Court Opinion

ID: 9528060
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 03:36:40.376266+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:26:25.674727
License: Public Domain

Baker, J.
(dissenting) — I respectfully dissent.
The defendant was walking on a city sidewalk on an early summer evening. He had his hands in his pockets. A uniformed officer turned on her yellow wig-wag lights, stopped her patrol car near him, and asked him and his companion to step over to her car. The defendant turned toward her; his companion continued slowly walking away.
The officer had been responding to a radio dispatch to "check for narcotics activity" at a nearby intersection. Her suspicions were aroused because three men, including the defendant, split up and began walking when they saw her police car go by. It was her stated intent to stop the men and determine their identification and reason for being there.
The officer's tone was nonthreatening, but we indulge in impractical legal theorizing when we conclude that a reasonable person would feel free to ignore the officer's initial request to come over to her car to talk with her. The encounter continued, moreover, by the officer directing the defendant to remove his hands from his pockets. When he neither *714came toward the police car nor removed his hands from his pockets, the officer ordered him to "take your hands out of your pocket and come towards my car."
By this point, the encounter had progressively intruded upon the defendant's privacy to such an extent that a reasonable person would clearly not feel free to walk away. State v. Soto-Garcia, 68 Wn. App. 20, 841 P.2d 1271 (1992). In my opinion, to hold otherwise ignores the realities of the encounter. Worse, it promotes dubious policy. Had Nettles elected another course of action — for example, turning and running — the situation could have escalated into a chase through a residential neighborhood, with obvious attendant risks to innocent bystanders. We should encourage compliance with officer requests, including those borne of concern for officer safety. This is best accomplished not by straining to validate police stops which are effected on insufficient grounds, but by refusing to penalize those who do comply with the police officer's directions. If the stop lacks sufficient basis, we should not hesitate to exclude evidence so obtained.
Lawyers and judges will debate and disagree whether a seizure was effected under circumstances such as occurred in this case. It is unrealistic to expect citizens to make informed and intelligent decisions concerning the lawful authority of a police officer to issue directives like the one involved here. We should not encourage persons in the position of the defendant to choose not to comply and thereby possibly create risks for those involved as well as for the general public.9
I would hold that Nettles was illegally seized, see, e.g., State v. Richardson, 64 Wn. App. 693, 696, 825 P.2d 754 (1992), and that there was a nexus between that seizure and the dropping of the baggie.
Review denied at 123 Wn.2d 1010 (1994).

 See the interesting discussion of these issues in the opinion of Justice Scaha in California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621, 113 L. Ed. 2d 690, 111 S. Ct. 1547, 1551 (1991).