The Fourth Amendment permits brief investigative stops when an officer has a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion takes into account the totality of the circumstances and depends upon both the content of information possessed by police and its degree of reliability. This term, a divided Court held that an anonymous and uncorroborated tip can provide a sufficient basis for an officer’s reasonable suspicion to make an investigative stop.
In Prado Navarette v. California, highway-patrol officers stopped a pickup truck that matched the description of a vehicle that a 911 caller had recently reported as having run her off the road. As the officers approached the truck, they smelled marijuana. They searched the truck’s bed, found 30 pounds of marijuana, and arrested the occupants. Petitioners moved to suppress the drugs, arguing that the police lacked reasonable suspicion to make the traffic stop, which was denied at trial and affirmed by the California Court of Appeal.
Justice Thomas, writing for a bare majority, held that under the totality of the circumstances, the officer had reasonable suspicion that the truck’s driver was intoxicated. Looking to the reliability of the tip, Justice Thomas noted that the tipster’s description of the truck indicated an eyewitness basis of knowledge. According to the majority, the risk of a false report was limited by the apparently short time between the near accident and the report, suggesting that the caller had little time to fabricate the report, and the 911 system’s technological safeguards—such as the ability to ascertain call numbers—likely dissuade false reports. As for the content of the tip, Justice Thomas noted that a report that a vehicle had run another car off the road creates reasonable suspicion that the driver is drunk.
Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, arguing that while the Court’s opinion purports to adhere to precedent it marks a sharp departure from prior cases and announces a far-reaching new rule: so long as the caller identifies where the car is, anonymous claims of a single instance of possibly careless or reckless driving, called in to 911, will support a traffic stop. According to Justice Scalia, the tip in this case fell well below the standard set forth in Alabama v. White, in which the conduct of the subject of anonymous tip was detailed, predictive, and corroborated by the police. Because the tip in this case lacked any of those indicia of reliability, Justice Scalia would reverse the California Court of Appeal.
Prado Navarette will almost certainly change the way in which police rely upon anonymous and fairly general tips in establishing reasonable suspicion. As Justice Scalia warned in his dissent, police departments read the Court’s Fourth Amendment cases carefully and will likely derive a looser and more flexible standard for reasonable suspicion from the majority opinion—one that may influence police conduct outside of the traffic-stop context, such as Terry stops (“stop and frisk”).