Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca6-14-04050/USCOURTS-ca6-14-04050-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION 

Pursuant to Sixth Circuit I.O.P. 32.1(b) 

File Name: 15a0092p.06 

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT 

_________________ 

SHAWN NORTHRUP, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v. 

CITY OF TOLEDO POLICE DEPARTMENT; DAVID R.

BRIGHT; DANIEL RAY, 

Defendants-Appellants. 

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No. 14-4050 

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the Northern District of Ohio at Toledo. 

No. 3:12-cv-01544—Jeffrey James Helmick, District Judge. 

Decided and Filed: May 13, 2015 

Before: GILMAN, ROGERS, and SUTTON, Circuit Judges. 

_________________ 

COUNSEL 

ON BRIEF: John T. Madigan, CITY OF TOLEDO DEPARTMENT OF LAW, Toledo, Ohio, 

for Appellants. Daniel T. Ellis, LYDY & MOAN, LTD., Sylvania, Ohio, for Appellee. 

_________________ 

OPINION

_________________ 

SUTTON, Circuit Judge. On a midsummer evening, Shawn and Denise Northrup went 

for a neighborhood walk with their daughter, grandson, and dog. Apparently in a happy-golucky mood, Shawn wore a t-shirt reading, “This Is The Shirt I Wear When I Don’t Care.” R. 28 

at 7–8. Shawn carried a cell phone, which he holstered on his hip—next to a black 

semiautomatic handgun. 

>

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 A passing motorcyclist stopped to complain about Shawn’s visible firearm. The stranger, 

Alan Rose, yelled, “[Y]ou can’t walk around with a gun like that!” But “[O]pen carry is legal in 

Ohio!” Denise responded. Id. at 28. As the Northrups walked away, Denise and Rose 

exchanged increasingly unprintable words until he was out of view (and earshot). 

 Rose called 911, reporting that “a guy walking down the street” with his dog was 

“carrying a gun out in the open.” R. 39 at 22–23. When asked what type of gun the guy was 

carrying, Rose replied, “A handgun, and he’s telling me it’s legal to carry out in the open.” Id. at 

23. That’s right, the dispatcher responded, it’s legal “[i]f you have a CCW”—a concealed-carry 

weapon permit. “I’ll get a crew out though.” Id. The legality of Northrup’s behavior threw 

Rose for a loop, prompting him to add: “I’m not going to call a crew out if it’s legal to carry a 

gun out in the open.” Id.

 Despite Rose’s change of heart, the dispatcher sent an officer to the scene anyway. “I’m 

not an officer,” she worried. Id. She dispatched Officer David Bright with the message that 

someone was “walking his dog on Rochelle [Road] carrying a handgun out in the open.” R. 26 

at 35, 115. Ten minutes later, Bright spotted the Northrups, their dog, and the “gun on [Shawn’s] 

hip.” Id. at 36. He got out of his vehicle, said “excuse me, sir,” and asked Shawn to hand the 

dog’s leash to his wife, which Shawn did. Id. at 37. 

 At that point, according to Officer Bright, Shawn pulled out his cell phone, then “moved 

his hands back toward his weapon”—where his cell phone had been—“in what [Officer Bright] 

believed to be furtive movement.” Id. Bright asked Shawn to turn around with his hands over 

his head. Id. at 38. Rather than comply, Shawn “kept asking” why Bright was there. Id. And 

rather than answer, Bright “walked up and unsnapped and temporarily took possession of his 

firearm.” Id.

 Shawn adds these details. Before Officer Bright emerged from his car, Shawn began 

holding his phone (and leash and arms) out in front of him to record the interaction. Bright 

walked up with “his hand on his firearm,” announced that if Shawn “go[es] for the weapon, he’s 

going to shoot,” and refused to answer any of Shawn’s questions, such as: “[W]hat was going 

on?” “[A]m I free to go?” “[A]m I under arrest here?” R. 28 at 33–35. After Bright disarmed 

Shawn and explained he was responding to a call, Bright demanded Shawn’s driver’s license and 

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concealed-carry permit. Shawn gave Bright his license, but Denise told Bright to look up the 

permit himself, prompting Bright to threaten to “arrest [Shawn] for inducing panic right now.” 

Id. at 36.

At that point, Bright placed Shawn in handcuffs and put him in the squad car. Bright 

suspected Shawn had committed the Ohio offense of “inducing panic.” R. 26 at 47; see Ohio 

Rev. Code § 2917.31. After Bright looked up Shawn’s driver’s license, he discovered that 

Shawn had a concealed-carry permit—making the family walk (dog, cellphone, gun, and all) 

legal. After about a half hour and after another officer (Sergeant Daniel Ray) arrived, Officer 

Bright released Shawn with a citation for “failure to disclose personal information.” Ohio Rev. 

Code § 2921.29(A)(1). The police later dropped that charge. 

 Shawn Northrup sued Officer Bright, Sergeant Ray, and other members of the Toledo 

Police Department in federal court, alleging violations of his rights under the First, Second, 

Fourth (and Fourteenth) Amendments as well as state law. The district court granted the 

officers’ summary judgment motion in part, rejecting Northrup’s First and Second Amendment 

claims as a matter of law. But it permitted his Fourth Amendment and state-law claims against 

Bright and Ray to go to trial. The officers filed this interlocutory appeal. 

 Officer Bright claims that he had a “reasonable suspicion” that Northrup was engaged in 

criminal activity based on two undisputed facts: (1) Northrup was visibly carrying a gun on his 

holster, and (2) Bright was responding to a 911 call. That reasonable suspicion, Bright claims, 

justified his disarmament, detention, and citation of Northrup. Before addressing whether he is 

right, we should mention a few guiding principles. 

Qualified immunity protects the officers from this lawsuit if either of two things is true: 

The officers did not violate Northrup’s Fourth Amendment rights, or any such rights were not 

clearly established at the time of the search. Summary judgment is appropriate if no material 

fact dispute clouds the officers’ defense and if they are entitled to judgment as a matter of law. 

And the nonmovant—here Northrup—gets the benefit of all reasonable inferences in the record. 

The Fourth Amendment protects “the people” from “unreasonable searches and 

seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. The guarantee does not prevent the police from initiating 

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“consensual encounter[s]” with individuals—from approaching them on public streets and in 

other public places and asking them questions. United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, 200–01 

(2002). But it does prevent the police from stopping and frisking individuals in the absence of 

“reasonable suspicion” that the individual has committed, or is about to commit, a crime. Terry 

v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21, 27 (1968). More than an “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 

‘hunch’” is needed to stop and frisk an individual; the officer must identify “specific and 

articulable facts” of criminality. Id. at 27. 

The facts of Terry make the abstract more concrete. A Cleveland police officer noticed 

two young men pacing outside a store and closely scrutinizing it. Id. at 5–6. Afraid the two men 

might be planning an armed robbery—“casing” the joint in the Court’s words—the officer 

approached the men, identified himself as a police officer, and asked what they were doing. Id. 

at 6–7. The men were evasive, leading the officer to spin one of the men around and pat down 

his clothing to check if he was armed. Id. He was. The officer found a concealed—and illegal 

to possess at the time—handgun. Id. When the Supreme Court considered the men’s argument 

that this “stop and frisk” amounted to an unreasonable search and seizure, Chief Justice Warren 

wrote for eight Justices that police officers may reasonably intrude into a pedestrian’s personal 

security if they can “point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational 

inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.” Id. at 21. 

 In today’s case, Officer Bright relies on two “specific and articulable facts”: Northrup’s 

open possession of a firearm and the 911 call about what Northrup was doing. The Fourth 

Amendment no doubt permitted Bright to approach Northrup and to ask him questions. But that 

is not what he did. He relied on these facts to stop Northrup, disarm him, and handcuff him. 

Ohio law permits the open carry of firearms, Ohio Rev. Code § 9.68(C)(1), and thus permitted 

Northrup to do exactly what he was doing. While the dispatcher and motorcyclist may not have 

known the details of Ohio’s open-carry firearm law, the police officer had no basis for such 

uncertainty. If it is appropriate to presume that citizens know the parameters of the criminal 

laws, it is surely appropriate to expect the same of law enforcement officers—at least with regard 

to unambiguous statutes. Heien v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 530, 540 (2014). 

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Clearly established law required Bright to point to evidence that Northrup may have been 

“armed and dangerous.” Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 64 (1968) (emphasis added). Yet all 

he ever saw was that Northrup was armed—and legally so. To allow stops in this setting “would 

effectively eliminate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed persons.” United States 

v. King, 990 F.2d 1552, 1559 (10th Cir. 1993); accord United States v. Ubiles, 224 F.3d 213, 218 

(3d Cir. 2000); United States v. Black, 707 F.3d 531, 540 (4th Cir. 2013); United States v. Roch, 

5 F.3d 894, 899 (5th Cir. 1993). 

 This requirement and the impropriety of Officer Bright’s demands are particularly acute 

in a State like Ohio. Not only has the State made open carry of a firearm legal, but it also does 

not require gun owners to produce or even carry their licenses for inquiring officers. See Ohio 

Rev. Code §§ 9.68(C)(1), 2923.12; Mike DeWine, Ohio Att’y Gen., Ohio’s Concealed Carry 

Laws and License Application 15 (2015) (“Ohio’s concealed carry laws do not regulate ‘open’ 

carry of firearms. If you openly carry, use caution. The open carry of firearms is a legal activity 

in Ohio.”); R. 26 at 121 (“If an officer engages in a conversation with a person who is carrying a 

gun openly, but otherwise is not committing a crime, the person cannot be required to produce 

identification.”). 

 What about the verbal dispute between the Northrups and the motorcyclist? Doesn’t that 

justify Bright’s suspicion that the Northrups were engaged in criminal activity? No, for at least 

two reasons. There is no evidence that Bright knew about the dispute: All that the dispatcher 

told him was there was a man “walking his dog on Rochelle [Road] carrying a handgun out in 

the open.” R. 26 at 35, 115. Even if Bright had known about the argument, the statute that he 

suspected Northrup of violating—“inducing panic”—does not cover what happened. Under 

Ohio law, “inducing panic” applies to circulating a false warning of an impending “catastrophe,” 

threatening to commit an “offense of violence,” or committing an offense with “reckless 

disregard of the likelihood” that it will cause “serious public inconvenience or alarm,” Ohio Rev. 

Code § 2917.31. Carrying a handgun out in the open is not an “offense” in Ohio and thus does 

not fall within any of these proscribed activities. 

 What about the possibility that Northrup was carrying a firearm not covered by the Ohio 

law? Had Northrup been carrying a gun that looked like an assault rifle or some other illicit 

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firearm, that might have justified the officer’s conduct. See Embody v. Ward, 695 F.3d 577, 

580–81 (6th Cir. 2012). But there is no evidence that this was the case, and Bright indeed does 

not even make this argument. 

What about the possibility that Northrup was not licensed to carry a gun or that he was a 

felon prohibited from possessing a gun? Where it is lawful to possess a firearm, unlawful 

possession “is not the default status.” Black, 707 F.3d at 540; Ubiles, 224 F.3d at 217. There is 

no “automatic firearm exception” to the Terry rule. Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 272 (2000). In 

Ublies, the Third Circuit showed why. There, police responded to an anonymous tip that Ubiles 

was carrying a gun while attending a crowded street festival in the Virgin Islands—which on its 

face was a legal activity. 224 F.3d at 214. The police nevertheless detained Ubiles even though 

they were unaware of “any articulable facts suggesting that the gun Ubiles possessed was 

defaced or unlicensed, [or] that Ubiles posed a safety risk.” Id. at 218. In rejecting the officers’ 

argument that Ubiles’s possession might have been illegal, the court treated the situation as “no 

different” from a setting in which the officers suspected “that Ubiles possessed a wallet, a 

perfectly legal act in the Virgin Islands, and the authorities stopped him for this reason. Though 

a search of that wallet may have revealed counterfeit bills—the possession of which is a crime 

under United States law—the officers would have had no justification to stop Ubiles based 

merely on information that he possessed a wallet.” Id. (citation omitted). 

Officer Bright adds that he faced a difficult choice: “[R]espond to the communities’ fear 

and the appearance of the gunman by performing an investigatory stop, or do nothing while 

Northrup continued walking down Rochelle and hope that he was not about to start shooting.” 

Appellant’s Br. 16. Law enforcement, to be sure, is not an easy job, and it often puts officers to 

difficult choices. But this was not one of them. The argument indeed presents a false 

dichotomy. Nothing in the Fourth Amendment prohibited Officer Bright from responding to the 

call and ascertaining through a consensual encounter whether Northrup appeared dangerous. 

Until any such suspicion emerged, however, Bright’s hope that Northrup “was not about to start 

shooting” remains another word for the trust that Ohioans have placed in their State’s approach 

to gun licensure and gun possession. 

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What about Officer Bright’s perception that Northrup made a “furtive movement” toward 

the gun during the encounter? Officer Bright was not the only witness to this encounter, 

however. Northrup claims that he put both of his hands in front of him as soon as the officer 

approached—with one holding the cell phone and the other holding the dog leash. R. 28 at 33–

35. Only the officer claims that Northrup made a furtive movement after he put both hands in 

front of him. On this record, only a jury may decide whether Northrup made any such 

movement and whether it justified the officer’s conduct. 

 While open-carry laws may put police officers (and some motorcyclists) in awkward 

situations from time to time, the Ohio legislature has decided its citizens may be entrusted with 

firearms on public streets. Ohio Rev. Code §§ 9.68, 2923.125. The Toledo Police Department 

has no authority to disregard this decision—not to mention the protections of the Fourth 

Amendment—by detaining every “gunman” who lawfully possesses a firearm. See Ohioans for 

Concealed Carry, Inc. v. Clyde, 896 N.E.2d 967, 976 (Ohio 2008) (holding that Ohio’s statewide 

handgun policy preempts contrary exercises of a local government’s police power). And it has 

long been clearly established that an officer needs evidence of criminality or dangerousness 

before he may detain and disarm a law-abiding citizen. We thus affirm the district court’s 

conclusion that, after reading the factual inferences in the record in Northrup’s favor, Officer 

Bright could not reasonably suspect that Northrup needed to be disarmed. 

 Officer Bright’s other arguments on appeal rise and fall with his reasonable suspicion 

defense. If Bright had no reason to stop and frisk Northrup, he violated clearly established law 

in handcuffing—fully seizing—Northrup in his squad car for thirty minutes. Smoak v. Hall, 

460 F.3d 768, 781 (6th Cir. 2006). Officer Bright, quite wisely, no longer defends the theory 

raised below that he had probable cause to arrest Northrup. And a jury, as the district court also 

correctly concluded, is the appropriate body to determine whether he acted with malice in seizing 

Northrup and thus whether he committed a state tort. 

 Unlike Officer Bright, Sergeant Ray is entitled to qualified immunity. “[W]here 

individual police officers, acting in good faith and in reliance on the reports of other officers, 

have a sufficient factual basis for believing that they are in compliance with the law, qualified 

immunity is warranted, notwithstanding the fact that an action may be illegal when viewed under 

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the totality of the circumstances.” Humphrey v. Mabry, 482 F.3d 840, 847 (6th Cir. 2007). 

Sergeant Ray did not arrive until after Northrup was handcuffed in the back of Officer Bright’s 

police car. Ray was then told Bright’s account of events, including of Northrup’s “furtive 

movement” toward his gun and his failure to produce identification when initially requested. R. 

26 at 63; R. 29 at 23; R. 38-2 at 3. With this information in hand, Ray contacted the Toledo 

Police Department detective’s bureau to help determine the proper charge. A detective advised 

Ray to cite Northrup for failure to disclose personal information, Ohio Rev. Code § 2921.29, 

which Ray and Bright then did. 

 Northrup has a claim against Sergeant Ray only if we infer that Officer Bright, in his 

initial conversation apprising Ray of recent events, confessed to an illegal seizure. There is no 

basis in the record for such an inference. During his deposition, Northrup stated that he did not 

overhear the conversation between Bright and Ray, R. 28 at 38, and Northrup’s wife does not 

mention the content of that conversation in her affidavit, R. 38-3 at 4–5. Accordingly, Ray 

should receive qualified immunity. 

 For these reasons, we affirm in part and reverse in part and remand for further 

proceedings.

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