D.D.C.: ShotSpotter alert and being in a high-crime area late at night was not RS

A ShotSpotter alert led to defendant’s stop in a high-crime area late at night. On the totality, there was no reasonable suspicion for defendant’s stop. Therefore, his flight after the stop began didn’t end the inquiry. United States v. Carter, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121181 (D.D.C. July 10, 2020):

The government’s attempt to analogize this case to United States v. Brown, 334 F.3d 1161, 357 U.S. App. D.C. 339 (D.C. Cir. 2003), is also unpersuasive. It is true that, as in Brown, the officers here had somewhat more than a generalized area where the gunshots may have occurred: the ShotSpotter alert indicated that the shots occurred in the vicinity of 4905 Nash Street NE. Tr. at 17:22-18:12; cf. Brown, 334 F.3d at 1162. But Brown had a number of facts, absent here, that render the case distinguishable. First, the officers in Brown were responding to a 911 call with many specific details. The caller, the resident of an apartment building, reported that there had been a fight in an adjacent parking lot, that shots had been fired, and that one of the shots had shattered her child’s window. Brown, 334 F.3d at 1162. When officers arrived on the scene, there were only two cars in the parking lot. Id. The court stated that the specificity of the report—”that gunshots had been fired from the lot into the window of a child’s bedroom”—”enhanced the probability that criminal activity had been committed, or was being committed, by someone inside one of the only two occupied cars in the lot” and thus justified a Terry stop. Id. at 1165. In contrast, here, police had less specificity about where the shots took place—they had only a radius of unspecified size from the ShotSpotter alert centering on 4905 Nash Street NE. See ShotSpotter Report; Tr. at 16:5-6 (“ShotSpotter gives a radius of where the sounds of gunshots are heard.”). And there is no persuasive evidence that Carter and his companions were the only people in the area of the shots. Furthermore, in Brown, one of the occupants of defendant’s car exhibited “peculiar” behavior—exiting the vehicle, watching the officers for a while, then disappearing—that was sufficient to “raise suspicion or concern.” Id. at 1167. Here, the government has been able to point to no behavior beyond Carter and his companions simply walking in a residential neighborhood on New Year’s Eve, which is certainly not out of the ordinary. See Delaney, 955 F.3d at 1086.

Beyond the gunshots, the government also points to the fact that the incident occurred in a high-crime area at night. Tr. at 9:22-25. While presence in a high-crime area can be a relevant factor, it is “insufficient by itself to amount to reasonable suspicion.” United States v. Johnson, 212 F.3d 1313, 1316, 341 U.S. App. D.C. 289 (D.C. Cir. 2000) (citing Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 124). Nor can the time of day, though relevant, establish reasonable suspicion on its own. Jones, 142 F. Supp. 3d at 59 (citing Brown, 334 F.3d at 1165). On their own or together, these three factors—the gunshots, the high-crime area, and the time of day—are insufficient to create individualized “suspicion that the particular individual being stopped … was engaged in wrongdoing.” Delaney, 955 F.3d at 1087 (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted). “The demand for specificity in the information upon which police action is predicated … is the central teaching of [the Supreme Court’s] jurisprudence, and specificity is precisely what is missing here.” Id. (quoting Terry, 392 U.S. at 21 n.18 (cleaned up)). The Court therefore concludes that Officers Dabney and Kelly lacked reasonable suspicion as to Carter at the time of the initial interaction, when the officers stopped Carter and his companions on the street.

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