re briefly detaining you to investigate.”
Which leads to my second complaint, which I also laid out and which seems to have escaped you: The police, in my view, will very often walk down both sides of this street; they will project a commanding presence that makes the ordinary citizen feel as though he has no choice but to remain, and then, should evidence of a crime be revealed, claim piously in court that the citizen was free to leave at any time.
If indeed the 911 call gave them reasonable suspicion, then they can safely tell the citizen he cannot leave. They didn’t say that here; yet they didn’t let him leave, either, which suggests to me that they were trying to preserve an eventual claim that the encounter was consensual while still detaining the suspect.
The post you quoted was posted by mistake, while I was composing it - the full and accurate post is quoted below it. Please read that one.
I attempted to indicate as much, but because of the way this board is configured I could do so in the post itself.
In any event, no-one in the whole thread since has brought up the actual legal background of police procedure since the OP, even though it has been going a very long time - don’t you think this is an ommission better rectified?
These are what I believe are mistaken assumptions.
Assumption #1: that the information used to identify the person under suspicion is exactly the same as the reason they are under suspicion.
We do not know whether that is true and it is unreasonable to assume it is. Remember, all we know is the report of the guy stopped. The cops have no obligation to inform him of what they know at this stage.
Take a common “Terry stop” situation - some guy is seen doing something suspicious, say apparently casing a store for a break-in; the 911 caller desribes him as “a White guy, 6’ tall, with a big dragon tattoo on his forehead”. Cops pull up, say “we got a call about a suspicious looking guy, the caller said it was a White guy with a big dragon tatoo on his forehead”. Is it the natural assumption to make that the reason he was stopped was because he had a big dragon tattoo? Police are bashing tattoo-wearers?
Not necessarily, the tattoo may just make the guy, suspicious for other reasons, conspicous. That was how the cops identify the correct person, out of all the persons walking down the street.
Similarly, in this case all we know is the following (reported by the “victim”):
We do not in fact know why the caller thought he was “suspicious looking”. All we have is the assumption that the “victim” leaps to - that it was his race, nothing more.
Assumption #2: that because they let him go, they had no resonable suspicion in the first place.
We do not know this, it could just as easily be the case that the caller provided what amounts to “reasonable suspicion”, but that on actually seeing the fellow the cops judged his demeanor and his apparent interactions with the girl and decided that the suspicions were not justified, and let him go. It could have gone the other way, of course.
It seems to me that the cops were only behaving badly if you make a couple of assumptions concerning what they were told by the 911 operator, assumptions which in context are not particularly reasonable. This is a situation which is “unreasonable” on its face only if you assume the cops were acting unreasonably. In order to know one way or the other, you would have to know the content of the 911 call.
Your claim seems to be: As a Terry stop, this may have been justified by the contents of the phone call, which are unknown to us.
And I’m saying: ok, arguendo, the phone call provided reasonable, articulable suspicion for a Terry stop. Then why, when Grandpa asks if he’s free to go, didn’t they tell him that he was being briefly detained? They strongly suggest he’s detained (number of cops present, continued questions, noting that he “isn’t cooperative”) but they never actually commit to a position that could later be used in court.
It sounds, Bricker, as if they did commit to a Terry Stop when they told him he was not yet free to go. Is that correct?
I, too, was assuming that the account of the officer’s description of the 911 call was accurate and complete, but of course we don’t know what the caller actually said. Is a 911 call describing a person escorting a child as “suspicious” (without regard to race) sufficient for a Terry stop? Obviously a cop would need more than a feeling that a person is suspicious, but a third-person report would perhaps have a little more weight, especially since citizens aren’t expected to meet the same standards as police.
IOW “Your honor, the suspect was looking suspicious,” wouldn’t be a reasonable, articulable suspicion, but “Your honor, I received a report that Mrs. Smith had observed the suspect acting a manner which caused her to believe the suspect may be engaging in an abduction or other crime,” may be even if the officer can’t state what the specific behavior was that caused Mrs. Smith to call 911. Is that the case?
Finally, suppose the 911 call had given additional information that did provide a reasonable, articulable suspicion (such as that the caller has seen the man tempting the girl away from a playground by offering her candy). Is there any reason to think the police would tell the gentleman this? Do police have to justify a Terry stop to the suspect? If not, what recourse does the victim of a potentially illegal stop have? He could sue the police for violation of his civil rights, but it would be an expensive waste if the cop could just show up in court and say, “Well, the real reason for the stop was this…”
Perhaps because they decide, based on their observations, that the ‘reasonable suspicion’ provided by the 911 call was in fact incorrect?
Why should they detain him, if on investigating they conclude that he’s not a threat?
In a way, his little wannabe Rosa Parks outburst may have even lead them to that conclusion - his show of outraged self-righteousness may not be what they, in their cop-ly experience, expect from a real pervert abductor.
In which case they are to be applauded and not condemned - a real asshole bunch of cops may have said “no” and given him a bunch of hassle, even though they reasonably concluded he’s no threat, just to be dicks because of his talk-back (and justified it if called on it by the 911 call).
They detain him until they have observed him further. Then, on questioning him, observing him and deciding he’s not actually a threat, they let him go, rather than (say) arrest him.
To my mind, this is consistent with a so-called “Terry Stop”.
If such a thing existed, it was in the content of whatever the 911 dispatcher told the cops. Without knowing what was in it, one cannot make any pronouncement about whether the cops acted reasonably or not - which is my point; that in the absence of the one piece of evidence necessary, people are leaping to conclusions about the cops “wasting their own time” and being “racist” (just like the “victim” did). Such a conclusion is only sustainable if you assume that the 911 call was laughably bogus on its face, as in any other case the cops acted quite reasonably.
I do not know why you are drawing a distinction between the first and second cop.
I can deduce from the behavior of the first cop that she had no such information, else she would have detained him. What the hell would be the point of not detaining him if she had grounds to do so?
The first cop not not tell him he wasn’t free to go. The second cop did. They both had the same information. If the first cop had reasonable, articulable suspicion, why did she not employ a Terry stop? if the second cop had such suspicion and she didn’t, where did *he *get the information?
The second he asked whether he was free to go and she did not respond she was out of line. She was abusing the authority of her badge. Everything else that happened flows from that.
Methinks you are deducing too much based on too little.
First cop:
Isn’t that a “detention”?
Second cop:
[Emphasis added]
After the cops question/view him some more:
I simply do not see the alleged difference between the two cops. First cop shows up, detains him; second cop shows up, reaffirms his detention; then, finally, after investigating, the first cop lets him go.
On the contrary, the first cop was asked “… if we could leave …”, but “…the officer kept me there demanding answers”. Sounds like a “stop” to me.
There is zero evidence of “abusing authority of the badge”.
No, it’s refusing to answer a direct question about a detention.
If she was detaining him she had ample opportunity to say so. The fact that she ignored his question speaks volumes as to whether she thought her stop was legitimate. How she behaved and how the second cop behaved are significantly different. She refused to say whether he was being detained. She refused to answer a perfectly legitimate question from a citizen concerning their interaction. The second cop, on the other hand, answered in the negative immediately. Why was this so difficult for her? What is so hard about speaking a simple truth?
Then why couldn’t she answer a simple yes/no question?
OK. Amend that to “attempting to intimidate a citizen under cover of the badge.”
Seems to me like the alleged scofflaw had a complaint as well, to which the officers somehow did not feel compelled to respond. Indeed.
In my opinion, you are reading far, far too much into the “victim’s” account.
What HE said is as follows:
He never even claims to relate exactly what she said to him - yet from this terse account, you glean that she deliberately “refused to answer a direct question”, found it “difficult … speaking a simple truth” etc.
Point is, she clearly indicated to him he wasn’t free to go. He doesn’t say how she “kept me there”.
The second cop said “no.” The first cop didn’t, unless you want to invent a dialog.
Frankly, if I, a middle-aged white man, were walking down the street with a black child who was legitimately under my protection, and a police officer stopped me and said the someone had complained that a “suspicious looking white man …” was doing something, I would suggest that the officer tell the complainant to stick it up his ass, and then ask “Will that be all?” I would continue asking that until I got a yes or no answer.
Those cops had jack shit and they knew it. If they had had the slightest remote suspicion that a kidnapping or other serious crime were going down he would have been cuffed forthwith. As **Bricker **has suggested many times, it is far more likely that they were trying to walk both sides of the line. To which I say, screw 'em.
I say this as someone who has tremendous respect for the job the police do every day, and absolutely cooperate with them when asked, as long as they aren’t being jerks, or overstepping their bounds. These cops were being bullies, and did nothing to deserve his respect.
It is not, alas, a verbatum dialogue. Nor does it pretend to be.
Are you asserting that absence of evidence is evidence of absence in terms of dialogue? The "victim"didn’t say ‘the first cop evaded my attempt to discover if I was stopped or not’, no matter how much you think he did.
What you would or would not do in that situation is irrelevant.
No, I would not say that the “slightest remote suspicion” warrants arrest, and if you have been following this thread you would know that isn’t the test. A cop has to have “probable cause” for arrest. A 911 call sure as shit isn’t “probable cause” for arrest.
“Reasonable suspicion” = cause for a “Terry Stop”, and a 911 call may form the basis of “reasonable suspicion”.
Which is, in fact, exactly what they did.
You seem to be advocating (nay, demanding) a harsher level of police reaction than legally acceptable, and getting upset that the cops didn’t [illegally] over-react in the way you would expect.
For someone who has tremendous respect for the cop’s job, you are willing to jump to a lot of unflattering conclusions respecting them in the absence of any actual evidence of wrongdoing. I tend to reserve outrage for, well, when the cops actually behave outrageously - not when they are doing their jobs in (for what we know) was a perfectly acceptable and even laudable manner.
How about everybody did the right thing? A 911 caller saw something suspicious and out of concern for the child called it in. Cops responded to the call not knowing that it was about nothing, but out of concern for a citizen complaint concerned about a child. The grandpa stood up for all of our rights. The cops were persistent but didn’t get what they wanted. Freedom is messy and unresolved. There are not clear good guys and bad guys.
The cops aren’t supposed to be persistent without either articulable suspicion or probable cause. Not when that persistence detains a citizen against their will.