Court Opinion

ID: 9782173
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 18:04:12.883663+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:50.650552
License: Public Domain

DURHAM, Chief Justice,
dissenting:
¶ 37 I respectfully dissent. This is indeed a close case but I am simply not persuaded that the officers had sufficient information to permit a lawful warrants check. My concern is that the majority opinion may be interpreted to mean that reasonable suspicion may be based on an ambiguous telephone report with no indicia of reliability and no corroboration that there is even criminal activity going on, let alone that the defendant is somehow connected to it.
¶ 38 In most jurisdictions there appears to be no presumption that a call to police, even if it is a 911 call, contributes to a police officer’s reasonable suspicion. Rather, either the call itself must be highly reliable or the substance of the call must be somehow corroborated. See, e.g., United States v. Terry-Crespo, 356 F.3d 1170, 1173 (9th Cir.2004) (“Provided Mr. Domingis’s 911 call exhibited sufficient ‘indicia of reliability,’ it could have provided Officer Kulp with reasonable suspicion justifying a Terry stop.”); United States v. Quarles, 330 F.3d 650, 656 (4th Cir.2003) (“[T]he 911 call was not anonymous and provided sufficient information about [the caller] *515and about the defendant to find [the caller] credible and knowledgeable. We also believe that the 911 call provided sufficient reasonable suspicion to justify stopping the defendant.”); United States v. Nelson, 284 F.3d 472, 481 (3d Cir.2002) (“[W]e assess whether the [telephone] communications to the police possessed sufficient indicia of reliability, when considering the totality of the circumstances, for us to conclude that the officers possessed an objectively reasonable suspicion sufficient to justify a Terry stop.”); United States v. Jones, 242 F.3d 215, 218 (4th Cir.2001) (holding an anonymous 911 call that several black males were causing a disturbance did not justify police stopping a car containing black males).
¶ 39 In line with these eases, this court has also analyzed dispatch calls to officers on patrol in order to determine whether the calls were sufficiently reliable to provide police with reasonable suspicion. In State v. Pena, 869 P.2d 932 (Utah 1994), for example, we held that a dispatch call relaying information obtained from a 7-Eleven store clerk, who had reported a theft at the store and had described the suspect and his car, including its license plate number, did contain sufficient detailed information to justify police in making an initial stop of an individual matching the suspect’s description. Id. at 934, 940; see also State v. Bruce, 779 P.2d 646, 650-51 (Utah 1989) (holding that police who received a radio bulletin were justified in stopping the car identified in the bulletin as long as the officers who had issued the bulletin originally possessed sufficient articulable facts to constitute reasonable suspicion).
¶ 40 Here, the only information about the call in the record is that the police received a report of the call from dispatch. Thus, in this case, it would be impossible to conduct the reliability analysis that is often used to analyze whether police are justified in relying on a call, either alone or in combination with other factors, as a basis for reasonable suspicion. Moreover, the police were unable to corroborate the report of a scream or cry for help with other related indications of criminal activity.
¶ 41 Thus, based on the record before us, all we have is an uncorroborated and, for all we know, anonymous call, in combination with completely unrelated “suspicious” behavior by someone who was not even identified by the caller as the possible perpetrator. An identity request for possible future reference was, I believe, permissible, but the warrants check was not based on reasonable suspicion. I would affirm the court of appeals.