E.D.Mich.: Stop was completely lacking in RS

This black defendant’s stop six minutes after a shooting call in a heavily black neighborhood (2,000 within a half mile radius) was completely lacking in reasonable suspicion. The court goes on for many pages about the government’s proffered reasonable suspicion factors and finds them all lacking. United States v. Smith, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 234149, 2021 WL 5771219 (E.D.Mich. Dec. 6, 2021) (For litigators, this is an important case to read if you can, and I provided the Westlaw cite, too, because it shows how the defense completely undermined the government’s claim of reasonable suspicion. (Good work deserves to be admired.)):

In sum, anonymous 911 callers gave dispatch a description of the suspects that Wickham believed matched Defendant. These anonymous tips lack sufficient indicia of reliability because the identities of the 911 callers are not easily ascertainable, the tips were not independently corroborated beyond corroborating that Defendant matched the physical description of the suspects provided by dispatch, the tips did not contain predictive information, and the tips did not allege criminal activity.

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In this case, the government does not contest Defendant’s assertion that in 2010 “over 2,000 black people lived in the half mile radius from where the shots were fired.” (ECF No. 28, PageID.131; see ECF No. 19, PageID.53-54.) Based on this data, and on Knoblauch’s testimony that the shots were fired in an area with a large African American population, the description of Black males wearing all black and black hoodies could potentially describe “any number of people in the neighborhood.” Fleming, 465 F. Supp. 3d at 732. The government argues that the time of night “narrow[ed] the number of potential people” who matched dispatch’s description, but the government does not show that the description was sufficiently particular and “sufficiently ‘winnow[ed] the class of potential suspects.'” Id. (quoting Davis, 341 F. App’x at 140-41). Indeed, officers did stop, more than once, another Black male who the officers believed matched the description from dispatch. (See ECF No. 19-7.) Therefore, the government has not demonstrated that dispatch’s description gave Wickham a “particularized and objective basis for suspecting” Defendant of criminal activity, Fleming, 465 F. Supp. 3d at 732, which was necessary for Wickham to have reasonable suspicion to stop Defendant.

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The other factors identified by the government—time of night, high crime area, temporal and geographic proximity, the other individual stating that he was on Morrell Street, and Defendant and the other individual making a furtive movement—are insufficient to establish reasonable suspicion. …