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DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS

No. 13-CF-1450

MELVIN E.JACKSON, APPELLANT,

v.

UNITED STATES, APPELLEE.

Appeal from the Superior Court of the

District of Columbia

(CF2-10019-13)

(Hon. Robert I. Richter, Trial Judge)

(Submitted January 22, 2015 Decided February 12, 2015) 

Sidney R. Bixler was on the brief for appellant.

Ronald C. Machen Jr., United States Attorney, Elizabeth Trosman, 

Elizabeth H. Danello, and Christian Natiello, Assistant United States Attorneys, 

and Rockne Chickinell, Special Assistant United States Attorney, were on the brief 

for appellee. 

Before GLICKMAN and FISHER, Associate Judges, and FARRELL, Senior 

Judge.

FARRELL, Senior Judge: Found guilty by the court of multiple firearms 

offenses on stipulated facts, appellant argues that his motion to suppress the loaded 

revolver seized from him during a pat-down was wrongly denied, because in 

stopping him the police relied on an anonymous 911 telephone tip that, he 
2

contends, did not furnish the reasonable suspicion necessary for a lawful stop. 

Largely on the basis of Prado Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. ___, 134 S. Ct. 

1683 (2014), we affirm.

I.

Officer Lina of the Metropolitan Police Department testified that on June 13, 

2013, around 8:30 p.m. and as it was getting dark, he received a radio call about a 

man with a gun standing at the bus stop between Condon Terrace and Fourth 

Street, Southeast. In the radio call the dispatcher described the man as a black male 

with a brown shirt. Lina drove south on Fourth Street and, between Valley Avenue 

and Condon Terrace a minute or two after he got the call, saw appellant standing in 

front of a church along Fourth Street, wearing a black windbreaker. The officer 

drove on to the nearby bus stop, but when he arrived no one was there. Other than 

appellant, Lina saw no persons between appellant at the church and the bus stop.

Lina made a u-turn to drive back up Fourth Street, stopped at Valley 

Avenue, and called the dispatcher for a better lookout while watching appellant, 

who was wearing a black skullcap and a black windbreaker poncho. The 
3

dispatcher called back with a description of a black man wearing a black hat and a 

windbreaker. Four minutes after first spotting appellant in front of the church, 

Lina and his partner approached appellant at the corner of Valley Avenue and 

Fourth Street and directed him to turn around and submit to a protective pat-down. 

During the pat-down, Lina felt what he believed to be a gun on appellant‟s right 

side, and pulled a silver revolver out of appellant‟s right pocket.

On the government‟s motion, the trial court admitted into evidence a 911 

call and the radio dispatch, both recorded on Government Exhibit 4. The 911 call 

was made by an anonymous female caller,

1 who stated that a man was walking 

near Fourth and Atlantic, down toward a church or elementary school, and had a 

silver gun on him. The caller had “[seen the gun] when [appellant] took it out of 

his pocket,” explaining that she had been waiting for her friend to come off a bus 

when “I see him bring out a silver pistol out of his pocket,” and that she then made 

the 911 call. Seeing the gun, the caller said, “scared the hell out of [her].” She 

described the suspect as wearing a “brown windbreaker,” “raincoat thing,” and a 

 

1

The call was recorded and has been provided to us in a compact-disc copy. 

Although Officer Lina, of course, did not personally hear the 911 call, in situations 

like this it is the collective knowledge of the investigating officers that counts. See 

In re M.E.B., 638 A.2d 1123, 1129 (D.C. 1993).
4

black hat. When the 911 operator stated her own understanding that the suspect 

was at Fourth Street and Condon Terrace, the caller corrected her, stating that he

was “not on Condon Terrace” but was walking down Fourth Street (“not up”) 

toward the elementary school. Officer Lina confirmed that there was a school and 

church on Fourth Street, and that appellant was standing by the church when he 

first saw him, with no one else around. 

The trial judge credited the testimony of Lina that, in responding to the radio 

call, he had seen only appellant walking on the block in question. The 911 caller 

was “a concerned citizen who had just seen a defendant holding a gun and was 

reporting it contemporaneously.” The dispatcher, the judge noted, had initially 

erred in putting out a lookout for a man wearing a brown shirt, but then gave a 

more particular description – on which Officer Lina relied – of a man wearing a 

windbreaker and a black skull cap. The difference in the color description was not 

material, the judge found, considering that it was getting dark at the time and 

appellant was the only person on the block when observed. Because, in the judge‟s 

view, the stop and frisk of appellant was supported by reasonable, articulable 

suspicion based on the call, he denied the motion to suppress. 
5

II.

“The Fourth Amendment permits brief investigative stops . . . when a law 

enforcement officer has „a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the 

particular person stopped of criminal activity.‟” Prado Navarette, 134 S. Ct. at 

1687 (quoting United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 417-18 (1981)). When, as 

here, the basis for the stop is an anonymous tip, the tip must “be reliable in its 

assertion of illegality” and “in its tendency to identify a determinate person.” 

Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 272 (2000). Tips regarding “unlawful carriage of a 

gun” enjoy no privileged Fourth Amendment status, id. at 272; they too have to 

“bear standard indicia of reliability in order to justify a stop.” Id. at 274. Prado 

Navarette is the Supreme Court‟s latest treatment of anonymous tips, and the 

reliability features it cited in upholding the investigative stop there persuade us that 

the police had the required justification for the stop here. 

The Court began by reaffirming that “under appropriate circumstances, an 

anonymous tip can demonstrate „sufficient indicia of reliability to provide

reasonable suspicion to make [an] investigatory stop.‟” Id. at 1688 (quoting

Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 327 (1990)). The caller in Prado Navarette had 
6

reported that her vehicle was run off the road by a truck shortly before, a report 

that, if reliable, gave the police reason to suspect the truck driver “of an ongoing 

crime such as drunk driving.” Id. at 1690-91. The Court then explained why “the 

[911] call bore adequate indicia of reliability for the officer to credit the caller‟s 

account” of what happened to her. Id. at 1688.

First, unlike in Florida v. J.L., supra, on which appellant mainly relies, the 

911 caller in Prado Navarette “claimed eyewitness knowledge” of the conduct 

yielding suspicion. 134 S. Ct. at 1689. That “basis of knowledge len[t] significant 

support to the tip‟s reliability,” in contrast to J.L. where “the tip provided no basis 

for concluding that the tipster had actually seen the gun.” Id.2 Moreover, the 

“timeline of events [in Prado Navarette] suggest[ed] that the caller reported the 

incident soon after she was run off the road,” and this “sort of contemporaneous 

report has long been treated as especially reliable.” Id. Whereas “[t]here was no 

indication that the tip in J.L. (or even in White) was contemporaneous with the 

observation of criminal activity or made under the stress of excitement caused by a 

 

2

Even in Alabama v. White, supra, the Prado Navarette Court said, “where 

we upheld the stop, there was scant evidence that the tipster had actually observed 

cocaine in the station wagon.” 134 S. Ct. at 1689.
7

startling event, . . . those considerations weigh in favor of the caller‟s veracity 

here,” the Court reasoned.

Finally, another “indicator of veracity is the caller‟s use of the 911 

emergency system,” the Court said, because “[a] 911 call has some features that 

allow for identifying and tracing callers.” Id. The Court arrayed those features of 

a standard 911 call, including Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 

regulations that “permit[] law enforcement to verify important information about 

the caller.” Id. at 1690. “Given [these] technological and regulatory 

developments,” it explained, “a reasonable officer could conclude that a false 

tipster would think twice before using such a system.” Id. “None of this is to 

suggest that tips in 911 calls are per se reliable,” the Court added, but “[t]he 

caller‟s use of the 911 system is . . . one of the relevant circumstances that, taken 

together, justified the officer‟s reliance on the information reported in the 911 

call.” Id.

Appellant scarcely challenges the application of these reliability features to 

his case – where the caller‟s report was made just after seeing the suspect pull out a 

gun “scared the hell out of her” – except to argue that the caller‟s use of the 911 
8

system has no relevance here. That is so, he says, because there is no indication 

that the 911 operator tried to trace the caller or call her back after she hung up or, if 

she did try, was successful in doing so. Those uncertainties, however, do not

change the presumed application of the cited FCC regulations to the District‟s 911

system. Moreover, although the trial court and the parties undertook no 

examination of the capabilities of the District‟s system for tracking 911 callers

(understandably, since this case was tried before Prado Navarette), neither was the 

local (or California) 911 system closely examined in Prado Navarette. See id. at 

1689-90.3 That record gap gives us no reason here, any more than in Prado 

Navarette, to discount the fact that “a reasonable officer could conclude that a false 

tipster would think twice before using such a system.” 134 S. Ct. at 1690.

For these reasons, although the issue as in Prado Navarette is a “close” one, 

id. at 1692, we are satisfied that when the police saw appellant standing in front of 

a church on Fourth Street (the caller had said he was walking near Fourth and 

Atlantic down past a school and church) wearing a black skullcap and black 

 

3

The Court did note that “9ll calls can be recorded, which provides victims 

the opportunity to identify the false tipster‟s voice and subject him to prosecution,” 

citing Cal. Penal Code Ann. § 653x (West 2010). See 134 S. Ct. at 1690. But the 

same is true in the District of Columbia. See D.C. Code § 22-1319 (a-1) (2012 

Repl.).
9

windbreaker poncho (the caller had reported him wearing a black hat and “brown 

windbreaker,” “raincoat thing”),

4

and with no one else visible between the church 

and the bus stop where appellant was first spotted, they had sufficient,

particularized reason to suspect that he was the man referred to in the caller‟s tip 

and was carrying a gun. The tip was reliable both “in its assertion of illegality” 

and “in its tendency to identify a determinate person.” J.L., 529 U.S. at 272.

In arguing to the contrary, appellant relies also on our decisions in In re 

S.B., 44 A.3d 948 (D.C. 2012), and Plummer v. United States, 983 A.2d 323 (D.C. 

2009), both decided before Prado Navarette. S.B. is readily distinguishable on its 

facts, because while the citizen‟s tip there was “sufficiently reliable” – mainly 

because it “was based on firsthand knowledge,” S.B., 44 A.3d at 954 – it wholly 

failed the test of “particular[ity] as to the individual stopped.”

5

 Id. (citation and 

 

4

 Like the trial court, we consider this difference in color immaterial in the 

circumstances. 

5

The police in S.B. had no “information that isolated [the] criminal activity 

[i.e., the tip of gun possession] to a particular street corner or particular address”; 

rather, the tip “indicated that the individual . . . was on a playground that was part 

of a larger park area which included a field area and a „whole bunch of sports 

courts,‟ including basketball and tennis courts.” Id. at 956. Thus the description 

conveyed – of a black male with white jeans, possibly a juvenile – “was potentially 

applicable to a large number of individuals” frequenting those places. Id. Indeed, 

(continued...)
10

internal quotation marks omitted). The broad clothing and locational tip in S.B.

enabled the kind of “„dragnet seizure of . . . youths . . . resembl[ing] a generalized 

description‟” that this court had previously condemned. Id. at 956 (quoting In re 

A.S., 614 A.2d 534, 540 (D.C. 1992)). That situation differs markedly from this 

case, where the 911 caller took pains – even correcting the dispatcher – to narrow 

the gun-bearer‟s location to a specific school and church on Fourth Street near the 

bus stop where she first saw him wearing a “windbreaker” or “raincoat thing” and 

dark hat, and no one else was visible between the bus stop and the church. See 

S.B., 44 A.3d at 955 (distinguishing the affirmance in Nixon v. United States, 870

A.2d 100 (D.C. 2005), where “[t]here was no one else in the area” where the drug 

users were said to be).

 

(...continued)

the police successively encountered two groups of black juveniles in the area, each 

including an individual with white-colored pants or clothing; the first group “were

not even in the playground,” and no member, when all were patted down, had

weapons. Id. at 956-57. Consequently, when the second group appeared, 

including the defendant wearing white pants, the police not only had no “rational 

basis for differentiating [him] from the individual in white clothing . . . they had 

just searched (or any other juvenile in white pants who might come along), but” –

given the initial fruitless search – “the officers now had reasons to doubt the 

accuracy of the information provided by the citizen informant.” Id. at 957. 
11

Finally, appellant reads Plummer, supra, as dictating that for reasonable 

suspicion to ripen here, “the police officers had to have seen something” such as 

suspicious movements on his part “that confirmed the presence of a gun prior to 

his seizure.” Reply Brief for Appellant at 6. Plummer announced no such fixed 

rule, as we made clear in S.B., holding that “the tip [there] was sufficiently reliable 

such that independent corroboration of the illegality was not necessary before 

making [an investigative] stop. . . . ” 44 A.3d at 954. Prado Navarette is to the 

same effect. See 134 S. Ct. at 1691 (“Nor did the absence of additional suspicious 

conduct, after the vehicle was first spotted by an officer, dispel the reasonable 

suspicion of drunk driving” furnished by the citizen‟s tip.). In Prado Navarette,

the Court cited its prior “recogni[tion] that an informant who is proved to tell the 

truth about some things is more likely to tell the truth about other things, „including 

the claim that the object of the tip is engaged in criminal activity.‟” Id. at 1688

(citation omitted). Here, too, the caller‟s tip became “reliable in its assertion of 

illegality,” Plummer, 983 A.2d at 333 (citation omitted), when the police saw 

appellant alone in the immediate area at the location and dressed in the manner the 

caller described shortly after she had been frightened seeing him take out a gun. 

Affirmed.