Opinion ID: 201394
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Temporary Detention and Frisk.

Text: 31 The appellant maintains that even if the officers' entry into the apartment passed constitutional muster, they lacked lawful authority to detain him and perform a frisk for weapons. This line of argument redirects our analytic course to the law governing the search and seizure of persons. 32 A temporary detention of an individual constitutes a seizure within the purview of the Fourth Amendment and, therefore, is subject to the constitutional imperative that it must be reasonable under all the circumstances. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 16, 19, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968); Lee, 317 F.3d at 31. The Terry Court established the baseline rule, holding that an officer may conduct a brief investigatory stop if he has a reasonable, articulable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot. See Terry, 392 U.S. at 30, 88 S.Ct. 1868. Although the showing required to meet this standard is considerably less demanding than that required to make out probable cause, the officer nonetheless must possess (and be able to articulate) more than a hunch, an intuition, or a desultory inkling of possible criminal activity. See id. at 27, 88 S.Ct. 1868. 33 A court inquiring into the validity of a Terry stop must use a wide lens and survey the totality of the circumstances. See United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 8, 109 S.Ct. 1581, 104 L.Ed.2d 1 (1989). The inquiry must consider whether the officer's actions were justified at their inception, and if so, whether the officer's subsequent actions were fairly responsive to the emerging tableau. United States v. Chhien, 266 F.3d 1, 6 (1st Cir.2001). Generally speaking, a stop is justified at its inception if the officer can point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant [the] intrusion. Terry, 392 U.S. at 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868; see United States v. Young, 105 F.3d 1, 7 (1st Cir.1997). 34 Police officers are not limited to personal observations in conducting investigatory activities, and reasonable suspicion for a Terry stop may be based on information furnished by others. See Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143, 147, 92 S.Ct. 1921, 32 L.Ed.2d 612 (1972). That does not mean, however, that an officer may indiscriminately credit gossip or innuendo. An officer may rely upon an informant's tip to establish reasonable suspicion only if the information carries sufficient `indicia of reliability' to warrant acting upon it. Alabama v. White, 496 U.S. 325, 328, 110 S.Ct. 2412, 110 L.Ed.2d 301 (1990) (quoting Adams, 407 U.S. at 147, 92 S.Ct. 1921). That determination entails an examination of all the circumstances bearing upon the tip itself and the tipster's veracity, reliability, and basis of knowledge. See id. at 328-29, 92 S.Ct. 1921. 35 The propriety of an officer's actions after an initial stop depends on what the officer knows (or has reason to believe) and how events unfold. See Chhien, 266 F.3d at 6. The touchstone is reasonableness. Thus, in determining whether a pat-down search is an appropriate step following a valid Terry stop, the key is whether, under the circumstances, the officer is justified in believing that the person is armed and dangerous to the officer or others. United States v. Schiavo, 29 F.3d 6, 8 (1st Cir.1994). 36 With these tenets in mind, we rehearse the facts known to the officers, as well as those that they reasonably could have inferred, at the time they placed the appellant against the wall. We proceed from there to the facts known or inferable at the time of the pat-down. 37 The officers received information from the dispatcher that a 911 caller had reported that she was inside an apartment with an armed man. The emergency nature of a 911 call supported a reasonable inference that the woman felt threatened by her situation and desired police protection; the dispatcher's comment that the woman was pretending to be talking to a friend supported a further inference that the circumstances prevented her from providing a full picture of the peril presented by the man with the gun. 38 When the officers reached the premises, one of the two women who opened the door confirmed that an armed man was inside. The fact that this was done by a nod rather than by a declarative statement does not divest it of significance; the woman's gesture provided face-to-face corroboration of the essence of the 911 report, and her unwillingness to vocalize lent credence to the possibility that she faced some kind of threat that inhibited her from speaking aloud. 39 When the officers entered the flat, a man materialized from another room, flew into a rage, and charged toward them. His presence in the apartment made it highly likely that he was the man reported to be carrying a firearm. His belligerence, combined with the initial tip, gave rise to a reasonable suspicion that he might have been involved in criminal wrongdoing (say, menacing the occupants of the apartment) as well as a reasonable concern for the officers' safety. 40 It is common ground that [e]valuating whether an officer's suspicions are (or are not) reasonable is a fact-sensitive task, bound up in the warp and woof of the surrounding circumstances. Chhien, 266 F.3d at 8. As such, some [d]eference is due to the experienced perceptions of the officers. United States v. Woodrum, 202 F.3d 1, 7 (1st Cir.2000). Ceding that deference here, we conclude, without serious question, that the temporary detention — placing the appellant up against the wall — was justified at its inception because the officers had a reasonable suspicion that the appellant was armed and had acted in such a way as to threaten the person who placed the 911 call. 41 Having concluded that the officers were warranted in briefly detaining the visibly agitated man (whom they reasonably suspected of carrying a gun) in order to investigate the situation further, we next consider the frisk. In addressing this point, it is important to recall that Officer O'Malley's private audience with Margaret Jones yielded several nuggets of information: that she had placed the 911 call; that the man whom the police had detained was the man she had described as armed in that call; and that the gun was in the waistband of the man's pants. Having mined these nuggets and noted the appellant's frenetic behavior, the police had a plausible basis for suspecting that the appellant was armed and dangerous. That, in turn, formed the basis for a reasonable belief that a frisk was necessary to protect the safety of both the civilians within the apartment and the officers themselves. See, e.g., United States v. Taylor, 162 F.3d 12, 17 (1st Cir.1998) (noting that, in the context of a valid Terry stop, a reasonable safety concern justifies disarming the suspect). 42 The frisk that Officer O'Malley subsequently conducted was restricted to the bare minimum needed to detect the presence of a firearm. He began at the appellant's waist (where the informant had stated that the appellant kept his weapon) and went no further than to extract the gun. This course of action was reasonable under the circumstances and, thus, constitutionally appropriate. See Terry, 392 U.S. at 26, 88 S.Ct. 1868. 43 The appellant advances three counter-arguments in an effort to blunt the force of this reasoning. None is persuasive. 44 First, the appellant attempts to attack the officers' evidentiary portfolio by characterizing Margaret Jones as an anonymous (and, thus, inherently unreliable) tipster. In pressing this attack, the appellant points out that the police did not know Margaret Jones before the occurrence of these events and that she remained nameless from the time of the 911 call until after the arrest. In the appellant's view, her continuing anonymity triggered an unmet requirement of independent corroboration. 45 The appellant bases this argument on the Supreme Court's decision in Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266, 120 S.Ct. 1375, 146 L.Ed.2d 254 (2000). But he reads that decision through rose-colored glasses. In J.L., the Court, discussing a tip that emanated from an unknown caller who phoned from an unknown location and offered no indication of the basis for the information provided, confirmed that such an anonymous tip, standing alone, seldom will exhibit sufficient indicia of reliability to support reasonable suspicion for an investigatory stop. See id. at 270, 120 S.Ct. 1375. The Court took pains to contrast such a source with a known informant whose reputation can be assessed and who can be held responsible if her allegations turn out to be fabricated. Id. 46 While this case falls somewhere between these two descriptions, Margaret Jones more closely resembles the latter example because the police confirmed that the caller was not merely communicating an anonymous tip of dubious reliability. She said from the start that she was in an apartment with a man who had a gun, supporting a likelihood that she had seen the gun. And the manner in which she communicated the information on the telephone suggested a likelihood that she was concerned for her own safety. Thereafter, her willingness to reconfirm the accusation in person, under circumstances that might immediately reveal its truth or falsity, suggests a higher degree of reliability than a wholly anonymous telephone call (as to which the caller would suffer no adverse consequences if the police took action and the tip proved apocryphal). 47 Given these considerations, Margaret Jones's tip cannot plausibly be said to be anonymous and unreliable in the sense that concerned the J.L. Court. Unlike a faceless telephone communication from out of the blue, a face-to-face encounter can afford police the ability to assess many of the elements that are relevant to determining whether information is sufficiently reliable to warrant police action. See White, 496 U.S. at 328-29, 110 S.Ct. 2412. A face-to-face encounter provides police officers the opportunity to perceive and evaluate personally an informant's mannerisms, expressions, and tone of voice (and, thus, to assess the informant's veracity more readily than could be done from a purely anonymous telephone tip). See, e.g., United States v. Heard, 367 F.3d 1275, 1279 (11th Cir.2004); United States v. Campa, 234 F.3d 733, 738 (1st Cir.2000). In-person communications also tend to be more reliable because, having revealed one's physical appearance and location, the informant knows that she can be tracked down and held accountable if her assertions prove inaccurate. See J.L., 529 U.S. at 270-71, 120 S.Ct. 1375. Finally, a face-to-face encounter often provides a window into an informant's represented basis of knowledge; for example, her physical presence at or near the scene of the reported events can confirm that she acquired her information through first-hand observation. See, e.g., United States v. Lewis, 40 F.3d 1325, 1334 (1st Cir.1994). 48 In this case, the appellant would have us attach decretory significance to the fact that Margaret Jones was, at the times material hereto, anonymous — the officers did not learn her name until after they had made the arrest. This perspective gives an artificially literal meaning to the adjective anonymous and, in the bargain, mistakenly emphasizes the label rather than the contents of the package. The dispositive difference between this case and J.L. is that, here, the officers had in-person contacts with Margaret Jones, and those contacts, although limited, allowed them to gauge her veracity and to make some informed assessment of the reliability of the tip (e.g., her face-to-face reconfirmation and her presence in the apartment provided some assurance that her assertions were based upon first-hand knowledge). 49 In the last analysis, words are like chameleons; they frequently have different shades of meaning depending upon the circumstances. See, e.g., Hanover Ins. Co. v. United States, 880 F.2d 1503, 1504 (1st Cir.1989). The informant here was not anonymous as the J.L. Court employed that term and the information was not, as in J.L., a tip that had no discernible basis. Hence, we agree with the district court that it was reasonable for the officers to rely on the as-yet-nameless informant's statements in making their Terry determinations. 50 The appellant next argues that a combination of two facts — that Officer O'Malley had a specific purpose (retrieving a gun) and a specific target (the waistband of the appellant's pants) — invalidates the protective frisk and converts it into a search for evidence (which would have had to have been justified by probable cause). 51 This is resupinate reasoning. In determining whether an officer had reasonable suspicion to justify a Terry stop and protective frisk, the officer's subjective motives do not enter into the decisional calculus. See Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 812, 116 S.Ct. 1769, 135 L.Ed.2d 89 (1996); United States v. Trueber, 238 F.3d 79, 92 (1st Cir.2001). The appellant has pointed to no relevant authority suggesting that a particular subjective motive alters the familiar focus of the Terry analysis, which is the objective significance of the particular facts under all the circumstances. Woodrum, 202 F.3d at 7 (emphasis supplied). What is more, if the police conduct a Terry frisk justified by fear for their safety arising from information about a gun in a person's waistband, the waist area is logically the first place that one would expect the officers to look. 52 If more were needed — and we doubt that it is — the Supreme Court has applied the Terry doctrine in reviewing a targeted frisk of a defendant's waistband. In Adams v. Williams, the Court concluded that a policeman's action in reaching to the spot where the gun was thought to be hidden constituted a limited intrusion designed to insure his safety and was reasonable under the circumstances. 407 U.S. at 148, 92 S.Ct. 1921. It follows inexorably that Officer O'Malley's beeline to the place where he suspected a weapon would be found does not undermine our characterization of the intrusion as a valid Terry frisk. 53 In a last-ditch stand, the appellant contends that the Terry doctrine lacks force within the home because of the heightened expectations of privacy that operate in that domain. To support this contention, he leans upon the dissenting opinion in United States v. Beaudoin, 362 F.3d 60, 71 (1st Cir.2004) (Lipez, J., dissenting). A dissenting opinion is, of course, not binding precedent, and the majority opinion in Beaudoin, which is controlling on this panel, applied Terry in the quasi-residential setting involved there (a doorway of a hotel room). See United States v. Beaudoin, 362 F.3d 60, 67-68 (1st Cir.) (en banc), cert. denied, ___ U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. 484, ___ L.Ed.2d ___ (2004) [No. 04-5440]. 54 In all events, the Beaudoin dissent focused on the validity of the initial seizure of the defendant. See id. at 76-77 (Lipez, J., dissenting). It did not directly address the multifaceted question of whether and in what circumstances a security frisk is permissible where, as in this case, an officer legitimately secures consent to enter residential premises. Fairly read, then, the Beaudoin dissent does not commit to a per se rule that would prevent the Terry doctrine from crossing the threshold into the home. 55 Beaudoin aside, the appellant's argument cannot withstand scrutiny. In Terry, the Supreme Court recognized the need to reconcile an individual's Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable personal invasions with the immediate interest of the police officer in taking steps to assure himself that the person with whom he is dealing is not armed with a weapon that could unexpectedly and fatally be used against him. Terry, 392 U.S. at 23, 88 S.Ct. 1868. The appellant argues, in effect, that because the Terry Court dealt with the myriad daily situations in which policemen and citizens confront each other on the street,  id. at 12, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (emphasis supplied), this court should limit its logic to such public encounters and should not extend that logic to protective actions taken in the course of legitimate investigative activities (including emergency responses to 911 calls) that bring police within the sanctuary of a person's home. This argument is misguided. It invites us to disregard entirely one side of the balance that Terry struck (the serious concern for officer safety) simply because the interest on the other side (the right to be secure against intrusions in the home) deserves heightened protection. 56 We decline this invitation. We find no support for the proposition that the in-home setting automatically eclipses any and all interests in officer safety. To the contrary, in deciding whether a requirement less demanding than probable cause can justify certain police activities involving the home, the Court has emphasized that there is `no ready test for determining reasonableness,' Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325, 332, 110 S.Ct. 1093, 108 L.Ed.2d 276 (1990) (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868), and has balanced the nature of the intrusion against the contextualized concern for officer safety, see id. at 332-34, 110 S.Ct. 1093 (holding that the heightened risk of jeopardy to the police in the context of an in-home arrest outweighed the intrusion entailed in a protective sweep of the premises for dangerous individuals). In much the same vein, the Court recently reemphasized that for the most part per se rules are inappropriate in the Fourth Amendment context. United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, 201, 122 S.Ct. 2105, 153 L.Ed.2d 242 (2002). The appropriate inquiry, as we have said, entails a consideration of the totality of the circumstances surrounding an encounter. Id. 57 In applying the Terry doctrine to areas in and around the home, our case law has followed these principles, eschewing bright-line rules and treating the residential nature of the premises as part of the totality of the circumstances in determining whether reasonable suspicion justified particular police actions. See, e.g., United States v. Moore, 235 F.3d 700, 702-04 (1st Cir.2000) (sustaining a Terry stop and frisk of a person detained in a second-floor internal stairwell upon his egress from a third-floor apartment); Campa, 234 F.3d at 736-38 (upholding a Terry stop and frisk of a defendant apprehended inside an apartment and moved into the hallway). Other courts have held, as we do today, that once an officer is legitimately on residential premises pursuant to consent or other lawful authority, individualized suspicion that a person is armed may justify a frisk. See United States v. Brooks, 2 F.3d 838, 842 (8th Cir.1993) (Following a consensual or otherwise lawful entry into a private dwelling, police can pat a suspect down for weapons if they have a reasonable, particularized suspicion that the suspect is armed.); United States. v. Flippin, 924 F.2d 163, 165-66 (9th Cir.1991) (similar). 58 The most natural reading of Terry suggests that its rationale is designed to address the need for officer safety in the course of all legitimate investigative activities. We have been faithful to the core principle of Terry here by requiring individualized suspicion and accounting for the totality of the circumstances that enter into the delicate balance posed by constitutional and practical concerns. 3