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Legal Underpinning of the “Fellow Officer” Rule Explained

The Second Department determined defendant’s motion to suppress was properly denied.  The defendant’s arrest was based upon a transmission to the arresting officers but the prosecution did not introduce any evidence of the identity of the transmitting officer. The court offered an in-depth explanation of the “fellow officer” rule:

“Under the fellow officer rule, a police officer can make a lawful arrest even without personal knowledge sufficient to establish probable cause, so long as the officer is acting upon the direction of or as a result of communication with’ a fellow officer . . . in possession of information sufficient to constitute probable cause for the arrest” … . Probable cause exists when “an officer has knowledge of facts and circumstances sufficient to support a reasonable belief that an offense has been or is being committed” … . At a suppression hearing, the prosecution has the burden of establishing that the officer who transmitted the information had probable cause … .

The fellow officer rule is a “straightforward application” of the two-pronged Aguilar-Spinelli test … , which New York courts use to assess whether hearsay information is sufficient to establish probable cause for a warrantless arrest or the issuance of a warrant … . The Aguilar-Spinelli test first requires the suppression court to assess whether the information on which the police have acted is reliable … . The second part of the Aguilar-Spinelli test evaluates whether the informant had an adequate “basis of knowledge” for the information supplied… . Under the fellow officer rule, “[i]nformation received from another police officer is presumptively reliable” … . The People still, however, must satisfy the second prong of the Aguilar-Spinelli test: how the transmitting officer acquired that information.

Here, under the fellow officer rule, the arresting officers were entitled to presume that the information they received from an undercover officer was reliable. Moreover, under the circumstances of this buy and bust operation, it is clear that the transmitting officer, whether it was the ghost undercover officer or the primary undercover officer, had an adequate basis of knowledge for the information transmitted, either from direct participation in the transaction or observation of it. Contrary to the defendant’s contention, the undercover officer who made the transmission was not required to delineate the defendant’s exact role in the transaction in order to establish probable cause for his arrest … . People v Oglesby, 2014 NY Slip Op 06845, 2nd Dept 10-8-14

 

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