Opinion ID: 1926347
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: In-person tips from unidentified informants.

Text: The state of the authorities is less clear where, as in this case, information has been provided to the police by a citizen who has not disclosed his name and address, either because he has been unwilling to do so or because he has not been asked for the information. In United States v. Sierra-Hernandez, 581 F.2d 760, 763 (9th Cir.1978), the court, speaking through Judge (now Justice) Kennedy, observed that [i]nformation from a citizen who confronts an officer in person to advise that a designated individual present on the scene is committing a specific crime should be given serious attention and great weight by the officer. We have likewise stated that when a citizen appears to have observed a crime, the reliability of his or her information is greatly enhanced. Sanders, supra, 751 A.2d at 954-55 (quoting Ware v. United States, 672 A.2d 557, 563 (D.C.1996)). In Sanders, an anonymous telephone tip case, we went on to distinguish Ware as follows: The anonymous source in that case... was a woman who approached a police officer in person to report an observed crime and thus subjected herself to future recognition by the officer. Here, the informant was faceless and nameless, the more classic anonymous tipster.... 751 A.2d at 955. [10] The requirements of reliability and particularity applied by the courts to information supplied by anonymous telephone tipsters thus do not apply with equal force when the police are approached on the street by an unknown citizen who claims to have been a victim of the crime just moments before. Anderson, supra, 175 U.S.App.D.C. at 78, 533 F.2d at 1213. Further, [s]ome courts indicate that a citizen, who is not connected with the police or who is not a paid informant, is inherently trustworthy, when he advises the police [that] a crime is being committed. Sierra-Hernandez, supra, 581 F.2d at 763 n. 1 (citations omitted). The parties have provided us with no clearly dispositive authority in this jurisdiction, and we have found none, with respect to a scenario of the kind presented here. The District of Columbia precedents, however, appear to tilt in the government's favor. In United States v. Walker, 294 A.2d 376 (D.C.1972), a citizen approached two uniformed officers who were sitting in a police car. He reported that a man known to him as Willie was sitting on the porch of a nearby house with a pistol in his waistband. The citizen described Willie's clothing, and he stated that the man with the pistol had an artificial leg. As in this case, [t]he informant was unknown to the officers and refused to give his name, saying he `was afraid to be involved.' Id. at 377. The officers proceeded to the house in question and found four men on the porch, one of whom, the defendant, William A. Walker, was apparently asleep. One of the officers felt Walker's legs, and he determined that the right leg was artificial. The officers awoke Walker, told him to place his hands on the porch, and discovered and removed a pistol from his waistband. Reversing an order of the trial court suppressing the pistol, this court held that the seizure of the weapon was effected by a constitutionally permissible frisk conducted in conformity with the Supreme Court's decisions in Terry v. Ohio and in Adams v. Williams, supra . The court did not consider the informant's refusal to identify himself as dispositive: It is true that in Adams the information was given by an informant who was known to the officer and who had previously given him information, while here the information came from one unknown to the officers. The credibility of a paid or professional informer may be suspect, but in our opinion the same cannot be said of a citizen reporting a crime. While the citizen here did not specifically say he had seen the pistol in Willie's possession, such was the clear inference from his report. Id. at 378 (footnote omitted). Although Walker is similar to the present case in that the informants in both cases declined to identify themselves, and although the officer's action in Walker in feeling the defendant's legs was not a safety precaution and might reasonably have been viewed as a search requiring probable cause, [11] different legal issues were decided by the courts in the two cases. In Walker, the court grounded its decision on the theory that the police required only a reasonable articulable suspicion to take the actions they did. In the present case, on the other hand, the government has conceded that articulable suspicion analysis is inapplicable, and that the search of Davis can stand only if the police had probable cause. Nevertheless, the court's favorable comments in Walker on the reliability of the citizen informant, notwithstanding his refusal to provide his name, inform our inquiry in this case at least in some limited measure. In Galloway v. United States, 326 A.2d 803 (D.C.1974), cert. denied, 421 U.S. 979, 95 S.Ct. 1981, 44 L.Ed.2d 471 (1975), decided two years after Walker, a citizen, not otherwise identified, advised a police officer that the occupants of a certain automobile had a handgun. The citizen identified the vehicle by make, color, license tag, and number of occupants. The officer broadcast a flash lookout over the police radio. Twenty minutes later, another officer, who had monitored the lookout, observed the vehicle. After calling for assistance, the second officer stopped the car and frisked the occupants. The frisk was unproductive, but a search of the vehicle resulted in the discovery of a pistol under the driver's seat. The defendant, Charles H. Galloway, was arrested and charged with carrying a pistol without a license. Galloway moved to suppress the pistol on Fourth Amendment grounds, claiming, inter alia, that the report of a non-violent crime by an unidentified citizen did not establish probable cause. The trial judge denied the motion, and this court affirmed. We held that the informant's reliability and basis of knowledge had been sufficiently demonstrated to support a finding of probable cause, for [a]n informant who is an eyewitness to or a victim of the crime he subsequently reports satisfies these requirements. 326 A.2d at 805 (citations omitted). Because the citizen's report here was of a rapidly moving street occurrence, this court found it reasonable to conclude that such [a] report resulted from an eyewitness observation by that citizen. Id. The arresting officer having immediately confirmed that report by his own observation to the extent of verifying the existence of the car, its make, color and tags, and the number of its occupants, id., we conclude that the officer had probable cause, under the facts and circumstances of this case . . ., to stop and search the car for the pistol. Id. (citation omitted). The present case differs from Galloway in two respects. First, the comparative exigency of a rapidly moving street occurrence involving a firearm is not present here. [12] Second, there is no indication that the citizen-informant in Galloway affirmatively refused to identify himself. Nevertheless, this court's conclusion that a finding of probable cause may be based upon a report from an unidentified citizen has obvious relevance to our inquiry. In Brown v. United States, 125 U.S.App. D.C. 43, 365 F.2d 976 (1966), an officer monitored a radio lookout for a suspect in a robbery. Melvin L. Brown, whom the officer had stopped for a minor traffic offense, roughly matched the description of the suspect. [13] The officer searched Brown's car, he discovered the fruits of the robbery, and Brown was charged with the crime. Brown filed a motion to suppress tangible evidence, contending that the police lacked probable cause to arrest him or to search his vehicle. At the hearing on the suppression motion, the victim was not identified, and the prosecution introduced no evidence regarding his reliability. Nevertheless, the trial court denied the motion, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. In an opinion written by Judge (later Chief Justice) Burger, the court stated, in pertinent part: That the information came from an unknown victim of the crime did not preclude the policeman's having probable cause to arrest Appellant on the basis of it. Although the police could not here judge the reliability of the information on the basis of past experience with the informant, . . . the victim's report has the virtue of being based on personal observation ... and is less likely to be colored by self-interest than is that of an informant. 125 U.S.App.D.C. at 46, 365 F.2d at 979 (citations omitted). Brown is distinguishable from this case, for there is no suggestion that the victim in Brown refused to provide his name. Moreover, the informant in our case did not claim to be a victim, although this difference is not especially significant, for a liar can falsely accuse his enemy of stealing his wallet as easily as he can assert that the man has been selling cocaine. In any event, the court held in Brown that the victim's report was sufficiently reliable to support a finding of probable cause, and that this was true notwithstanding the lack of any information in the record about the victim. Courts in other jurisdictions have also dealt with issues which may arise where an unidentified tipster has provided in-person information to the police. In Johnson v. State, 50 Md.App. 584, 439 A.2d 607, 611 (1982), the court summarized the relevant authorities as follows: The overwhelming weight of authority among the courts that have considered the question is that where, as here, an anonymous informant voluntarily approaches a law enforcement officer and gives accurate, detailed, and at least partially verifiable information concerning possible criminal activity, that information may give the officer adequate reason to stop and frisk the suspect described by the informant; and, if the officer finds sufficient evidence through the stop and frisk to constitute probable cause, the resulting arrest will not be held invalid. (Emphasis in original; citations omitted); accord, People v. Tooks, 403 Mich. 568, 271 N.W.2d 503, 504-08 (1978). It would appear to be implicit in the court's articulation in Johnson that, where no stop-and-frisk has been performed, and no new evidence has been discovered, a tip from the anonymous in-person informant would ordinarily be insufficient to support a finding of probable cause. Indeed, in State v. Chatmon, 9 Wash.App. 741, 515 P.2d 530, 534 (1973), a case in which an individual who reported suspected drug activity to the police in some detail, declined to identify himself, the court opined that in the general case information supplied by an anonymous informant (as opposed to one known to the police but merely unidentified) cannot, standing alone, create probable cause. [14] The Supreme Court has recognized, and so have we, the difficulties inherent in case-matching in Fourth Amendment litigation. [B]ecause the mosaic which is analyzed for a reasonable-suspicion or probable-cause inquiry is multi-faceted, one determination will seldom be a useful precedent for another. Ornelas, supra, 517 U.S. at 698, 116 S.Ct. 1657 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). Two cases are seldom sufficiently alike for the first to be an absolute binding precedent for the second. Price v. United States, 429 A.2d 514, 518 (D.C.1981) (citation omitted). By the same token, not all anonymous informants are the same. 2 WAYNE R. LAFAVE, SEARCH AND SEIZURE: A TREATISE ON THE FOURTH AMENDMENT § 3.4 (a), at 217 (1996) (quoting State v. McCloskey, 453 N.W.2d 700, 703 (Minn. 1990)). In McCloskey, a case in which the citizen-informant declined to tell police her name, the Supreme Court of Minnesota, after acknowledging that unidentified informant cases present a variety of fact patterns, sensibly rejected the option, and so do we, of [s]imply saying that the informant here would not give his/her name and leaving it at that.... 453 N.W.2d at 703. In People v. Hoffman, 45 Ill.2d 221, 258 N.E.2d 326 (1970), a case that takes us back to the uninhibited and sometimes colorful protests of yesteryear, an unidentified woman waved down a squad car and informed the officers that a man who had just passed her on a Chicago street had a non-exemplary four-letter expletive written in red letters on his forehead. The officers followed the man, who turned out to be Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, into a restaurant. After Hoffman removed his hat at their direction, the officers observed the offending expletive decorating Hoffman's face, and they placed him under arrest. [15] In upholding the trial court's rejection of Hoffman's contention that his arrest was unlawful, the Supreme Court of Illinois stated: The officers here were justified in relying on the information received from the woman, and the usual requirement of prior reliability which must be met when police act upon tips from professional informers does not apply to information supplied by ordinary citizens. [Citation omitted.] Accordingly, we find that these officers had probable cause to arrest defendant for disorderly conduct. 258 N.E.2d at 328 (punctuation slightly revised); see also State v. Williams, 638 S.W.2d 417, 420 (Tenn.Crim.App.1982) (upholding robbery conviction where officers apparently did not ascertain identity of person who reported the crime, since [t]he reasonableness of the officers' action and the legality of the arrest in this case do[ ] not turn upon the name of the person who transmitted the information to the officers.... When the informant is an eyewitness, specific indicia of reliability or past reliable contact [are] not required.); Vai v. State, 482 S.W.2d 247, 250 (Tex. Crim.App.1972) (recognizing, in a different but related context, that many citizens prefer to cooperate in anonymity with the police or fear possible retribution by the accused).