Supreme Court: Anonymous 911 Tip Good for Warrantless Search

The US Supreme Court ruled (5-4) on Tuesday in Navarette v. California  to uphold a traffic stop in northern California in which officers subsequently found marijuana in the vehicle. The officers themselves did not see any evidence of the tipped reckless driving, which was interpreted as drunkenness, even after following the truck for several minutes.

Justice Clarence Thomas said the anonymous tip phoned in to 911 that a Ford pickup truck had run the caller off the road was sufficiently reliable to allow for the traffic stop without violating the driver’s constitutional rights.

In 2008, officers stopped Lorenzo Prado Navarette based on the anonymous 911 call which claimed that Navarette had run the caller off the road. When officers questioned Navarette they smelled marijuana and later found 30 pounds of marijuana in the vehicle and arrested Navarette and a passenger.

Navarette and the passenger moved to suppress the the evidence based on an argument that the search violated their Fourth Amendment rights because the officers lacked reasonable suspicion when they pulled them over. In the Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Clarance Thomas, the majority found that an an anonymous tip will not always lead to reasonable suspicion, but in this case it did. This of course could leave the door open to future litigation on the issue under different facts. The Court held that reasonableness of suspicion is based on the totality of of the circumstances, including: content of information possessed by the police and reliability of that information. The Court found that under appropriate circumstances an anonymous tip can demonstrate sufficient indicia of reliability to provide reasonable suspicion to make an investigatory stop.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the dissent, and in which he was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had strong words about the decision’s implications for the future. Law enforcement agencies will identify at once our 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. This is not my concept, and I am sure would not be the Framers’, of a people secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Justice Scalia continued to point out that anonymity is especially suspicious with respect to the call that is the subject of the present case. The Court’s opinion serves up a freedom-destroying cocktail consisting of two parts patent falsity: (1) that anonymous 911 reports of traffic violations are reliable so long as they correctly identify a car and its location, and (2) that a single instance of careless or reckless driving necessarily supports a reasonable suspicion of drunken­ness. All the malevolent 911 caller need do is assert a traffic violation, and the targeted car will be stopped, forcibly if necessary, by the police. If the driver turns out not to be drunk (which will almost always be the case), the caller need fear no consequences, even if 911 knows his identity. After all, he never alleged drunkenness, but merely called in a traffic violation—and on that point his word is as good as his victim’s.

Finally, Justice Scalia noted that drunken driving is a serious matter, but so is the loss of our freedom to come and go as we please without police interference. To prevent and detect murder we do not allow searches without probable cause or targeted Terry stops without reasonable suspicion. We should not do so for drunken driving either. After today’s opinion all of us on the road, and not just drug dealers, are at risk of hav­ing our freedom of movement curtailed on suspicion of drunkenness, based upon a phone tip, true or false, of a single instance of careless driving.

Scalia and Ginsburg appear to share this writer’s opinion that this new rule will open the door for abuses by law enforcement or harassment from citizens making baseless 911 calls. Additionally, it now seems to place the burden on the defendant to prove that the facts surrounding the warrantless stop based on an anonymous 911 call did not rise to the level of Navarette v. California.
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