Here’s a fun one, coming to us via MLive, which at least let us know this exists, even if it couldn’t be bothered to post the freely available decision posted at the Michigan Supreme Court’s website.
I can only imagine the amount of cop whining this will provoke. When cops don’t have a legitimate reason to stop and question someone, they tend to fall back on other criminal charges if that person decides they have no real reason to stick around and deal with whatever bullshit the cops have planned.
The usual suspects are criminal charges like obstruction and resisting arrest. The first only applies if someone interferes with lawful operations. The latter only applies if the officers “reasonably” believe they have probable cause to effect an arrest.
When none of that applies, the cops usually still win out, especially in civil cases where qualified immunity is routinely applied, no matter how egregious the rights violation. But this is a criminal case, so qualified immunity isn’t an option. The good faith exception might be, but there wasn’t much good faith here. Instead, as the state’s top court points out in its decision [PDF], there was no justifiable reason for cops to attempt to detain and question Douglas Prude, who proved his point not long after this far-from-consensual encounter began by driving away in his car as quickly as he could.
On May 30, 2019, Officer Nicholas Deleeuw saw defendant sitting alone in a parked vehicle, with the engine off, in an area of the parking lot where criminal activity was common; no one else was in the area. Officer Deleeuw approached defendant’s car, asked defendant for identification, and inquired whether defendant was a resident of the complex. Although defendant declined to identify himself, he answered that he was not a resident but that he stayed at the complex with his girlfriend, who was a resident. Officer Nathan Belen arrived around that time and approached defendant’s car; Officer Belen was familiar with defendant and provided his name to Officer Deleeuw. Officer Deleeuw informed defendant that he needed to be with a resident while on the property and then returned to his car to verify defendant’s tenant status through the Law Enforcement Information Network and to check the complex’s internal database to see if defendant had previously received a trespass warning from the complex. When asked, Officer Belen informed defendant that he was being detained and that he was not free to leave, after which defendant started the car, rolled up his window, and drove away at a high rate of speed; defendant was later arrested and charged.
That is the sort of thing that normally doesn’t lead to rulings like this one. Usually, testifying cops who claim an area (and I love this part: “area of the parking lot where criminal activity was common”) is frequented by criminals are given the judicial benefit of a doubt and any “suspicion” assumed to be “reasonable.”
That Prude responded to be told he was being detained by driving away “at a high rate of speed” probably convinced the cops and the prosecutor that the “resisting an officer” and “second-degree fleeing” charges would stick. And they did, at least as far as the trial court was concerned. But Prude challenged his conviction, asserting the claim the cops had no reason to question him, much less tell him he was not free to leave.
It didn’t work on appeal, though. The state’s top court says suspicion needs to be far more “reasonable” than the shaky “but muh high crime area” assertions made by the officers. And for good reason:
An individual’s presence in a high-crime area provides no particular reasonable basis for suspicion as to the activity of that person. Thus, an individual’s presence in an area of expected criminal activity, standing alone, is not sufficient to support a reasonable, particularized suspicion that the person is committing a crime. While presence in a high-crime area may support the existence of reasonable suspicion, this is so only if the suspect engages in suspicious behavior.
Further, a refusal to cooperate with police officers, without more, does not furnish the minimal level of objective justification needed for a detention or seizure. To hold otherwise would effectively mean that any person who is approached by an officer in a high-crime area must fully cooperate with that officer or else be subject to a Terry seizure.
That means the initial interaction had no legitimate law enforcement purpose. That didn’t change throughout the course of what someone (perhaps a police union rep) might call an “investigation.” Everything Prude was doing was fully permitted by the law. The only thing the cops didn’t like is that he was doing it in a location they considered to be a “high crime area” — a phrase that usually only means a cop is desperately trying to salvage an unlawful stop or arrest. It’s not like there’s a clearly defined legal standard for “high crime.”
The court sees this and won’t be a part of it.
In this case, the officers were not acting lawfully in the performances of their duties when they detained defendant, a required element for both offenses for which he was convicted. The relevant facts included that (1) defendant was alone and parked legally with the engine off during daylight hours in an area of the parking lot where nonresidents frequently committed crimes, (2) defendant declined to identify himself at Officer Deleeuw’s request, and (3) defendant admitted that he was not a resident of the apartment complex but that he was visiting his girlfriend, who was a resident. These facts did not amount to an objectively reasonable, particularized suspicion that defendant was trespassing. The fact that defendant refused to identify himself and was in an area where other nonresidents had frequently committed crimes did not provide reasonable suspicion that defendant himself was engaged in criminal activity when the officers approached him. Indeed, there was nothing suspicious about defendant being parked in the apartment complex’s parking lot in the early evening while visiting a resident of that complex.
If there was nothing supporting a detention of Prude (no matter how briefly), the best the cops could hope for was a speeding ticket after he decided to end the conversation by driving away from the officers. The officers decided to try to punish him for not respecting their unlawful insistence he wasn’t free to go.
It’s just one incident and it may seem like a minor victory. But it isn’t. This affirms some very basic rights, including the one that says you don’t have to hang around and deal with cop bullshit just because the cops say you’re not free to leave. Of course, that probably means you’ll end up facing criminal charges, but maybe this decision might make a few cops a bit more hesitant to detain people when they don’t have anything more to work with than but the fact that someone happens to exist, live in, or passes through an area they’ve unilaterally decided has higher crime than other areas they patrol.
