Source: https://apanewslaw.wordpress.com/category/safety-search/
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 00:58:41+00:00

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The officers then received oral information from dispatch that the vehicle was a white four-door 2009 Toyota. They drove to the liquor store, arriving at 8:24:53, but did not see the vehicle. They exited the parking lot and drove along a nearby road where, a few minutes later, they saw a vehicle pulled over with the engine running matching dispatch’s description of the car and the licence plate. The car had a single male occupant — the appellant — who was Asian and wearing a brown hat. The officers stopped behind the vehicle.
The officers approached the appellant, ordered him to show his hands, opened the car door, and removed him from the driver’s seat. One officer told the appellant he was under investigative detention following the 911 gun call. The appellant looked shocked and said, “No! No!”, in response to mention of the word “gun”. The officer did not immediately inform the appellant of his right to counsel. He did a pat-down search for weapons and found none. The appellant was detained but not handcuffed. The second officer performed a search of the passenger cabin of the appellant’s vehicle and did not find a gun.
A sergeant, who had also heard the 911 gun call, arrived shortly after the responding officers, with two other officers. An officer pushed the button releasing the latch to open the trunk of the appellant’s vehicle. A duffle bag came into view once the trunk was open. The sergeant lifted the bag and found it heavy. Thinking there could be guns inside, he unzipped it. The bag contained 23 kilograms of cocaine. No gun was located.
The investigative detention lasted three minutes. By 8:39 p.m., the appellant was arrested for possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking. At that time, he was informed of his right to counsel. The next day, the police obtained a search warrant to search the appellant’s vehicle and to seize the duffle bag and cocaine.
The trial judge concluded that the search was reasonable and that, in any event, the evidence seized was admissible under s. 24(2). Two judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal agreed that the police searched the trunk lawfully, while one judge in the Court of Appeal agreed with Lee’s lawyers that this search went too far.
Was the search of his trunk authorized by s. 117.02(1) of the Criminal Code?
Was the search of his trunk authorized by the common law?
Should the cocaine be excluded from evidence under s. 24(2) of the Charter?
The ONCA ruled that the police officers all testified that they did not believe they had grounds to obtain a warrant to arrest the appellant at the time of the search, so s. 117.02(1) of the Criminal Code does not apply. Accordingly, s. 117.02(1) did not authorize the search in this case.
Was the search of the trunk authorized at common law? First, a police officer must have reasonable grounds to suspect in all the circumstances that the individual is connected to a particular crime and that such a detention is necessary. Second, the police officer is entitled to search the individual detained for a weapon where the officer has a reasonable belief that his safety “or the safety of others…is at risk”. The decision to search cannot be premised on hunches, mere intuition, or a vague or non-existent concern for safety, rather, the officer, “is required to act on reasonable and specific inferences drawn from the known facts of the situation”. The search must also be confined in scope to an intrusion reasonably designed to locate weapons. Third, the search must be conducted in a reasonable manner. Fourth, the investigative detention should be brief and the individual detained is not obliged to answer questions.
How did the ONCA decide? First, the investigative detention was necessary. Based on the 911 call, “[the officers] were discharging their common law duty to preserve the peace, prevent crime, and protect life and property”. As a result of confirmation of the specific information in the call, description of the car, licence plate, and description of the individual driving it, the police had reasonable grounds to suspect that the appellant was connected to a particular crime, possession of an illegal weapon, a gun, and his investigative detention was necessary.
Second, the police had reasonable grounds to believe that their safety and the safety of the public was engaged and they were entitled to conduct a protective pat-down search of the appellant and in the particular circumstances, they were also entitled to search the cabin of the car.
Third, the appellant did not submit that the manner in which the search was conducted was unreasonable.
Fourth, there was also no issue that the investigative detention was brief. Here, after receiving the 911 call from dispatch at 8:23:10 p.m., the police were at the liquor store parking lot by 8:24:53 p.m., and they located the appellant only a few minutes later. The appellant was under arrest within sixteen minutes from the time of the 911 call.
I find that the officers reasonably believed that the person driving the car was probably the person who closed the trunk as there was no other individual involved. I find that they reasonably inferred that there could have been one or more guns in the car and that the gun that the caller believed he saw could have been moved to the pocket of the Asian male from the trunk or from the pocket to the trunk.
Importantly, this decision must not be read as condoning an unlimited search of a car for police or public safety purposes whenever there is an investigative detention. The jurisprudence makes it clear that it is the totality of the circumstances that must be considered in every case. It is a very factually-driven analysis.
The take home? Don’t go into the trunk UNLESS you have specific reasons pointing at a live risk to police or the public (and you are able to articulate that). In the specific facts of this case, the importance of preventing serious injury or death to members of the public in not allowing the appellant to drive away until that threat was dispelled clearly outweighed the additional interference with the appellant’s liberty and privacy interests. The same may not be in the result in our situation; we must tread carefully.
MacDonald was a somewhat puzzling decision. To make matters worst, the minority in the decision spoke in strong and clear terms about an issue, but the majority didn’t advert to the issue in the slightest. I’ve posted the MacDonald decision earlier in the blog, so I won’t go into the facts or the actual decision this time around. I’ve gotten alot of questions about the raised threshold in MacDonald from “reasonable grounds to suspect” as decided in R. v. Mann, 2004 SCC 52,  3 SCR 59, to the new standard of “reasonable grounds to believe” as the majority decision in MacDonald seemed to identify in order to do a pat down search for weapons of a person detained.
I spent the last week in Halifax on a criminal law conference with 750 judges and lawyers from across Canada, so I took the opportunity to ask some of these legal professionals about the MacDonald decision. What I learned was that crown prosecutors, defence counsel, and judges alike as just as puzzled as we (police) are about the decision, so in essence I’m no clearer than I was before last week.
Perhaps the most confusing process is that having a “believe” standard for safety searches for investigative detentions (as the majority in MacDonald decided) is inconsistent with the ability to detain someone on the basis of suspicion, which is still good law. Arguably, the majority’s holding prevents us from searching to keep ourselves safe in detentions we are entitled to conduct. On the other hand, where there are reasonable grounds to believe that someone is “armed and dangerous”, we can simply arrest them anyway and search them incident to arrest, rendering the investigative detention and the safety search unnecessary.
I was directed to two new cases on the issue. With the minority having identified the issue so harshly, it can no longer be ignored, and judges are already split on the interpretation of MacDonald. I won’t go into the facts of each case because they didn’t essentially decide new case law or powers for us, but both courts interpreted the threshold in MacDonald differently, so I will give you the judge’s interpretation of what MacDonald means to us in their view.
The Supreme Court of Canada recently addressed the constitutional propriety of police “safety searches” in R. v. MacDonald, holding that, after the accused in that case refused to respond to police inquiries about the nature of the partially obscured “black and shiny” object in his hand, the police were justified in pushing open the accused’s apartment door in order to see whether the object was, as suspected, a weapon. Importantly, expressly applying R. v. Mann, at para. 40, the court in R. v. MacDonald, at paras. 31, 39-41, re-affirmed the common law police power to conduct a “safety search” when an officer believes “on reasonable grounds that his or her safety, or the safety of others, is at risk.” Such unplanned, reactionary, warrantless searches may properly be conducted, as the court observed in R. v. MacDonald, at paras. 32, 36-38, 41, where they are reasonably necessary to eliminate imminent threats to the safety of the public or the police in response to dangerous situations.
There is some question whether the decision in R. v. MacDonald changes the legal threshold for lawful police “safety searches” from the traditional “reasonable suspicion” standard to a higher standard akin to the search warrant requirement of “reasonable and probable grounds.” I do not read the R. v. MacDonald decision as having such an effect. It is important to recall that, from its judicial inception in Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (1968), the courts in the United States and Canada have long applied, in somewhat different language, the standard of “reasonable suspicion” to measure the constitutional permissibility of such “stop and frisk” searches. The significantly higher standard of “reasonable and probable grounds” has never been the required threshold, for the sound functional reason that it would render such searches legally redundant and practically useless. If a police officer possessed reasonable and probable grounds to believe a suspect was armed and dangerous, the suspect would invariably be arrested, not merely detained, and would be physically searched as incident to that arrest. There would be little point in the existence of the police “safety search” power, which has been clearly recognized in the appellate court jurisprudence, if it provided no search powers beyond those already recognized as being incident to an arrest. Moreover, if police officers are to lawfully conduct investigations in relation to detained (but not arrested) suspects, it only stands to reason that they must be given the lawful means of taking the necessary steps to protect themselves and others during the course of such investigations. Otherwise, the police would be needlessly placed at serious risk in the performance of their important public duties. See: R. v. Chehil, 2013 SCC 49, at para. 3, 20-24, 27; R. v. MacKenzie, 2013 SCC 50, at para. 74; R. v. Clayton and Farmer, at paras. 20, 28-30, 43-49, 81-84, 98, 103-104, 118, 123-126; R. v. Simpson (1993), 12 O.R. (3d) 182; 79 C.C.C. (3d) 482 (C.A.), at p. 202; Arizona v. Johnson, 129 S.Ct. 781 (2009), at p. 784; R. v. Crocker, 2009 BCCA 388, 275 B.C.A.C. 190, at paras. 62-72, leave denied:  S.C.C.A. No. 466,  1 S.C.R. viii; W.R. LaFave, Search and Seizure – A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment (2005, 4th ed.) at s. 9.6(a); J.A. Fontana and D. Keeshan, The Law of Search and Seizure in Canada (2010, 8th ed.) at pp. 709-712.
In R. v. Mann and its progeny the courts have confirmed the existence of the police power to detain individuals for investigative purposes and, where the police have “reasonable grounds” to suspect the detainee is armed and dangerous, to conduct a brief frisk or pat-down search to ensure their own safety and the safety of the public as they conduct such investigations. In my view, R. v. MacDonald is but an application of that well-established warrantless search power in a particular factual context, namely, where the search involves police entry of the confines of a private residence, where there is an increased expectation of privacy. See: R. v. Zargar, 2014 ONSC 1415, at paras. 29-32. Indeed, in R. v. MacDonald, the Supreme Court expressly purports to apply R. v. Mann in this factual context – not overrule it (or the many subsequent judgments that have clarified and applied it). The confusion in relation to this legal threshold has arisen, it seems to me, from the use of the phrase “reasonable grounds” to describe the threshold of “reasonable suspicion” or “articulable cause,” as this same terminology is also used to describe the higher threshold of “reasonable and probable grounds.” See: R. v. Mann, at paras. 33-35, 40-45, 63-64. Accordingly, it is important to recall that, in this particular context, the term “reasonable grounds” is used to describe a threshold of reasonable suspicion, not a threshold of reasonable probability.
The minority came to the same conclusion as the majority (four) judgment of Lebel J. but for very different reasons. They argued that the case ought to have been resolved by extending the logic of Mann (at para. 87) and that instead the majority had effectively overturned the “safety search” power recognized in Mann and a decade of subsequent jurisprudence (at para. 90). As the minority pointed out (at para. 84), the majority’s decision assumed that the officer in question had reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. MacDonald was armed and dangerous although the officer had only testified that he was concerned that Mr. MacDonald “might” have a weapon. They concluded that the consequence of the majority decision was to deprive officers of the ability to conduct protective searches except in circumstances where they already have ground to arrest” (at para. 90).
Arguably the minority in MacDonald are in the best position to interpret what the effect of the majority’s decision is.
“When the performance of a police duty requires an officer to interact with an individual who they have reasonable grounds to believe is armed and dangerous, an infringement on individual liberty may be necessary.” (at para. 39, subpara. 2, emphasis added). This is repeated at para. 41 where the majority states that “the search will be authorized by law only if the police officer believes on reasonable grounds that his or her safety is at stake and that, as a result, it is necessary to conduct a search”. [Emphasis added]. Although this statement is less clear, there could be no doubt what the majority meant given the statement of their factual conclusion at para. 44 that the officer had reasonable grounds to believe that there was an imminent threat to the safety of the police”….
However, the minority decision is very persuasive and clearly they are of the view that the majority has raised the standard required before an officer can lawfully conduct a pat down search as they stated (at para. 90).
So, we have two decisions out of the same level of court in Ontario by two justices who have interpreted MacDonald differently. While Justice Spies found a s. 8 violation where police conducted a safety search without “reasonable grounds to believe,” Justice Campbell did not. All we can hope for is an appeal to the SCC of a case with similar facts soon so that we can clear up this confusion once and for all.

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