morning may please the court i'm peter henderson they represent david watson this case is i think very close to the williams case from the ford a few years ago and it  is in between jail and navarette and i think the district court struggled with which which supreme court precedent is more in line obviously under this reasonable suspicion an anonymous tip line of cases we have to deal with whether a tip is sufficiently reliable whether a tip contains sufficient information of criminality to justify a terrorist and on both of those prongs  this case doesn't doesn't quite meet that and of course reliability in information can be balanced if we have a more reliable to perhaps less information required if we have more information perhaps less reliability is required so i think the court needs to needs to address both of them the whole theme of these lines of cases is a reluctance to allow police officers on their own to stop people to investigate general versus wanting police officers to be able to intervene in emergency situations and the status of possession of firearms is an allegation of ongoing criminality of general criminality rather than them an emergency situation that's what j l held and that's why never at ultimately is not the deciding case here because never it did involve an emergency where there was an anonymous nine one one call made by an adult that she nearly been driven off the road by a reckless driver we see that throughout the cases out of this circuit where that are upheld terry stops because the tip involved an allegation of an ongoing emergency had this tip for example alleged there are men across the street pointing guns at each other or threatening people or there's a domestic dispute and one person has a gun that would that would be sufficient that's an emergency situation and that's the way the officer remembered it in his testimony that's right and incorrectly incorrectly and you know that i think that's a problem with the case is you know what terry said fifty years ago  the rule that the court decides on is going to govern police conduct and what happened here is you have a police officer who gets a call and hears the word gun knows the location of the town has a high crime area knows that there are four black males around the car with a gun and immediately jumps to that conclusion so wildly when you hear it on it is they were a voice which is an ambiguous term and if it wasn't the children playing with guns then that is an emergency well i think that justifies checking it out i mean i don't think anybody is suggesting that he shouldn't have a response to the call right and as soon as he got there he would've seen the parking lot and seen there aren't always on time and that i greatly there i'm just saying i think the call wasn't quite fo you know african american man in the parking lot you know with guns that's right it was boys and that's exactly why we want to type a response that respects individual liberty well also respecting you know  brandished we don't have that here we're playing is ambiguous make make of what you want that they were part of a boisterous crowd which we don't have here it was late at night outside of the bar and so there were concerns in the court's opinion written by just stephanie miller that you know this might be intoxicated this there's more than just a hunch that this could lead to an unstable a volatile situation in which people get hurt  in our case by contrast the other thing is that i don't think william specifies the age of the tipster here we do have a child making this tip a fourteen year old child you know that right and they know that i mean he that that's on the on the call it's also him in broad daylight in the morning i think it was about nine thirty and it doesn't involve this group of twenty five i think there are about twenty five people and williams and so on those facts i think williams is represents a much more potentially volatile situation a sort of interesting thing is if mr watson had thrown the gun over his shoulder before he got out of the car and everybody knew this was going to be a frisk if he hadn't done that and then had gotten out and been frist probably gets suppressed and so there it's all very well you say well because williams the court did hold that the frisk was specific factors that come in favor of the reasonable suspicion modifies how we should think about williams well i think navarrette the strongest introduction of new factors is this reliability of nine one one calls and what the majority in that case decided was nine one one calls are reliable particularly because people know the consequences of calling nine one one they know and we know that it can be recorded  they can face criminal penalties things like that it was a fairly heroic assumption well that that's what justice scalia thought justice scalia thought you know to whom is this obvious that that these sorts of things have consequences and  so in our case in particular i don't think any fourteen year old knows you know the non emergency line of the gary police department to call to to report something if you call the police you call nine one one and we know that in their reply brief people call nine one one to call the police it was sunday morning right i think maybe i think so yeah it i'm not sure the day the week but you know that's who you call the other thing is to of course those assumptions about people knowing the consequences of making this call nine one one operator should know if i got a child calling nine one one it could be anything you know it could be a genuine emergency it could not be and that's why we trust the adults the police officers come to the scene see what's going on and then take action rather than coming to the scene and immediately detaining and then trying to figure out what's going on i think one of the more disheartening parts of this record is the officer's testimony in court that winnie after he blocked in the car it came up to the driver and well the driver was talking real reckless about you know his rights and things like that and i think that sort of disregard for the fourth amendment shouldn't be condoned or thank you good morning your honour's and may please the core of this report properly denied watson's motion to suppress based on the nine one call it was reasonable for the officers to suspect that criminal activity might be afoot and to briefly seize the occupants of the charge or to either and that it was contemporaneous and that nine one one was used in what was what was the suspected criminal activity or i believe the suspected criminal activity was that the firearm might be about to be used in some kind of a vent or some kind of incident that's what the officer testified was that this was a specific location that was a frequent site of domestic incidents and of of shots fired it's not illegal to have guns in indiana happen al it's not and it's not illegal to stand outside of a bank and to walk back and forth multiple times already of those other kinds of things the fact is as the court has said in terry and as many other courts have said reasonable suspicion is the chance that a crime is occurring or may be about to be occurring and may be based on purely innocent conduct and that's what the point is is that there are many different levels there's the terry stop there's the for risk and there's the the full blown arrest that requires probable cause and so the distinction between leo a probable cause case  williams which as it was decided by this court was essentially a first case is that here we are down at the lowest level we are at the level of purely a stop a nonconsensual stop to be sure but put a stop nonetheless it is the lowest level of intrusion and there are going to be many instances where there are because it is a mere chance of criminal activity that people engaged in purely an oculus conduct are going to be briefly stop the stop or last approximately six minutes and and ask questions about what's going on to either confirm or dispel and it may well have to then determine that there are no guns here this is a prank or there are guns here and we're exercising our perfectly free right under indiana law to have guns consistent with our permit and to use them navarette said and hance reliability i think billet each trace the ability to understand consequences are not present here i would disagree on both of those i think first of all the ability to trace is clearly present at the nine one one call or the dispatcher in this case even spread the phone number back so the caller knew it was a stranger's phone right at the sound man he was using some man's phone well as as we pointed out as it came up later in the record we were able to through using that number traced back to the original caller so the point of now to read is not whether the individual caller knows but that there is some indicator in some additional level of reliability that comes to the tracing system that's different from a call that is placed to say an anonymous tip line or some random person on the street who cannot be traced back so that appear it seems to me that at minimum this is consistent with navarette the nine one one system was used that's all that was really require hear beyond that the call is actually read back the caller knows you i have the phone number that is available and as as far as the point of this being a child your honor this is not a six year old this is a fourteen year old  frank belief would be that a fourteen year old is likely going to have more experience and knowledge with phone technology than many adults are but regardless of that fact that again is not a factor that the supreme court heavily relied on and that the dissent argued against as to whether or not fourteen year olds twenty four year olds or seventy four year olds know that the nine one one systems are recorded and this information can come back to that did not seem to be a factor that the court was concerned about not read and i think that this call is under the precedent of navarette reliable enough and it is far closer to navarrette than it is to to jail in fact i think is indistinguishable so so that meets the reliability see a difference between somebody is running me off the road and people have ran off the road as indicator of criminal activity or if it's just a possibility that somebody was swerving because they were possibly something else so how about how about this possibility mr holler i see somebody driving down the road looks to me like you're looking down at a screen in indiana over here until phone in their sipping from a cup and it's possible that what they're sipping from is least with alcohol so that they're drinking while driving and it's possible that they're texting but it's also possible that they're checking map directions on the phone you know if i'd be if i call and say there's somebody nine one one somebody a case on that point but the point in that case though is it's that we've moved beyond the question of whether it's you calling anyone else the child calling or a police officer observing it's simply not enough to stop somebody to believe that there's any kind of crime that's been committed i don't believe that the call in this case presented probable cause or even i'm sorry did not present probably cause a crime had been committed but i also believe if one reads the court's opinion and navarette i think the supreme court felt that there was probable cause to believe the mere fact that somebody brand somebody off the road is enough without knowing more facts about exactly what they meant by that to believe that there is probable cause to believe a crime was committed there they believe there was only reasonable suspicion to investigate further to see whether this person was engaged in drunk driving to see whether this person was engaged in criminal activity that's what we have here is reasonable suspicion to see whether there is any criminal activity well or not not just to look but to seize the individuals and restrain their liberty and use reasonable force if necessary to require them to remain so objective just right that is correct your honor and right so what's wrong in this situation was just walking and talking well as a believe the district court itself said that would have been any possible right if there was a reasonable suspicion we believe there was reasonable suspicion here so i mean all i can it can point out is that there are firearms involved here there were firearms that were out and under those kinds of circumstances in a in a high crime area and in an area where firearms have in the past been used for illegal conduct it is reasonable to investigate to determine whether that is what is going to be happening here investigators one thing seizes another and that's what the government's position seems to lose sight of here  you see in your brief the fact that others with firearms have used them unlawfully at the same building in a lot provided at least some reason to think that the people seen by the nine one one caller might do likewise that's an extraordinary  well i believe your honor that there is reason to suspect that when i think of any instance where there are firearms out whether there are there are people who are using firearms displaying playing with have them out there is nothing wrong with with officers briefly coming up stopping them and saying can you please tell me why you got your firearm out and what you're doing with it i don't think that's anything like they're over fifty titles and nobody thinks that they cannot ask that question the question is whether they're entitled to seize the liberty to to seize those individuals and deny them of their liberty while the question goes forward and by the way is there any doubt here that the officers were committed to frisking the individuals in the car once they got enough officers on the scene i i think that is what they were going to do as there was no to any doubt as to whether as a doubt i don't know but i think that was their plan was that the practice of gary police in essence anybody we talked to were going to for us and we're going to stop and frisk no i don't believe that that is we're going to do we're going to stop i think under the circumstances if they hear a report that there are guns out in an area that they it is a hot spot i believe it would be their practice to stop and to investigate further yes i believe that they probably would do that with a full blown teary stop as opposed to walk into our i don't know exactly how i believe that the answer of course is probably yes you are because i believe to do a walk and talk when you have received a report that there are multiple people which they confirm there were four people and at least two firearms i think the officers would say would likely endanger officer safety to simply walk up and approach somebody without taking some effort to block them and to detain them so i think that probably yes in order to protect officers or to protect the public i think it is important that that those kinds of steps be fermented to be taken and those are concerns and i don't think read anything in in florida versus j l to say well there certainly is no firearms exception that one cannot consider the nature of the call and the firearms need for the call that's something that when many of the cases we have cited the fact that there are firearms involved is something that is much greater in this instance than there are in cases like gentry or seventy or other case or pack or other cases where there is no involvement of firearms it's having a gun but it's we think something else might have happened in other words there wasn't actually an eyewitness account of criminal activity there's an eyewitness account of something that appeared or might have been  something that the police want to look into firearms or something that police want to make sure nothing bad happens with but the what might happen in the future based on  citizen's neighborhood even though that citizen has a second amendment right to carry a firearm is is this sort of mere speculation and hunches that the terry court did not want to  condone seizures and so i think that's that's really the key fact here is we don't have sufficient information that would justify a terry stop and the fact that it came from this anonymous source a fourteen year old child using somebody else's phone bill just doesn't rise to the level of reasonable suspicion that allows officers to seize and then investigate and i think this court should enforce the fourth amendment and tell the police officers