Defendant robbed a Denver bank on a Saturday wearing a beekeeper’s gear and mask, so nobody got a look at him. In the stolen money was a GPS tracker effective to a 60′ radius. Police tracked it to an intersection, and the first officer on the scene barricaded the intersection to stop all traffic on that side. Other officers arrived, and they made a split second decision to stop 20 cars at the intersection with 29 occupants. Everybody had their hands up. They sought an FBI tracking device effective to 10′, but it was late arriving. Ultimately, the occupants of 17 cars were handcuffed. The tracking beacon finally got there and pinpointed defendant’s car, and money wrappers were found inside. After a three day suppression hearing, on the whole, the stop and search was reasonable under Edmond, considering the nature of the crime and the need for immediate action. [Remarkably, defendant got only 2 months for the bank robbery, but 84 months for brandishing the gun. He should have been thankful.] United States v. Paetsch, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 5624 (10th Cir. April 8, 2015):
Meanwhile, at a standstill after Officer Acierno’s disappointing performance with the beacon, Lt. Lertch ordered that his officers remove all occupants from the remaining 17 cars—again they did so using weapons and ballistic shields. Officers treated adults traveling without children as suspects and handcuffed them. At least in some cases, officers at close range fixed their firearms on the heads and bodies of the people removed from their cars. After ensuring that none were armed, officers sat them on the curb.
By 5:25 p.m., the officers had cleared out every car. Then they did a “secondary search,” peering through car windows to ensure that nobody was hiding. R. vol. 3, at 197—98. During this secondary search, an officer saw through Paetsch’s car window a $2,000 “money band”—a slip of colored paper that banks use to wrap stacks of money. Id. at 198—99. Upon being informed of this, Lt. Lertch and several other officers came over to see the money band.
Shortly after this, Officer Williams arrived. An expert in using handheld beacons, he set its functions correctly and quickly got a very strong signal from inside Paetsch’s car. Officers then arrested Paetsch and put him in the back of a police car. A search of his car revealed more incriminating evidence: $22,956 in cash, two handguns, boxes of ammunition, a mask, a wig, a pair of gloves, an empty air horn package, two fake license plates, and, of course, the GPS tracker embedded within a stack of money.
. . .
In Indianapolis v. Edmond, the Court explained in dictum4 that “there are circumstances that may justify a law enforcement checkpoint where the primary purpose would otherwise, but for some emergency, relate to ordinary crime control.” 531 U.S. at 44. As one example, the Court noted, “the Fourth Amendment would almost certainly permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist attack or to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route.” Id. The Court distinguished the exigencies in those scenarios from “the circumstances under which authorities might simply stop cars as a matter of course to see if there just happens to be a felon leaving the jurisdiction.” Id.
Here, the police knew far more than that an armed bank robber was fleeing on a “likely route”: they knew that the stolen money (and likely the armed criminal who stole it) sat in a car idling at that very intersection. And, because the police barricaded only the 20 cars possibly containing the bank robber, their barricade was appropriately tailored to achieve its constitutional purpose—”to catch a dangerous criminal who is likely to flee by way of a particular route.” See United States v. Abbott, 265 F. App’x 307, 309 (5th Cir. 2008) (concluding an emergency roadblock was “properly tailored” because officers used an electronic tracking device to limit the search area). As such, the barricade’s group seizure did not violate the Fourth Amendment simply because it lacked individualized suspicion of a particular motorist. But that does not entirely resolve whether the barricade comported with the Fourth Amendment. We still must examine whether it was reasonable under the totality of the circumstances.
. . .
Not only was the barricade effective, but police knew it would be effective before setting it up. Edmond teaches that law enforcement must only employ an emergency roadblock absent individualized suspicion where a criminal is “likely to flee by way of a particular route.” 531 U.S. at 44. Here police had reliable information that they had penned the bank robber at the traffic intersection. See Palacios v. Burge, 589 F.3d 556, 559, 564 (2d Cir. 2009) (holding a group seizure lacking individualized suspicion valid under the Fourth Amendment partly because the police “were armed with reliable information that the perpetrators were among the group of individuals”). Further, the [*20] officers knew that they had access to a handheld beacon that would pinpoint the tracker and thus, most likely, the bank robber.
Perhaps, as Paetsch suggests, the police could also have advanced the public interest by continuing to pursue Paetsch rather than barricading traffic at the stoplight. But “reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment does not require employing the least intrusive means….” Bd. of Educ. of Indep. Sch. Dist. No. 92 v. Earls, 536 U.S. 822, 837 (2002). In fact, the means chosen to advance the public interest need only represent one “choice among … reasonable alternatives.” Sitz, 496 U.S. at 453. Here, the district court found that the barricade advanced the public interest more effectively and less dangerously than the alternative proposed by Paetsch. Paetsch, 900 F. Supp. 2d at 1213—14. With dozens of officers after him, Paetsch would likely have noticed the police in hot pursuit. Id. at 1214. As the district court found, this could have led to a dangerous high-speed chase, or to Paetsch discarding or disabling the GPS tracker, a possibility mentioned by Officer Michael Thrapp at the suppression hearing. Id. Further, because of the moderate-to-heavy traffic conditions, officers might have been unable to locate the tracker to any particular car had they continued pursuing the signal. And, finally, police had to consider that the tracker’s battery would last only four hours. In light of these factual circumstances and the Supreme Court’s admonition not to “indulge in unrealistic second-guessing,” United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 11 (1989) (internal quotation marks omitted), we conclude that the decision to barricade the 20 cars reasonably advanced the public interest.
