Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 341

529US1

Unit: $U41

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266

OCTOBER TERM, 1999

Syllabus

FLORIDA v. J. L.

certiorari to the supreme court of florida

No. 98–1993. Argued February 29, 2000—Decided March 28, 2000

After an anonymous caller reported to the Miami-Dade Police that a young
black male standing at a particular bus stop and wearing a plaid shirt
was carrying a gun, ofﬁcers went to the bus stop and saw three black
males, one of whom, respondent J. L., was wearing a plaid shirt. Apart
from the tip, the ofﬁcers had no reason to suspect any of the three of
illegal conduct. The ofﬁcers did not see a ﬁrearm or observe any un-
usual movements. One of the ofﬁcers frisked J. L. and seized a gun
from his pocket.
J. L., who was then almost 16, was charged under
state law with carrying a concealed ﬁrearm without a license and pos-
sessing a ﬁrearm while under the age of 18. The trial court granted
his motion to suppress the gun as the fruit of an unlawful search. The
intermediate appellate court reversed, but the Supreme Court of Flor-
ida quashed that decision and held the search invalid under the Fourth
Amendment.

Held: An anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is not, without
more, sufﬁcient to justify a police ofﬁcer’s stop and frisk of that person.
An ofﬁcer, for the protection of himself and others, may conduct a care-
fully limited search for weapons in the outer clothing of persons engaged
in unusual conduct where, inter alia, the ofﬁcer reasonably concludes in
light of his experience that criminal activity may be afoot and that the
persons in question may be armed and presently dangerous. Terry v.
Ohio, 392 U. S. 1, 30. Here, the ofﬁcers’ suspicion that J. L. was carry-
ing a weapon arose not from their own observations but solely from a
call made from an unknown location by an unknown caller. The tip
lacked sufﬁcient indicia of reliability to provide reasonable suspicion to
make a Terry stop: It provided no predictive information and therefore
left the police without means to test the informant’s knowledge or credi-
bility. See Alabama v. White, 496 U. S. 325, 327. The contentions of
Florida and the United States as amicus that the tip was reliable be-
cause it accurately described J. L.’s visible attributes misapprehend the
reliability needed for a tip to justify a Terry stop. The reasonable sus-
picion here at issue requires that a tip be reliable in its assertion of
illegality, not just in its tendency to identify a determinate person.
This Court also declines to adopt the argument that the standard Terry
analysis should be modiﬁed to license a “ﬁrearm exception,” under
which a tip alleging an illegal gun would justify a stop and frisk even if