Fourth Circuit Appeals Court Takes Aim At Police Officers' 'Training And Expertise' Assertions
from the training,-sure...-but-is-it-really-'expertise?' dept
It doesn't happen often, but it's always good to see a federal court push back against claims of "training and expertise." This phrase is often used to excuse rights violations and horrendous judgment calls -- somehow asserting that the more cops know, the less they should be held directly responsible for their acts.
The case being handled by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court deals with some drug warriors and their willingness to work backward from their assumptions to something they sincerely wanted to believe was probable cause for a search. But the Appeals Court sees no "training and expertise" here. Instead they see officers motivated by hunches, which are not synonymous with probable cause, much less reasonable suspicion.
Here's the court's ultimate conclusion [PDF], which is supported by the lack of support for the cops' arguments, which relied heavily on assertions of "training and expertise."
In order to sustain reasonable suspicion, officers must consider the totality of the circumstances and, in doing so, must not overlook facts that tend to dispel reasonable suspicion. Here, officers relied on general information from a confidential informant; two interactions that officers believed were consistent with the manner in which illegal drugs are bought and sold, but in which no drugs were found; and a single officer witnessing a handshake between Appellant and another man and concluding that it was a hand-to-hand drug transaction, even though the officer did not see anything exchanged. Moreover, the officers concluded this amounted to reasonable suspicion, overlooking the facts that the interaction took place in a public space, in broad daylight, outside of the vehicles, and in front of a security camera; and after the interaction, Appellant went into a store, rather than immediately leaving the scene. On these facts, we agree with Appellant that the officers did not have more than a mere hunch that criminal activity was afoot when they stopped Appellant.
The broad brush of this summary is pretty damning. The details, even more so.
It all started with a "tip" from a confidential informant. The informant told law enforcement a black fellow might sell some drugs. As the court notes, the CI's "tip" contained nothing that would turn this into probable cause. It didn't say the person had sold drugs in the past. It offered no suggestion the person was going to sell drugs to the CI in the future. The only solid info officers had was that the vehicle tags provided by the CI were linked to someone who had been arrested for drug offenses in the past.
The cops got the tip in August 2017. But they did nothing until October 2017. Surveillance of the house listed on the vehicle registration began. The house was surveilled ten times and no drug transactions were witnessed. Investigators moved on to surveilling the resident of the suspect's assistant. The residence was "observed" over 30 times and no drug transactions were seen.
A car driven by someone who had sat in a car with the original suspect was stopped. No drugs were found, despite the drug dog's "alert." Detectives speculated the presence of syringes in this car indicated the driver was a drug user.
Officers began tailing the suspect. They observed him sitting in a gas station parking lot where he never interacted with anyone. They observed him going home. They observed him visiting a house and later leaving carrying a bag to his car. And their informant later told them that the suspect had called and said he had drugs to sell.
No controlled buy was ever set up using the informant. Instead, officers followed the suspect to a car stereo dealer. And this is where the "training and experience" apparently kicked in.
Detective Moore testified that the surveillance team was “expecting someone to meet [Appellant] and this to be like the other occasions when somebody would meet him.” J.A. 78. Detective Moore testified that this stop was consistent with how he would expect a drug transaction to occur.
If this was a drug transaction, it was a terrible place to engage in illegal activity. First off, the alleged incident happened in broad daylight in a busy public parking lot. Second, it occurred directly in front of the business's surveillance cameras.
Despite this, Detective Douglas Moore was sure the suspect was engaging in drug sales. He testified that his "training and experience" made it clear regular-ass handshakes are "hand-to-hand" drug transactions.
[O]n cross-examination, when specifically asked if he saw drugs or money exchange hands, Detective Murphy testified that it was just the actions and mannerisms that indicated to him that it was a drug transaction. He did not actually see drugs exchanged. Nor did he see money exchanged. See J.A. 120 (“Q. So you didn’t see any drugs or money exchange, just the actions and the mannerisms and it being a second handshake and it being longer than the first handshake, you believed it to be a hand-to-hand? A. Yes, sir.”). Detective Murphy provided no further detail about why this second handshake led him to conclude that a hand-to-hand drug transaction had occurred. In fact, when asked to describe why he thought the second handshake was a “hand-to-hand transaction versus just another greeting,” Detective Murphy testified, only, “Well, the first interaction was brief. The second, what I believe to be the hand-to-hand transaction, was more deliberate and it wasn’t as brief as the first action.”
So, the difference between a legal handshake and an illegal handshake is in the eye of (only one) beholder. And that's what instigated a search and the discovery of drugs.
No good, says the Appeals Court. Give this "training and expertise" bullshit a rest. It dismantles every single one of the detective's arguments in favor of presumed probable cause. First, the information obtained from the confidential informant:
[T]he only information that proved useful to detectives in connecting the informant’s tips to Appellant was the vehicle tag number that was connected to him. But that alone does not connect him to drug trafficking. It connects him to a vehicle and that is it.
Then the second handshake, which Detective Moore claimed was actually the consummation of a drug transaction:
As to the notorious second handshake, the Government contends this second handshake provided the officers with reasonable suspicion because Detective Murphy testified that the second handshake was a “hand-to-hand” transaction. However, Detective Murphy never provided more than this conclusory testimony. In fact, Detective Murphy never witnessed drugs or money change hands, and his testimony did not provide any details about the handshake that allows us to view this second handshake as suspicious.
Do better, says the court:
[W]e cannot hold that officers’ bare suspicion of drug trafficking -- without more -- can allow even an experienced officer to reasonably conclude that such a benign and common gesture can be viewed as an exchange of drugs. This cannot amount to reasonable, particularized suspicion.
The ends cannot be used to reverse-engineer justification for the means.
The Fourth Amendment does not allow the Government to label a person as a drug dealer and then view all of their actions through that lens.
And here's the concurrence, setting fire to speculative "training and expertise" assertions. Trying to convert a seemingly harmless handshake into "reasonable suspicion" just because it seemed more "deliberate" than the first one the detective observed does direct harm to citizens, especially when courts decide an officer's speculation is more trustworthy than actual facts.
We therefore have thin facts—the handshake appeared long and purposeful— bolstered by a thinner interpretation of those facts—the handshake was “consistent with” a drug transaction. Such meager testimony would not have received the same degree of deference had it come from someone other than a law-enforcement officer. But in the half-century since Terry v. Ohio, we have afforded greater and greater weight to officers’ “training and experience”—often at the expense of the robust judicial scrutiny that the Fourth Amendment demands.
[...]
Our practice of affording strong deference to “training and experience” has costs. [...] It incentivizes veteran officers to lean on their “impressions” instead of doing the hard work of building a case, fact by fact.
As the concurrence points out, granting this much deference to cops does little more than offer judicial blessing for biased policing and rights violations. If cops want to be trusted in court, they need to earn it, not expect it.
In my view, judges can begin to curb these ill effects by dialing down the deference—even slightly—and treating police officers like other expert witnesses. Doing so would be consistent with both precedent and common sense. If a veteran officer catches something that would elude a novice—a code word, a pattern, etc.—he may of course rely on it, so long as he can later explain in court why the fact is significant. But if an officer's explanation is paltry or conclusory, as in this case, the judge must not hesitate to assign it less weight.
That would be a welcome change from the current status quo -- one that says cops are full of knowledge and everyone accused of a crime is full of lies. The burden of proof still remains on the government. And this burden should include offering evidence that supports "training and experience" assertions made by officers, rather than assuming anyone with a few years on the force is inherently an expert on illegal activity and human behavior.
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Filed Under: 4th circuit, police, qualified immunity, training and expertise
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At which point those specific judges might find themselves being investigated by the police for…oh, no real reason, really.
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You fail to grasp the police / legal / corporate revenue system.
Golly, even in this piece and after several years, you just don't grasp key elements and scale of The System.
Two simple maxims:
They're ALL in cahoots, even the defense lawyers.
It's all about the Benjamins.
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Went to college with a lot of criminal justice majors who became cops. One of them was in a pretty good back and forth with other cops about this issue on FB. Even amongst the cops there is a consensus that there is a huge disconnect between their actually training and just how well the public believes they are trained. Many of them were complaining that much of the federal and state funding intended for training get redirected to other pet projects.
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Re: You fail to grasp the police / legal / corporate revenue sys
"All about the Benjamins", or their digital eqivalent, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos
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Jay and Silent Bob Approve
Conducting a drug transaction in the front of a store, in plain daylight, in view of a security camera is actually a pretty good idea. If the other party robs you, then you can call the cops on them and have some recourse. As long as the drugs are concealed, noone can prove that illicit activity was afoot, even if they watch the security footage, which they probably won't.
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Re:
I'm surprised that they managed to get jobs with police, given their college education.
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That would be a welcome change from the current status quo -- one that says cops are full of knowledge and everyone accused of a crime is full of lies.
Except all those occasions when they can't be "reasonably" expected to know all manner of things. They've conveniently had it both ways, usually concurrently.
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"Expert" witnesses?
Many non-cop "expert" witnesses are granted a great deal of undeserved deference, and often grossly exaggerate their qualifications and the evidentiary value of their opinions. Our criminal legal systems in general, and judges in particular, are notoriously bad at keeping charlatan "experts" and their snake oil "evidence" out of courtrooms. Juries are then left to determine the validity of an "expert's" testimony, often without having any objective or reliable way of determining the validity of the "expert's" qualifications to give said testimony to begin with.
It is a hole in our legal systems big enough to drive a convoy of honeywagons through.
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So on this hand they have training & expertise...
On this other hand they think invasive cavity searches on the side of the road by opposite sex officers to the suspect is aokay...
Perhaps we shoudl train them about real things instead of overly used tropes from tv & movies.
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Re: You fail to grasp the police / legal / corporate revenue sys
Man, if it is All About the Benjamins, that's really bad. That movie got panned so hard...
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Re: Jay and Silent Bob Approve
You don't think it would be standard procedure to check security camera footage of a crime even if they already caught the suspect, so that they have a record of the crime for the court? I'm not sure if that reflects worse on you or the cops.
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Re:
Too bad a cop's training and expertise don't include things like the Constitution and respect for the rights of everyone.
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Now, wait
Every word is a "code word" to a cop. We constantly see stories of them passing around samizdat folklore about how this or that is a gang sign or a term for "that new thing the kids are doing".
And a slightly longer handshake is apparently a "pattern".
"Because I saw a rumor on a cop Internet forum that it was a code word"
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Re:
So to clarify, the public believes they're this highly trained force, and in reality they get almost no training, yes?
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Convenient standards
The less they know the less liable they are for rights violations because they couldn't have known better then. The more they know the less liable they are for rights violations because they know better. I am starting to think they just don't want to be liable for rights violations.
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Re: Re:
I believe the anwser is "Yes."
Lack of training is often a feature, not a bug, from the cop's point of view, as it increases the plausibility of ignorance of "clearly established rights," etc. Often what training cops do get primarily involves techniques for avoiding accountability, such as yelling "Stop resisting!" over and over again as they repeatedly punch a person (who is clearly not resisting) in the face.
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Re: Re:
if you want to call 6 months of gladiator school, "highly trained" ....
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Re:
Thanks for admitting that copyright enforcement is a racket, blue. Having to resort to lawyers? Now that's just nasty...
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