Informant Tips

Informant Tips

The stops discussed so far rested on facts the officer saw personally: pacing in front of a store, footprints, a vehicle's round trip. Often the officer has seen nothing, and the suspicion comes from what another person said, whether a victim, a bystander, a regular source, or a caller who never gave a name. A tip raises a question that the officer's own observations do not, which is whether the information deserves to be acted on. The answer comes from Alabama v. White. Reasonable suspicion depends on both the content and reliability of the information the police have, and the two are weighed together as part of the whole picture.¹

Because the two factors are weighed together, they trade off against each other. A tip with a relatively low degree of reliability requires more additional information to reach the needed level of suspicion than a more reliable tip would, so independent facts can make up for a weak source.² The same reasoning explains how reasonable suspicion relates to probable cause. The lower standard is lower in the quantity and content of information required, and it also tolerates information that is less reliable than probable cause would demand. In Adams v. Williams the Court assumed that an unverified tip from a known informant might not be reliable enough to establish probable cause, yet found it sufficient to justify a stop.³

The reason for weighing content against reliability, instead of choosing a simpler rule, is that either simple rule fails. Officers cannot personally witness every crime, and a report from a victim or informant is often the only lead they will ever have, so a rule that disregarded all tips would leave real emergencies unanswered. A rule that accepted any tip would fail in the opposite direction, because anyone with a telephone could trigger the seizure of anyone else, and a caller who cannot be identified faces no consequence for lying. Weighing the two factors lets a strong tip justify a quick response while requiring a weak tip to be shored up by independent police work.

Reliability itself has two parts. The first is veracity, meaning whether the source is telling the truth, and the second is basis of knowledge, meaning how the source came to know what is being reported. In Florida v. J.L. the Court observed that an anonymous tip alone seldom demonstrates the informant's basis of knowledge or veracity, in contrast to a known informant whose reputation can be assessed and who can be held responsible if the report proves fabricated.⁴ Those two parts organize the tip cases into a spectrum. At the most reliable end is the known informant of Adams, at the middle is the anonymous tip whose predictions the police verify, as in White, and at the least reliable end is the bare anonymous tip of J.L.⁵ A qualification sits at that last end, since the Court relaxed the rule in Navarette v. California for an anonymous report of reckless and potentially impaired driving, given the public-safety stakes of drunk driving.⁶

On an exam stem that begins with a call, a note, or a statement from a source, a frequent error is to ask only whether the officers heard a tip, when the question is how reliable the tip is and what else supports it. The lower standard of reasonable suspicion does not remove the reliability inquiry, and it does not make every tip worthless either. The first subsection starts at the strongest end of the spectrum with the informant whom the police know.

Known Informants

The spectrum of tips described above starts at its reliable end with Adams v. Williams, and the facts show what a strong tip looks like in practice. Sgt. Connolly was alone on car patrol in a high-crime area of Bridgeport, Connecticut, at about 2:15 one morning when a person known to him walked up to the cruiser and reported that a man in a nearby car had narcotics and a gun at his waist.⁸ Connolly called for assistance and approached the car. When the occupant, Robert Williams, rolled the window down instead of opening the door, the sergeant reached in and removed a loaded revolver from Williams' waistband, in the very spot the informant had described, although the gun could not be seen from outside the car.⁹ Whether that reach was a proper frisk is a question for the protective-frisk sections later in this chapter. The question here comes first in time: could a tip from another person, with nothing from the officer's own senses behind it, justify a forcible stop at all?

Williams argued that, absent a more reliable informant or some corroboration, the stop was unreasonable under Terry, and that reasonable cause for a stop can rest only on what the officer personally observes.¹⁰ The Court rejected both contentions. Terry does not require an officer who falls short of probable cause to stand by while a crime occurs or a suspect escapes; it permits an intermediate response, a brief stop to identify the person or to hold the situation in place for a moment while more information is gathered.¹¹ A tip is one more clue reaching an officer on the scene, and like any other clue it varies in value, so the Fourth Amendment asks how much this tip is worth, and the fact that it came from someone other than the officer does not answer that question.¹²

The Court found this tip worth acting on for reasons specific to the informant. The informant was known to Connolly personally and had provided information before, came forward in person, and reported something the officer could check at the scene at once; under Connecticut law the informant could also have been arrested immediately for making a false complaint had the investigation shown the tip to be wrong.¹³ The Court described this as a stronger case than an anonymous telephone tip.¹⁴ Each feature does separate work. The history between officer and informant gives the officer a basis for judging whether this person's reports can be trusted. Appearing in person lets the officer see who is speaking and find that person again, and that matters because a source who can be located and prosecuted has a reason to be careful about what is reported, while a voice no one can trace risks nothing by lying. Verifiability limits the cost of a mistake: the man described was sitting in a car a short distance away, so the officer could test the report within moments, and a false tip would burden one identifiable person only briefly.

Reasonable suspicion tolerates information less reliable than probable cause demands, and Adams applies that point directly. The Court acknowledged that this informant's unverified tip may have been too weak for a narcotics arrest or a search warrant, yet held that it carried enough indicia of reliability to justify a forcible stop of Williams.¹⁵ The reason follows from what a stop is. It is a short detention meant to resolve doubt, so the information needed to begin one can be thinner than the information needed to arrest, because the stop itself is how the remaining doubt gets resolved.

Adams does not make every tip from a known person sufficient. The Court said that one simple rule will not cover every situation: some tips, wholly lacking indicia of reliability, warrant no police response or call for further investigation before a forcible stop, while others, such as a street-crime victim who seeks immediate aid and describes the assailant or a credible informant who warns of a specific impending crime, should not be defeated by the technicalities of the hearsay rule.¹⁶ Adams therefore marks a point on the weighing scale described above. A tip like Connolly's lands on the strong side because of the features just discussed, and removing those features moves the tip back toward the weak side.

The dissent shows where the disagreement lay. It accepted that an officer may act on reliable information short of probable cause to make a stop, but it read this informant's report as unreliable, unsubstantiated, conclusory hearsay and called the officer's response a knee-jerk reaction.¹⁷ The dissent also pressed a separate point: because Connecticut allowed people to carry guns with a permit, nothing in the tip showed that Williams was dangerous.¹⁸ That second objection concerns the frisk rather than the stop, and it returns when this chapter reaches the requirement that a person be armed and dangerous. For the tip analysis, the lesson is that the two sides shared a standard and split over whether this informant's information met it, which is why an answer on comparable facts must point to the specific features that made the report trustworthy.

The Court later drew this same contrast in Florida v. J.L., describing the informant in Adams as one whose reputation can be assessed and who can be held responsible if the allegations prove fabricated, while an anonymous tip alone seldom demonstrates the informant's basis of knowledge or veracity.¹⁹

Students lose this issue when they hold the tip to the probable-cause standard and conclude that an unverified tip from a known informant cannot justify a stop. Adams answers that reasoning directly. On an exam, an answer built on a known source's information should run through the totality of the circumstances, compare what the officer was told with what Connolly had, and confirm that the stop lasted no longer than needed to confirm or dispel the suspicion.²⁰

Corroborated Anonymous Tips

The anonymous tip that the police have gone out and checked sits in the middle of the reliability spectrum described above. A caller who gives no name has no history with the department and faces no consequence for a false report, so the call by itself tells the officer little about the caller's honesty or about how the caller knows what is being reported.²² What the police can do is test the tip against events. A caller who describes where a person is standing right now has told the officer only what any passerby could see. A caller who predicts, in detail, what that person will do hours later has shown something more, which is familiarity with the person's plans, and someone with that familiarity may also know about a crime the person is concealing. Corroboration of predictions is therefore how the police supply, through their own work, the reliability that the caller cannot supply through identity. Alabama v. White is the decision that applies this idea to a Terry stop.²³

The facts show how the predictions worked. At about 3 p.m. a Montgomery police corporal named Davis received an anonymous telephone call. The caller said that Vanessa White would leave 235-C Lynwood Terrace Apartments at a particular time in a brown Plymouth station wagon with a broken right taillight lens, that she would drive to Dobey's Motel, and that she would be carrying about an ounce of cocaine in a brown attaché case.²⁴ Davis and a second officer went to the complex, found a brown Plymouth station wagon with a broken right taillight parked in front of the 235 building, and watched White come out of that building with nothing in her hands and get into the car. They followed as she drove the most direct route toward Dobey's Motel, and a patrol unit stopped the car at about 4:18 p.m., just short of the motel.²⁵ White consented to a search, and a locked attaché case in the car held marijuana.²⁶

The Court held that the stop was justified, because the tip, as corroborated by independent police work, carried enough indicia of reliability to supply reasonable suspicion.²⁷ The reasoning follows the weighing described in the previous section: a tip of low reliability needs more information behind it, and here the officers' own observation of the predicted events supplied that information.²⁸ The corroboration was incomplete, and the Court said so. The officers had not verified the woman's name or the precise apartment she left, and the corporal never stated the time the caller gave. Still, the officers had gone to the address right after the call and White emerged not long afterward, which placed her departure within the predicted timeframe. The route she drove was the most direct one to the motel, though it involved several turns, and the Court treated her destination as significantly corroborated even though the officers stopped her before they could see whether she would pull in.²⁹ Two points follow. Not every detail the caller supplied has to be verified. And the officers never confirmed the cocaine itself, which was the one claim they could not check; the accuracy of the predictions about her movements is what made it reasonable to credit that claim.³⁰

White does not mean that any tip with a prediction in it will do. The Court later called White a close case, because knowledge of a person's future movements shows some familiarity with that person's affairs but does not necessarily show that the caller knows whether the person is carrying hidden contraband.³¹ The marijuana found afterward does not rescue a stop either, since the reasonableness of official suspicion is measured by what the officers knew before they acted.³² The contrasting pole is Florida v. J.L., where an anonymous caller reported that a young man in a plaid shirt at a particular bus stop was carrying a gun. Officers arrived about six minutes later, found three young men there, one wearing a plaid shirt, saw no gun and no unusual movement, and frisked him anyway.³³ The Court held the tip insufficient because it gave no predictive information and so left the police no means to test the caller's knowledge or credibility.³⁴ Florida argued that the tip was reliable because its description of the suspect's visible traits proved accurate, and the Court rejected that argument as a misreading of the reliability a tip needs.³⁵ What separates the two cases is whether the tip contained something the police could check that only an insider would have known, which a description of a person's present appearance and location does not provide.

Exam stems on this topic go wrong in two directions. Some answers treat any accurate detail as corroboration, when a tip confirmed only as to appearance and location is the bare tip of J.L. Others demand that every detail be verified, when White upheld a stop despite unverified gaps. The sound answer asks whether the verified predictions show inside knowledge, and it treats a case with few verified predictions as close to the line.

Bare Anonymous Tips

The corroborated tip in White marks the passing side of the line, and the tip that offers only a description marks the failing side. Florida v. J.L. holds that an anonymous tip describing a person and a location, with no predictive information and no other sign that the caller has inside knowledge, does not supply reasonable suspicion for a stop and frisk, even when the description of the person's visible characteristics turns out to be accurate.³⁷ The question before the Court was whether an anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is, without more, enough to justify stopping and frisking that person, and the answer was no.³⁸ Because the callers in White and J.L. were both anonymous, the variable that separates the two cases is whether the police had a prediction of future conduct to test.³⁹

The facts of J.L. matter chiefly for what they leave out. The record contains no recording of the call and reveals nothing about the caller, so the officers were acting on a report from an unknown person at an unknown location.⁴⁰ When they reached the bus stop about six minutes later, they found three young men, one of them J.L. in a plaid shirt. Apart from the tip they had no reason to suspect any of the three, no gun was visible, and J.L. made no threatening or unusual movements.⁴¹ One officer frisked J.L. and took a gun from his pocket, while the other frisked the two remaining men, against whom no allegation had been made, and found nothing.⁴² The trial court suppressed the gun, the Florida Supreme Court held the search invalid under the Fourth Amendment, and the United States Supreme Court affirmed.⁴³ The frisks of the two men against whom nothing had been alleged show how readily a tip with this little content draws police contact toward people who did nothing.

The reason the description cannot carry the tip lies in what a tip must show. An officer weighing a report needs some basis for believing that the caller is honest and that the caller actually knows what is being reported, and an anonymous tip alone seldom shows either.⁴⁴ A known informant has a reputation that can be assessed and can be held responsible if the allegations prove fabricated, but the unnamed caller who reported J.L. could not be assessed or held to account.⁴⁵ The accurate description proved less than it seems to. That a young man in a plaid shirt stood at that bus stop establishes only that the caller could see and identify a person in a public place, something any passerby could do. It says nothing about whether the person had a concealed gun, which was the one fact that made police intrusion lawful. The officers confirmed everything except that claim, and the Court described what they had as "the bare report of an unknown, unaccountable informant" who gave no explanation of how the caller knew about the gun and no basis for believing the caller had inside information about J.L.⁴⁶

The government urged a narrower version of the accuracy argument, and the Court's rejection of it shows the principle at work. The United States proposed that a stop and frisk be allowed when an anonymous tip describes a particular person at a particular location illegally carrying a concealed firearm, police promptly verify the pertinent details except the existence of the firearm, and nothing casts doubt on the tip.⁴⁷ The Court held that this argument, like Florida's, misapprehends the reliability a tip needs to justify a Terry stop.⁴⁸ The defect appears in the proposal's own structure. Verifying every detail except the gun confirms only what is already public, so the test checks everything except the claim that makes the conduct criminal. A rule built on that kind of verification would also hand any caller a way to direct a search at a chosen person. A caller with a grudge need only describe the target accurately, the target has no protection against the false report, and the caller, who cannot be traced, risks nothing.

Two further features of the decision explain why the bare tip fails at the moment of the frisk. The officers' suspicion arose from no observation of their own but solely from the call, whereas the Terry standard for a frisk contemplates an officer who sees unusual conduct, reasonably concludes that criminal activity may be afoot, and reasonably fears that the person is armed and presently dangerous.⁴⁹ And the discovery of the gun cannot repair the frisk afterward, because the reasonableness of suspicion is measured by what the officers knew before they searched.⁵⁰ Measured against White, the tip lacked the moderate indicia of reliability that were essential to the result there, which is why the Court placed it on the far side of the line.⁵¹

The J.L. rule has one recognized limit. In Navarette v. California the Court held that police may stop a motorist on an anonymous tip reporting reckless and potentially impaired driving, in light of the serious public-safety concerns that drunk driving raises, and that decision relaxes the J.L. rule somewhat for that setting.⁵² The functional logic is that a report of a driver weaving through traffic describes a danger that grows with each passing minute, which weighs against making the police wait for corroboration. J.L. itself involved a report of a gun, which also threatens safety, and the Court still required more than a bare description.⁵³ On an exam, the Navarette limit is therefore tied to anonymous reports of reckless or potentially impaired driving, and a stem about a person carrying a gun or drugs stays under J.L. unless the tip contains predictive or other reliable detail.

Two reflexes cost points on this topic. The first is reasoning from the result: the frisk found a gun, so the tip must have been good. Suspicion is judged by what the officers knew before the search, so the gun that turned up does no work in the analysis.⁵⁴ The second reflex is to treat a report of a firearm as urgent enough to excuse the reliability requirement, when the holding in J.L. addressed exactly that report and required more.⁵⁵