Opinion ID: 65371
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The BOLO Report

Text: [A]n alert or BOLO report may provide the reasonable suspicion necessary to justify an investigatory stop. Gonzalez, 190 F.3d at 672. Whether a particular tip or BOLO report provides a sufficient basis for an investigatory stop may depend upon [1] the credibility and reliability of the informant, [2] the specificity of the information contained in the tip or report, [3] the extent to which the information in the tip or report can be verified by officers in the field, and [4] whether the tip or report concerns active or recent activity, or has instead gone stale. Id. ( Gonzalez factors). Rodriguez claims the BOLO report was not specific enough to support the stop and argues that it failed to specify the vehicle's license plate number, state of registration, and other distinguishing information. Review of this mixed question of law and fact is de novo. As noted above, it is not clear whether the BOLO did contain a license plate number, albeit one that did not match Rodriguez's car. More importantly, the Fourth Amendment does not require that a BOLO specifically include a vehicle's license plate number or registration information. The BOLO contained a great deal of detail, even though it was brief. The BOLO's identification of a car by its make, model, body style, and by the number, ethnicity, sex, and attire of its occupants, on such a sparsely traveled road, might have been sufficient in itself to support a stop. But Rodriguez fails to acknowledge that the agents did not stop the Ford Tempo solely as a result of the BOLO alert. In fact, Coronado followed Rodriguez's Tempo for approximately 50 miles before directing Hodges to pull it over. Although he was alerted to Rodriguez's car by the BOLO, Coronado also articulated other specific facts and rational inferences from those facts, detailed supra, that supported the stop. See Jacquinot, 258 F.3d at 427. In addition, the first, third, and fourth Gonzalez factors, unchallenged by Rodriguez, all favor the Government, even if the stop were understood to have resulted from the BOLO alert alone. First, the informant was Goitia, the person who confessed to being involved in narcotics trafficking with Rodriguez. The slip of paper in Goitia's wallet contained information on a similar car, but the fact that the license plates on that slip of paper did not match Rodriguez's is not dispositive; as Goitia explained to the agents, the plates on the slip of paper belonged to a different Ford Tempo that the ring was also using for smuggling. Even if Hardin also relayed the inconsistent information from the slip of paper, the fact that Rodriguez's car matched a lesser quantum of the information would not in itself vitiate the BOLO on these facts. We emphasize that we do not reach the question whether this BOLO itself would have been sufficient to provide reasonable suspicion for the stop. The third and fourth Gonzalez factors clearly favor the Government: the tip was in fact verified to a significant extent by officers in the field, who observed the suspicious behavior of Rodriguez's car as they followed it for over 50 miles, and the report concerned not merely recent but in fact contemporaneous activity: ongoing drug-smuggling.