CA5: Anonymous tip wasn’t sufficiently corroborated

The anonymous tip here wasn’t sufficiently corroborated to make reasonable suspicion. The evidence supports the district court’s conclusion. United States v. Norbert, 2021 U.S. App. LEXIS 7620 (5th Cir. Mar. 16, 2021) (2-1):

The Supreme Court has evinced a strong distrust of anonymous tips. In particular, it has stated an anonymous tip that provides verifiable information as to a person’s identity and location, without more, is insufficient to justify an investigative stop.” Only “under appropriate circumstances” does an anonymous tip “demonstrate ‘sufficient indicia of reliability to provide reasonable suspicion to make [an] investigatory stop.'” To determine if an informant’s tip provides reasonable suspicion for an investigative stop, the Fifth Circuit considers various factors, including:

the credibility and reliability of the informant, the specificity of the information contained in the tip or report, the extent to which the information in the tip or report can be verified by officers in the field, and whether the tip or report concerns active or recent activity, or has instead gone stale.

. . .

Viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Norberto, we conclude that the district court’s ruling should be affirmed because “there is [a] reasonable view of the evidence to support it.” In summary, the innocent information from the tip allowed the officers to identify Norbert and his car in the parking lot, but the officers patted all the men down after only verifying this “innocent information.” Inexplicably, the officers did not get the informant’s name or phone number when she called, and she did not clearly advise the officers that she had personally observed any illegal drug activity. The officers also did not observe any drug activity occurring, nor did they attempt to speak with someone in the management office to identify who had phoned in the tip. Therefore, the district court did not err in concluding that the officers lacked the reasonable basis required to conduct an investigatory stop.