ANONYMOUS 911 CALL JUSTIFIED TRAFFIC STOP; DISSENT DISAGREED (FOURTH DEPT).

The Fourth Department, over a dissent, determined an anonymous 911 call provided reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop, officer safety warranted handcuffing the defendant and seeing a rifle in the car provided probable cause for arrest. The dissent argued the anonymous 911 call did not justify the traffic stop:

… “[P]olice stops of automobiles in New York State are legal ‘when there exists at least a reasonable suspicion that the driver or occupants of the vehicle have committed, are committing, or are about to commit a crime’ ” … . The evidence at the suppression hearing established that police officers were dispatched based on a 911 call reporting a group of people at a specific location, one of whom had been observed getting into a van while possessing “a long gun.” The dispatch provided the license plate number of a van in which the group had driven away from the location where they had been seen by the 911 caller. One or two minutes after the dispatch, one of the responding officers located the van in the area. The officer confirmed that the van’s license plate number matched the one provided in the dispatch, and he initiated a traffic stop. Contrary to defendant’s assertion, “the totality of the information known to the police at the time of the stop of [the van] ‘supported a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity . . . [, i.e.,] that quantum of knowledge sufficient to induce an ordinarily prudent and cautious [person] under the circumstances to believe criminal activity is at hand’ ” … . In particular, we conclude that the 911 call as relayed in the dispatch “contained sufficient information about defendant[‘s] unlawful possession of a weapon to create reasonable suspicion” justifying the stop of the van … . People v Walls, 2020 NY Slip Op 05337, Fourth Dept 10-2-20