Opinion ID: 4542480
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Officer Flagg

Text: Wright argues that Flagg “used far more force than necessary to effect an arrest,” Appellant’s Br. at 42, when he approached Wright’s SUV with his gun drawn and later deployed his taser on Wright while the latter sat in the driver’s seat of the vehicle. When making an arrest or investigatory stop, the police have “the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 10 thereof to effect it.” Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989). In determining whether the use of force in effecting an arrest is excessive in violation of the Fourth Amendment, we must determine “whether the officers’ actions [were] ‘objectively reasonable’ in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them, without regard to their underlying intent or motivation.” Id. at 397. This inquiry assesses “reasonableness at the moment” of the use of force, as “judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Goodwin v. City of Painesville, 781 F.3d 314, 321 (6th Cir. 2015) (quoting Graham, 490 U.S. at 396). The bottom-line inquiry is “whether the totality of the circumstances justifies a particular level of force.” Coffey v. Carroll, 933 F.3d 577, 588 (6th Cir. 2019) (citing Mitchell v. Schlabach, 864 F.3d 416, 421 (6th Cir. 2017)). Three factors from Graham guide this analysis: “[1] the severity of the crime at issue, [2] whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and [3] whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” Shreve v. Jessamine Cty. Fiscal Court, 453 F.3d 681, 687 (6th Cir. 2006) (quoting Graham, 490 U.S. at 396). Balancing these factors, and viewing the record in the light most favorable to Wright, a reasonable juror could conclude that Flagg used excessive force both when he brandished his firearm and when he deployed his taser. As to the firearm, we have held that a police officer may approach a suspect with a weapon drawn during a Terry stop when the officer reasonably fears for his safety. United States v. Hardnett, 804 F.2d 353, 357 (6th Cir. 1986); see also United States v. Heath, 259 F.3d 522, 530 (6th Cir. 2001) (“[When the] surrounding circumstances give rise to a justifiable fear for personal safety, a seizure effectuated with weapons drawn may properly be considered an investigative stop.” (alteration in original) (quoting Hardnett, 804 F.2d at 357)). Moreover, we have held that when a suspect is reasonably suspected of carrying drugs, an officer is “entitled to rely on [his] experience and training in concluding that weapons are frequently used in drug transactions.” Heath, 259 F.3d at 530. In Heath, the officers surveilled the defendant four times over the course of a month and observed conduct that they believed was consistent with drug activity, including stopping at locations under investigation for drug activity, checking for tails, and associating with “a large-scale drug trafficker.” Id. at 525. The police had identified the No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 11 defendant and knew that he had three misdemeanor convictions and one felony drug conviction. Id. at 524. They also obtained information from a confidential informant that the defendant was trafficking in large quantities of cocaine. Id. In those circumstances, we held that it was reasonable for the officers to approach the defendant’s vehicle with their guns drawn when conducting a Terry stop after seeing him leave a building with a known large-scale drug trafficker while carrying a bag. Id. at 530. Relying on Heath’s “drug activity = guns” premise, the district court in this case held as a matter of law that Flagg and Williams were justified in drawing their weapons for protection upon approaching Wright’s vehicle. See Appellant’s Br. at 44; see also Wright, 2019 WL 2009453, at  (“Thus, the officers in this case, having an objective reason to believe that Mr. Wright may have been involved in drug activity, also had a reasonable belief that he may be in possession of a weapon.”). The facts in this case, however, can be distinguished from Heath. Unlike the defendant officers in Heath, the officers here had very little, if any, reason to think that the detainee was involved in drug activity. Flagg and Williams had observed Wright pull into a driveway at his friend’s house and speak to his friend for about one minute to exchange greetings. According to Wright, he did not pull all the way up the driveway. While conversing, Wright stayed in his car and the friend stayed on the porch. According to the officers, they were surveilling the residence “based upon multiple arrests and complaints regarding drug activity.” However, according to Wright, the prior complaints for the residence were all stale, only three of the six complaints pertained to drugs, and none of the complaints pertained to him. Flagg and Williams also admit that they did not see Wright engage in any criminal activity, drug-related or otherwise, while stopped at the residence. Nevertheless, based only on Wright’s brief stop at the residence, the officers decided to conduct a traffic stop with weapons drawn. These circumstances are very different from those in Heath where the officers had a justifiable fear for their safety given that the defendant, whom they had identified and surveilled for a month, was a large-scale drug dealer and likely to be carrying a weapon. Flagg and Williams at most had a suspicion that Wright had briefly visited with a suspected drug dealer, but given that the officers had not identified Wright himself as a drug dealer or sought any corroboration of their suspicions of criminal activity, there is a genuine No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 12 dispute as to whether the officers were justified in brandishing their firearms upon approach. Thus, a jury must determine whether their decision to do so was unconstitutionally excessive. See, e.g., Croom v. Balkwill, 645 F.3d 1240, 1252 n.17 (11th Cir. 2011) (“An officer’s decision to point a gun at an unarmed civilian who objectively poses no threat to the officer or the public can certainly sustain a claim of excessive force.” (collecting cases)). Second, as to Flagg’s use of his taser, we hold that this too must be submitted to a jury to determine whether the use of force was excessive. The tasering occurred when Flagg had, at most, reasonable suspicion—not probable cause—to detain him for the officers’ drug investigation. See Ciminillo v. Streicher, 434 F.3d 461, 467 (6th Cir. 2006) (noting that “the fact that a plaintiff in a § 1983 suit had committed no crime clearly weighed against a finding of reasonableness”). Therefore, at no point before Flagg began to seize Wright did Flagg have probable cause to arrest him. The first Graham factor, relating to the severity of the suspected crime, thus cuts against a finding of justified use of force because there was no probable cause that he had committed any crime at all before the tasering occurred. “Of course, the use of force can be reasonable, even when the crime at issue is innocuous. To determine whether this is so, we turn to the [second and third] Graham factors.” Thomas v. Plummer, 489 F. App’x 116, 126 (6th Cir. 2012). Construing the record in the light most favorable to Wright, the second Graham factor—the immediate safety threat posed by the suspect to police and others—weighs in his favor as well. When Flagg deployed his taser, Wright was doing his best to comply with the officers’ commands despite his recent surgery and difficulty in exiting the SUV. After Flagg and Williams had holstered their weapons, Flagg opened the driver’s side door and Wright put his hands up. Flagg then demanded Wright turn off the engine, an order with which Wright complied, followed immediately by putting his hands up again. When Wright was unable to comply with Flagg’s commands because of his stomach staples and colostomy bag, the encounter turned violent. Wright was not armed. According to Flagg, he thought Wright was reaching for a weapon in the center console and considered that movement to be an act of resisting arrest. Wright, however, disputes that his hand movement was threatening to the extent that he moved his hand at all. Although these two versions of events are not inconsistent with each other—that is, Flagg could have reasonably believed No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 13 Wright was reaching for a gun when in reality he was trying to comply with orders—a reasonable jury could find, based on the totality of the circumstances, that a reasonable officer would not believe that Wright posed an immediate threat to their safety. Finally, the third Graham factor, which hinges on whether Wright was “actively” or “passively” resisting arrest, weighs in his favor as well when the facts are construed in his favor. See Goodwin v. City of Painesville, 781 F.3d 314, 323 (6th Cir. 2015) (noting that while active resistance to an officer’s command can justify use of a taser, passive resistance—or no resistance at all—does not justify such use of force) (citing Hagans v. Franklin Cty. Sheriff’s Office, 695 F.3d 505, 509 (6th Cir. 2012)). Flagg maintains that when he opened the driver’s side door, he grabbed Wright’s left wrist and began to bring his left arm under control. Flagg claims that when Wright pushed down on the center console, Flagg lost control of Wright’s arm, which Flagg described as an act of resistance. A reasonable juror, however, could accept Wright’s account that he was not resisting, but rather was simply having difficulty maneuvering while seated in the vehicle and in Officer Flagg’s forced hold. Even if Flagg is correct that Wright’s act of pushing down on the center console constituted some resistance, if the resistance was merely “passive,” then the use of a taser was unreasonable. See Goodwin, 781 F.3d at 323. The tasering of Wright was justified only if he engaged in resistance that was “active,” which “can take the form of ‘verbal hostility’ or a ‘deliberate act of defiance.’” Id. at 323 (quoting Eldridge v. City of Warren, 533 F. App’x 529, 534–35 (6th Cir. 2013)). We recognized this principle in Smith v. City of Troy, where the plaintiff was tased while experiencing an epileptic seizure. 874 F.3d at 942. In that case, when officers arrived at the scene, the plaintiff was standing outside his car clinging to a fence, which led the officers mistakenly to believe that he had been driving under the influence. Id. In an attempt to return the plaintiff to his car, an officer tried to pry the plaintiff’s fingers from the fence. Id. The plaintiff responded by pulling his arm away from the officer, at which point the officer forced the plaintiff to the ground and wrestled with him until a second officer arrived and deployed his taser. Id. The district court granted the officers qualified immunity, holding that “the officers used measured force in response to [the plaintiff’s] defiance of their orders and reaching where No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 14 the officers could not see his hands.” Id. at 943. We reversed, holding that “[a] reasonable juror could conclude that, in pulling his arm away, [the plaintiff’s] resistance was minimal and that [the force used] was excessive.” Id. at 945. Similarly, the facts regarding Wright’s arm movement would allow a reasonable juror to find that his resistance was minimal to the extent that it constituted resistance at all. Wright maintains that he reached down towards the center console in order to assist the officers in removing him from the SUV because his mobility was limited as a result of his surgery, colostomy bag, and staples in his stomach. However, Flagg claims that he was not aware of Wright’s medical problems until after he had deployed his taser. The reasonableness of force is predicated solely on the knowledge of officers in the moments before the force is used. Graham, 490 U.S. at 396–97. Therefore, if the officers did not know of Wright’s recent surgery, the colostomy bag or the stomach staples, those facts would bear no weight in the reasonableness calculus. But, even if the officers had no knowledge of any of these facts, there are other facts that, when construed in Wright’s favor, could support a reasonable juror’s finding that Wright did not actively resist. In a split-second reaction, Wright pushed down on the center console in an attempt to maneuver his torso into a better position to get out of the car. Construing the record in the light most favorable to Wright, his act of purported resistance is close enough to that of the plaintiff in Smith to present a question of fact for a jury to decide whether Wright in fact actively resisted arrest. That this issue presents a jury question is confirmed by our consideration of the officer’s actions “in light of testimony regarding the training that [the officer] received.” Griffith v. Coburn, 473 F.3d 650, 657 (6th Cir. 2007). Wright presented expert testimony from Roy Taylor, a police officer and expert on police-involved use of force, who testified that the level of force used was unreasonable. In his affidavit, Taylor noted that the Model Policy on Electronic Control Weapons of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (of which the Euclid police chief is a member), the TASER training manual, and the Euclid Police Department’s use-offorce continuum, each outline circumstances in which use of a taser is appropriate. According to Taylor, “[n]one of the circumstances . . . were present when Officer Flagg deployed his taser No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 15 against Lamar Wright. Officer Flagg used a greater level of force than other officers would have used if facing the same, or similar circumstances.” R. 31-6 at PageID 1415. Finally, and significantly, at no point before Flagg deployed his taser was Wright under arrest for any offense. As we noted in Smith, “the mere failure of a citizen—not arrested for any crime—to follow the officer’s commands does not give a law enforcement official authority to put the citizen in handcuffs.” 874 F.3d at 945. By the same logic, an officer may not tase a citizen not under arrest merely for failure to follow the officer’s orders when the officer has no reasonable fear for his or her safety. Whether the tasering in this instance was constitutionally permissible must be decided by the jury, given the genuine factual disputes described above concerning the circumstances of Wright’s encounter with the officers.
We now must decide whether, accepting Wright’s version of the facts, Flagg’s drawing of his weapon and use of the taser violated a constitutional right that was “clearly established at the time of the alleged violation.” Campbell v. City of Springboro, 700 F.3d 779, 786 (6th Cir. 2012). For this prong of the qualified immunity analysis, we are “not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality.” Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 563 U.S. 731, 742 (2011). The district court held that it was “unaware of any controlling cases that have established a constitutional violation occurred when non-lethal force was used to obtain control over the suspect who reasonably appeared to pose a safety risk to officers.” Wright, 2019 WL 2009453, at . In so holding, the district court examined the issue of whether the law was clearly established using too specific of a level of generality. See al-Kidd, 563 U.S. at 742. The district court also incorrectly framed the issue based upon Flagg’s version of the facts by assuming that Wright did in fact “reasonably appear[] to pose a safety risk” to the officer. Given that this was a summary judgment ruling, the district court instead should have considered whether the law was clearly established using Wright’s version of the facts. Wright contends that he had done nothing prior to his encounter with police to justify the officers’ brandishing of their firearms. He also maintains that he had a right not to be tased when, during the course of an investigatory detention, he inadvertently broke away from the officer’s grip, but presented no threat to others, No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 16 and did not actively resist arrest. For the reasons discussed below, we hold that, viewing the facts in Wright’s favor, Flagg’s drawing of his firearm and use of his taser violated Wright’s constitutional rights that were clearly established as of the date of the encounter, November 4, 2016. We reach this conclusion by examining “whether the contours of” the plaintiff’s constitutional rights “were sufficiently defined to give a reasonable officer fair warning that the conduct at issue was unconstitutional.” Brown v. Chapman, 814 F.3d 447, 461 (6th Cir. 2016). “This is not to say that an official action is protected by qualified immunity unless the very action in question has previously been held unlawful, . . . but it is to say that in light of preexisting law the unlawfulness must be apparent.” Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730, 739 (2002) (quoting Anderson v. Creighton, 482 U.S. 635, 640 (1987)). “In determining whether a right was clearly established, we look first to decisions of the Supreme Court, then to our own precedents, and then to decisions of other courts of appeal, and we ask whether these precedents ‘placed the . . . constitutional question beyond debate.’” Hearring v. Sliwowski, 712 F.3d 275, 280 (6th Cir. 2013) (quoting al-Kidd, 563 U.S. at 741). With respect to an officer’s use of a firearm, we have recognized that “pointing a firearm at an individual and making a demand of that individual . . . communicates the implicit threat that if the individual does not comply with the . . . demands, the [one pointing the firearm] will shoot the individual.” Vanderhoef v. Dixon, 938 F.3d 271, 277 (6th Cir. 2019) (quoting United States v. Bolden, 479 F.3d 455, 461 (6th Cir. 2007)). We have also recognized that pointing a gun at an individual can constitute excessive force under the Fourth Amendment. See Binay v. Bettendorf, 601 F.3d 640, 650 (6th Cir. 2010). We have addressed a similar scenario before. In Davis v. Bergeon, 187 F.3d 635, 1999 WL 591448 (6th Cir. 1999) (table), we concluded that pointing or displaying a firearm could constitute excessive force in the following circumstances: [The detective] was not in the process of an arrest, but inspecting the ladies’ restroom. [The plaintiff] was attempting to enter the men’s restroom to use the facilities and was not suspected of any wrongdoing at that point in time. [The detective], dressed in plainclothes, allegedly did not identify herself, pointed her weapon at [the plaintiff] and ordered him to get on the floor. No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 17 Id. at . We concluded that those facts sufficed to allow a jury to find that the officer had violated the plaintiff’s clearly established Fourth Amendment rights. Id. at –6; see also Saad v. City of Dearborn, No. 10-12635, 2011 WL 3112517, at  (E.D. Mich. July 26, 2011), aff’d sub nom. Saad v. Krause, 472 F. App’x 403 (6th Cir. 2012) (per curiam) (noting that that the Sixth Circuit has “held that pointing a gun at an unarmed suspect who is not fleeing or posing a risk to police officers may be an objectively unreasonable use of force” (citing Binay, 601 F.3d at 650)). Based on this authority, it was clearly established as of the time of Wright’s encounter with the officers that brandishing a firearm without a justifiable fear that Wright was fleeing or dangerous was unreasonable and constituted excessive force. In conducting the analysis as it pertains to use of the taser, two lines of cases emerge. The first holds that there is no clearly established right not to be tased when a suspect is actively resisting arrest. See, e.g., Hagans v. Franklin Cty. Sheriff’s Office, 695 F.3d 505, 509–10 (6th Cir. 2012) (noting that, as of 2007, a suspect who refused to be handcuffed and actively resisted arrest did not have a clearly established right not to be tased). The second line of authority holds that there is a clearly established right not to be tased when the suspect is not actively resisting arrest. See Brown, 814 F.3d at 462 (holding that “as of December 31, 2010, it was clearly established that tasering a non-threatening suspect who was not actively resisting arrest constituted excessive force”); Coffey, 933 F.3d at 589 (“Drawing the line at a suspect’s active resistance defines the right at a level of particularity appropriate for a claim pursued under § 1983.”); Smith, 874 F.3d at 945 (“It was well-established [in 2014] that a non-violent, nonresisting, or only passively resisting suspect who is not under arrest has a right to be free from an officer’s use of force.”). Assuming Wright’s version of the facts to be true, this case falls neatly within the second category of cases. To summarize, a reasonable jury could find that Flagg’s actions constituted unreasonable and constituted excessive force. It was clearly established as of November 4, 2016 that drawing a weapon on a suspect who was not fleeing or posing a safety risk and tasering a suspect who was not actively resisting arrest constituted excessive force. Therefore, we REVERSE the district court’s grant of summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds to Flagg as to the excessive-force claims. No. 19-3452 Wright v. City of Euclid, et al. Page 18