In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 18-1935 

MARCUS D. TORRY, LATRELL Q. GOSS, 

and WILLIAM I. ROBERTS, 

Plaintiffs-Appellants, 

v.

CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., 

Defendants-Appellees. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court for the 

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. 

No. 1:15-cv-8383 — John Robert Blakey, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED APRIL 9, 2019 — DECIDED AUGUST 2, 2019 

____________________ 

Before KANNE, BARRETT, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges. 

BARRETT, Circuit Judge. One afternoon in 2014, three Chicago police officers stopped three black men in a grey sedan 

to investigate a nearby shooting that had happened a few 

hours earlier. When the passengers sued the officers a year 

later, none of the officers remembered the Terry stop. Lacking 

recall, they relied on other evidence to show that reasonable 

suspicion had existed for it. Cell phone footage taken by one 
2 No. 18-1935 

of the plaintiffs during the encounter depicted Sergeant Robert King, the officer who initiated the stop, citing the plaintiffs’ suspicious behavior in the area of the shooting as the reason that he had pulled them over. And a police report showed 

that dispatches to officers investigating the shooting, including King, identified the suspects as three black men in a grey 

car. The descriptions of the car’s model varied, and none was 

an exact match for the car that the plaintiffs were driving. But 

reasonable suspicion can exist without an exact match, and 

the district court held that these descriptions were close 

enough to justify the Terry stop. In any event, the court said, 

the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because the 

stop did not violate clearly established law. 

Before us, the plaintiffs have repeatedly suggested that the 

defendants’ failure of memory is a concession of liability. In 

other words, they maintain that if a police officer doesn’t remember a stop now, reasonable suspicion could not have justified it at the time. But the Fourth Amendment does not govern how an officer proves that he had reasonable suspicion for 

a Terry stop; he can rely on evidence other than his memory 

to establish what he knew when the stop occurred. The police 

report demonstrates that King knew that the suspects in the 

shooting had been identified as three black men driving a 

grey car, and the cell-phone video shows him giving the 

shooting as the reason for the stop. We agree with the district 

court that the officers are entitled to qualified immunity. 

I. 

On the morning of September 23, 2014, a drive-by shooting occurred about half a mile from Manley High School, 

which is located on West Polk Street in Chicago. Sergeant 

Robert King was on duty that day as a “school sergeant”—an 
No. 18-1935 3 

officer who responds to and investigates violence near 

schools within his beat. A police report detailing the chronology of events related to the shooting shows that King responded to the shooting and that three descriptions of suspects were received while he was assisting.1 One identified 

the suspects’ vehicle as a newer-model grey Nissan with three 

black male occupants. The second was almost identical to the 

first but specified that the Nissan was an SUV. The third identified the shooter as a medium-complected black male wearing a white t-shirt and driving a grey Trailblazer (a Chevrolet 

SUV). 

Shortly past noon on that same day, Marcus Torry and 

William Roberts picked up Latrell Goss, Torry’s brother, in a 

grey Ford Fusion sedan. Goss’s car had broken down on West 

Polk Street; Torry and Roberts met him at his car and then 

drove him west on West Polk to an auto parts store. They 

passed Manley High School as they drove to the store, and 

they passed it again when they returned the same way. As 

they went by the school for the second time, they were pulled 

over by three police officers—King, Jacek Leja, and Justin Raether. Torry captured video of the ensuing encounter on his 

cell phone camera. Like the district court, we draw our de-

 

1 This report is from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications and is called a “Chicago Police Department Event Query Report.” For simplicity’s sake, we will refer to it as a “police report.” The 

record also contains post-dated supplementary reports that expand on the 

information contained in the police report. The parties dispute the admissibility of these supplementary reports, but because they are not necessary 

to show that King knew about the shooting and suspect descriptions, we 

do not address them. 
4 No. 18-1935 

scription of the encounter primarily from the video, supplementing it with other undisputed facts and drawing all inferences in the plaintiffs’ favor.2

After Torry pulled over, King approached his window 

and asked for his license and registration. Torry asked why 

he had been stopped, and King replied that “this was about 

your third pass by this school.” Torry protested that he had 

not driven by the school three times and handed over his license and registration. King told him not to argue; Torry demanded King’s badge number. 

King told Torry to step out of the car and reached for the 

handle of the driver’s door, which prompted Torry to ask if 

he was under arrest. King didn’t directly answer the question 

but said, “Sir, get out of the car please. Sir, this is a Terry stop, 

I have the right to search the car, get out of the car.” Torry, 

protesting that he had done nothing wrong, failed to comply 

with multiple commands that he exit the vehicle. King told 

Torry, “If you don’t get out of the car, I will remove you from 

the car,” and Torry replied, “I’m gonna remove myself but I 

just don’t want to get—y’all get me, shoot me, or kill me for 

something I didn’t do wrong.” King responded, “Yes, sir, absolutely; hands up, don’t shoot, there you go.” Neither King 

nor the other officers had a gun out, but Torry feared police 

brutality. 

Torry testified that when he finally removed his seatbelt, 

King “just grab[bed] me out of the car.” King ordered Torry 

to “come on out, sir,” as Torry repeatedly exclaimed, “Please 

 

2 Neither side contests the admissibility of the video, which the plaintiffs and defendants introduced as a joint exhibit in the district court. The 

video runs the full length of the stop. 
No. 18-1935 5 

don’t shoot.” King walked Torry to a squad car, saying, “Let’s 

go back to my car, sir, right over here,” and placed him inside. 

Goss testified that an officer grabbed him out of the car too, 

but neither Goss nor Roberts were placed in a squad car. After 

the plaintiffs had been repeatedly ordered to leave the car but 

before they had complied, one of the officers shook a can of 

mace, although he never used it.

After placing Torry in the back of his squad car, King sat 

in the front for a few minutes while he ran Torry’s name 

through a warrant check. Torry demanded to know why he 

had been pulled over, and King explained that Torry had 

“cruised this street here around the school,” which was an 

area of “safe passage” and “the immediate location of a shooting this morning.” (An area of “safe passage” is a designated 

area where extra precautions are taken to prevent violence 

that might affect students on their way to and from school.) 

King then returned to Torry’s car, where the officers talked to 

Goss and Roberts, who testified that the other officers patted 

them down and searched Goss’s pockets. Still in the squad 

car, Torry yelled obscenities and protests while continuing to 

film with his cell phone camera. At one point, Goss approached the car and told him to be quiet, to which Torry responded, “Leave me alone!” 

Roughly ten minutes into the stop and eight minutes after 

putting Torry in the squad car, King retrieved Torry and 

walked him back to his own car. Torry asked if he was under 

arrest, to which King answered, “If you were under arrest, 

you’d be in handcuffs.” Torry got in his car, and King returned his license and registration. Shortly after, one of the 

officers said to Goss that “you don’t want anything to do with 

him,” and—in response to an unintelligible reply—said, 
6 No. 18-1935 

“Yeah, c’mon, jump in the car ... yeah we’ll give you a ride 

home.” Goss testified that the officers had told him to get in 

their car to return to his disabled car. 

Free to leave, Torry and Roberts pulled back onto West 

Polk Street. Torry continued his video recording, narrating 

that the officers were driving behind his car. Goss, riding in 

the back seat of Leja and Raether’s car, testified that those officers debated pulling Torry over again “to mess with him.” 

But the officers dropped Goss off at his car and nothing else 

happened. 

One year later, Torry, Goss, and Roberts sued the three 

officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the officers 

lacked reasonable suspicion to initiate the Terry stop, and that 

even if the stop was justified, its scope transformed it into a 

de facto arrest without probable cause.3 By the time the 

plaintiffs filed suit, none of the officers could recall the stop. 

Nor could King recall any details about the shooting. It was 

undisputed, though, that the shooting occurred while King 

was on duty in that area as a school sergeant, and the police 

report detailing the investigation’s chronology reflected that 

King responded as an assist vehicle to the shooting, drove 

around the corner to the victim’s residence a few minutes 

later, and continued to assist until 9:49 a.m., when the report 

notes him as “clear.” During the hour or so that King was on 

the shot call, three suspect descriptions were transmitted to 

investigators: one that identified the suspects’ car as a newermodel grey Nissan with three black male occupants, a second 

 3 The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed other claims that they had asserted against the officers. 
No. 18-1935 7 

that was almost identical to the first but specified that the 

Nissan was an SUV,4 and a third that identified the shooter as 

a medium-complected black male wearing a white t-shirt and 

driving a grey Trailblazer. 

Based on that report and his review of Torry’s video, King 

testified by affidavit that the dispatches would have alerted 

him that the suspects were three black men driving a grey car, 

and, as the video reflected, that he told Torry—who was driving a grey car with three black male occupants—that he had 

stopped him because of the shooting. The plaintiffs and the 

defendants filed cross-motions for summary judgment, and 

the district court granted summary judgment to the defendants. 

II. 

The primary theme of the plaintiffs’ argument is that proving reasonable suspicion for the stop requires the officers to 

have at least some independent memory of what they knew 

at the time. The plaintiffs particularly object, therefore, to the 

district court’s reliance on indirect evidence—the police report and King’s affidavit—to conclude that the officers had 

reasonable suspicion to pull them over. They offer four reasons why the district court was wrong to consider this evidence: first, the officers submitted it in response to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment rather than in support of 

 4 This second entry lacks a timestamp and so may have been received 

later. But because identifying the car as an SUV weakens the officers’ argument for reasonable suspicion and because we must take the facts in the 

light most favorable to the plaintiffs, we presume that this description had 

been received by the time of the stop. See Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574, 587 (1986). 
8 No. 18-1935 

their own motion; second, King’s affidavit was a sham because it contradicted his prior testimony; third, the police report was hearsay; and fourth, King’s lack of memory precludes him from relying on the collective knowledge doctrine. 

None of these arguments succeeds. 

To begin with, it doesn’t matter that the officers submitted 

the report and affidavit in their response to the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment rather than in support of their 

own motion. In adjudicating a motion for summary judgment, “[a] court need consider only the cited materials, but it 

may consider other materials in the record.” FED. R. CIV. P. 

56(c)(3). The court was therefore free to consider evidence 

submitted in response to one motion when it decided the 

other. Indeed, it would have been odd for the court to ignore 

the report and affidavit, because they were obviously relevant 

to the defendants’ cross-motion on the very same issues. See 

Las Vegas Sands, LLC v. Nehme, 632 F.3d 526, 532 (9th Cir. 2011) 

(“Where the parties file cross-motions for summary judgment, the court must consider each party’s evidence, regardless under which motion the evidence is offered.”). The plaintiffs had an opportunity to—and did—address the evidence 

in their own brief, and they don’t suggest that they were inappropriately prejudiced by its consideration. Cf. Simpson v. 

Merchs. Recovery Bureau, Inc., 171 F.3d 546, 551 (7th Cir. 1999) 

(explaining that summary judgment may be granted sua 

sponte “so long as the opposing party has had an adequate 

opportunity to respond.” (citation omitted)). This argument 

for excluding the report and affidavit fails. 

The plaintiffs’ next argument—that the court should have 

excluded King’s affidavit as a sham—fares no better. According to the plaintiffs, King made several admissions during 
No. 18-1935 9 

discovery that effectively conceded his liability, and his affidavit contradicts these admissions because it explains why 

King had reasonable suspicion for the stop. Thus, they insist, 

the court was obliged to exclude the affidavit as a sham. See 

Bank of Illinois v. Allied Signal Safety Restraint Sys., 75 F.3d 1162, 

1168 (7th Cir. 1996) (“[P]arties cannot thwart the purposes of 

Rule 56 by creating ‘sham’ issues of fact with affidavits that 

contradict their prior depositions.”). The premise of the plaintiffs’ argument is flawed, however, because King’s affidavit 

does not contradict his prior admissions. King never conceded that he stopped the plaintiffs unlawfully; he stated that 

he had no independent memory of the incident. Admitting to 

a lack of memory is a far cry from admitting that the opposing 

party’s version of events is correct. See Brown v. County of Cook, 

661 F.3d 333, 338 (7th Cir. 2011). Rather than contradicting his 

prior admissions, King’s affidavit explained the newly introduced police report and how it bore on the stop. The district 

court did not abuse its “great discretion” by considering 

King’s testimony. See Maldonado v. U.S. Bank, 186 F.3d 759, 769 

(7th Cir. 1999); cf. Bank of Illinois, 75 F.3d at 1172 (approving 

consideration of even contradictory affidavits if based on new 

evidence). 

The plaintiffs’ next argument—that the police report was 

inadmissible hearsay—is their most underdeveloped. They 

insist that the report is hearsay, but they never articulate why 

any of the statements within the report was offered as proof 

of the truth of the matter asserted. See FED. R. EVID. 801(c)(2) 

(“‘Hearsay’ means a statement that ... a party offers in evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted in the statement.”). Their failure to develop this argument is enough to 

dispense with it. See Mathews v. REV Recreation Grp., Inc., No. 

18-1982, 2019 WL 3369563, at *3 n.2 (7th Cir. July 26, 2019). We 
10 No. 18-1935 

observe, however, that many of the statements were obviously not offered for their truth. For example, the descriptions 

of the shooters (three black men) and their vehicle (a grey Nissan, a grey Trailblazer, or a grey Nissan SUV) were not offered to show what the real shooters looked like or what car 

they were actually driving. The descriptions were offered to 

show that a competent officer aware of that information could 

conclude that there was reasonable suspicion to stop Torry 

and his passengers. See Woods v. City of Chicago, 234 F.3d 979, 

986–87 (7th Cir. 2000) (a statement in a police report is not 

hearsay if it is offered “to show the effect that the statements 

had on the officers” who heard it); id. at 987 (explaining that 

the Fourth Amendment analysis does not turn on whether the 

information in the tips turns out to be true). Statements introduced to show their effect on the listener, rather than the truth 

of the matter they assert, are not hearsay. See 4 CHRISTOPHER 

B. MUELLER & LAIRD C. KIRKPATRICK, FEDERAL EVIDENCE § 8:20 

(4th ed. 2013). 

We will assume for the sake of argument that the entries 

reflecting King’s response to the shooting were offered for 

their truth.5 Even if they were, however, the plaintiffs don’t 

 5 It is doubtful, though, that even these statements are hearsay. The 

fact that King was participating in the investigation is implicit in the entries describing his response to the shot call, but that is not what the declarant was intentionally trying to convey. Assertions often reflect a declarant’s underlying assumptions, but only the assertions themselves meet 

Rule 801’s definition of hearsay. See FED. R. EVID. 801(1) (“‘Statement’ 

means a person’s oral assertion, written assertion, or nonverbal conduct, 

if the person intended it as an assertion.” (emphasis added)); see also 4 

MUELLER & KIRKPATRICK, supra, § 8:24. United States v. Zenni is the classic 

example. See 492 F. Supp. 464, 469 (E.D. Ky. 1980) (callers placing bets did 
No. 18-1935 11 

counter the defendants’ argument that the entire report is admissible under the business records exception. See FED. R.

EVID. 803(6). That exception applies if five conditions are met: 

(1) “the record was made at or near the time by—or from information transmitted by—someone with knowledge”; (2) 

“the record was kept in the ordinary course of a regularly conducted activity of a business, organization, occupation, or 

calling”; (3) “making the record was a regular practice of that 

activity”; (4) “all these conditions are shown by the testimony 

of a custodian or another qualified witness”; and (5) “the opponent does not show that the source of the information or 

the method or circumstances of preparation indicate a lack of 

trustworthiness.” Id. The only factor that the plaintiffs come 

close to discussing is the fourth: they seem to argue that King 

was not qualified to authenticate the report because he could 

not remember receiving the transmissions that it recorded. 

But to authenticate a business record, a qualified witness 

“need not be in control of or have individual knowledge of 

the particular [] records”; he “need only be familiar with the 

[] recordkeeping practices.” Thanongsinh v. Bd. of Educ., 462 

F.3d 762, 777 (7th Cir. 2006) (citation omitted). In his affidavit, 

King testified that each of the conditions was satisfied. Plaintiffs have not argued otherwise. Because the report is a business record, all of its statements are admissible for their truth.6

 

not intend to assert that they were telephoning a betting establishment, so 

the statements were not hearsay when offered for that purpose). 

6 It is true that any statements in the report made by those outside of 

the police force constitute “hearsay within hearsay” and would need to be 

themselves justified by a hearsay exception. The plaintiffs do not identify 

any such statements in the report, so they have forfeited any argument for 
12 No. 18-1935 

The plaintiffs point out that while the police report shows 

that descriptions of the suspects were transmitted to investigators, it does not expressly note whether the investigators 

received them. The district court properly concluded, though, 

that we can impute that knowledge to King via the collective 

knowledge doctrine. “[W]hen officers are in communication 

with each other while working together at a scene, their 

knowledge may be mutually imputed even when there is no 

express testimony that the specific or detailed information 

creating the justification for a stop was conveyed.” United 

States v. Nafzger, 974 F.2d 906, 911 (7th Cir. 1992); see also

United States v. Sawyer, 224 F.3d 675, 680 (7th Cir. 2000). That 

is true even when the communication is by dispatch rather 

than face-to-face. See Sawyer, 224 F.3d at 680. King’s presence 

at and involvement in the shooting investigation—bolstered 

by his testimony that suspect descriptions are typically shared 

with officers at the scene and through the Office of Emergency 

Management and Communications—are enough to attribute 

the knowledge to him. 

Because the report establishes that King was aware of both 

the shooting and the suspect descriptions, the court appropriately treated those as undisputed facts when considering 

whether reasonable suspicion for the Terry stop existed. 

 

their exclusion. For the sake of completeness, however, we note that the 

most obvious candidates are the witnesses’ descriptions of the shooters. 

As we have already explained, they were not offered for their truth. Even 

if they had been, though, they would have been admissible as presentsense impressions. See FED. R. EVID. 803(1) (defining a present sense impression as “[a] statement describing or explaining an event or condition, 

made while or immediately after the declarant perceived it”). 
No. 18-1935 13 

III. 

That brings us to the reasonableness of the stop. The plaintiffs argue that it violated the Fourth Amendment, given that 

the shooting had occurred several hours earlier and that 

Torry’s car was a different model than the one identified in 

the department’s transmissions to investigators. The defendants contend that the stop was lawful and that they are in any 

event entitled to qualified immunity. 

Qualified immunity protects government officials from liability for civil damages as long as their actions do not violate 

“clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which 

a reasonable person would have known.” Figgs v. Dawson, 829 

F.3d 895, 905 (7th Cir. 2016) (citation omitted). Thus, to win, 

the plaintiffs must show not only that the stop was unlawful, 

but also that the unlawfulness of the stop was clearly established at the time that it occurred. Because the plaintiffs cannot make the latter showing, we need not consider whether 

the stop violated the Fourth Amendment. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 236 (2009) (“[C]ourts of appeals should be 

permitted to exercise their sound discretion in deciding which 

of the two prongs of the qualified immunity analysis should 

be addressed first ....”). 

The “demanding standard” that the law be “clearly established” for liability to attach “protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’” District 

of Columbia v. Wesby, 138 S. Ct. 577, 589 (2018) (quoting Malley 

v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986)). For the law to be “clearly 

established,” existing precedent must have placed the unlawfulness of the stop “beyond debate.” Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 563 

U.S. 731, 741 (2011). It is usually necessary to identify an instance in which “an officer acting under similar circumstances 
14 No. 18-1935 

... was held to have violated the Fourth Amendment,” though 

in the “rare ‘obvious case’” the violation may be sufficiently 

clear “even though existing precedent does not address similar circumstances.” Wesby, 138 S. Ct. at 590 (alteration in original) (citations omitted). 

The general rule established by Terry v. Ohio is that officers 

may conduct a brief investigatory stop if they reasonably suspect that an individual has committed or is about to commit 

a crime. 392 U.S. 1, 20–22 (1968). Reasonable suspicion is a 

lower standard than probable cause. See Navarette v. California, 

572 U.S. 393, 397 (2014). It’s a “commonsense, nontechnical 

[standard] that deal[s] with ‘the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent 

men, not legal technicians, act.’” Ornelas v. United States, 517 

U.S. 690, 695 (1996) (citation omitted). It is judged holistically, 

based on “the sum of all of the information known to officers 

at the time of the stop.” See Matz v. Klotka, 769 F.3d 517, 523 

(7th Cir. 2014). 

The plaintiffs do not contend that this is the rare case in 

which the facts establish a blatant violation of Terry’s rule 

even though there is no case on point. See Wesby, 138 S. Ct. at 

590. Instead, they identify two cases that they say clearly established the illegality of this Terry stop: Gentry v. Sevier, 597 

F.3d 838 (7th Cir. 2010), and United States v. Packer, 15 F.3d 654 

(7th Cir. 1994). In Gentry, a police officer stopped someone after hearing a dispatch report that a suspicious person was 

pushing a wheelbarrow. 597 F.3d at 842–43. In Packer, police 

officers stopped a vehicle’s occupants based on a citizen’s report that a suspicious vehicle was parked along the street at 

one o’clock in the morning. 15 F.3d at 658. Neither report provided any facts concerning any crime that the people stopped 
No. 18-1935 15 

were suspected of committing—they were stopped just because they looked suspicious. In both cases, therefore, the officers “lacked the minimal detail of information that would 

point to any arguably particularized suspicion of criminal 

conduct.” Green v. Newport, 868 F.3d 629, 634 (7th Cir. 2017) 

(citation omitted). 

Neither Gentry nor Packer speaks to a situation like this 

one, where the plaintiffs partially matched the description of 

suspects involved in a drive-by shooting. When the officers in 

this case stopped the plaintiffs, they knew that three black 

men in a grey car were suspected of committing a nearby 

shooting earlier that day. The plaintiffs matched this description in number, race, and car color. Cf. United States v. Lenoir, 

318 F.3d 725, 729 (7th Cir. 2003) (“[P]olice observation of an 

individual, fitting a police dispatch description of a person involved in a disturbance, near in time and geographic location 

to the disturbance establishes a reasonable suspicion that the 

individual is the subject of the dispatch.”). The plaintiffs argue that the reasonableness of the officers’ suspicion was nevertheless undermined in two ways: first, the descriptions that 

the officers relied on identified the suspects’ vehicle as an 

SUV, but the plaintiffs were in a sedan; and second, the shooting occurred too far away (half a mile) and too long before 

(four hours) to justify the stop. But while these discrepancies 

may weigh against the officers’ suspicion, they don’t clearly 

overcome it. 

We’ll begin with the variation between Torry’s car and the 

descriptions of the suspects’ car. Under our precedent, an imperfect match between a suspect and a description does not 

necessarily make an officer’s suspicion unreasonable. See, e.g., 
16 No. 18-1935 

D.Z. v. Buell, 796 F.3d 749, 754 (7th Cir. 2015) (finding reasonable suspicion to stop an individual “who somewhat matched 

the description of the suspect”). And the significance of the 

imperfect match may have been lessened here because there 

were multiple reports giving conflicting information about 

the suspects’ grey car. One report identified it as a Nissan, 

without giving a model; another identified it as a Nissan SUV; 

and a third identified it as a Trailblazer (an SUV made by 

Chevrolet). The fact that the reports’ descriptions of the car 

were consistent only as to its grey color gave the officers some 

reason to pay more attention to the color than to the make or 

model. No clearly established law holds that this kind of variation makes an officer’s suspicion unreasonable under the 

Fourth Amendment. 

As for the time and place discrepancies, past cases have 

not established that they’re enough to defeat reasonable suspicion. In United States v. Tilmon, for example, we found a stop 

reasonable based on the “match of a unique automobile with 

a driver fitting the general description of the bank robber,” 

even though the stop occurred two hours after and fifty miles 

away from the robbery. 19 F.3d 1221, 1225 (7th Cir. 1994). This 

stop occurred four hours after but only a half-mile away from 

the shooting and within the “safe passage” area surrounding 

Manley High School. 

Finally, the officers’ suspicion was not based solely on the 

descriptions of the suspects. The plaintiffs had also passed by 

the same area multiple times, behavior that could suggest that 

they were casing it in preparation for further criminal activity 

related to the dispute underlying the shooting. Cf. Green, 868 

F.3d at 634 (circling an auto parts store’s parking lot multiple 
No. 18-1935 17 

times near the close of business contributed to an officer’s reasonable suspicion). Taking all of this evidence together, a reasonable officer could have concluded that the investigative 

Terry stop of the plaintiffs comported with the Fourth 

Amendment. See Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 641 

(1987). 

IV. 

Finally, the plaintiffs argue that even if the stop was initially justified, it exceeded its appropriate bounds and turned 

into a de facto arrest. They argue that taking Torry’s identification and placing him in the back of the squad car was more 

intrusive than was warranted for the Terry stop, and thus 

transformed the encounter into an arrest without probable 

cause. 

The district court concluded both that the scope of the stop 

was lawful and that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity regardless. The plaintiffs challenge only one of those 

holdings: the lawfulness of the stop. Because they do not challenge the district court’s alternative holding that the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity, they have forfeited 

this argument. See United States v. Giovannetti, 919 F.2d 1223, 

1230 (7th Cir. 1990) (“A litigant who fails to press a point by 

supporting it with pertinent authority, or by showing why it 

is a good point despite a lack of supporting authority or in the 

face of contrary authority, forfeits the point.” (emphasis omitted)). We note, however, that our precedent on the permissible scope of a Terry stop would have made this a tough argument for the plaintiffs to win. In United States v. Bullock, for 

example, we held that a defendant being handcuffed, placed 

in a squad car, and transported back to a house that he had 

recently left didn’t transform a Terry stop into an arrest. See 
18 No. 18-1935 

632 F.3d 1004, 1016 (7th Cir. 2011). We specifically noted that 

because the officers suspected that the defendant was selling 

drugs—a crime “associated with dangerous and violent behavior”—detention in the squad car was a reasonable precaution. Id. In the face of decisions like Bullock, the plaintiffs in 

this case would have a difficult time showing that detaining a 

drive-by shooting suspect in a squad car for approximately 

eight minutes clearly rose to the level of a formal arrest requiring probable cause under the law at that time. 

* * * 

Because the defendants are entitled to qualified immunity, 

the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.