Inside Job: Collective Knowledge Doctrine aka Fellow Officer Rule is Alive And Well

UNITED STATES v. RAMIREZ, USCA-9 Nos. 05-50165, 05-50181, 2007 U.S.App. LEXIS 869, on appeal from USDC-CACD, before Kozinski, O'Scannlain, and Bybee, Circuit Judges, opinion by O'Scannlain, concurrence by Kozinski filed 16 Jan 2007.

LONG STORY SHORT: An officer who has knowledge of probable cause that a vehicle is carrying contraband may, request that another officer in the same department stop the vehicle and investigate, without telling the stopping officer why.

FACTS: Glendale PD officers stopped a Mercury Mountaineer, arrested the driver, and after a drug dog alerted to drug residue, discovered a sophisticated hidden compartment inside, which was empty at the time. 12 days later, Sergeant Meier of Glendale PD, who had witnessed the search and the secret compartment, observed the same Mountaineer leave a residence in Los Angeles that he was surveilling. Defendant 1 was driving and Defendant 2 was in the shotgun seat. Officers Lawrence and Allen ran the tag and discovered that it was registered to someone else at the residence that Defendants just left, and the officers followed the Mountaineer to a parking lot in the city of Paramount.

While the Mountaineer was in the parking lot, a Silverado drove up and two men got out of it to meet with Defendants. Defendant 2 took a gym bag from the Silverado men and placed it in the Mountaineer, and the Silverado men accepted a manila envelope from Defendants and drove off in the Silverado. The officers could see the Mountaineer rocking back and forth consistent with Defendants moving around inside it, and then it drove off in a different direction from the Silverado, again with Defendant 1 driving and Defendant 2 riding. Officers Lawrence and Allen reported all this to Sergeant Meier, who surmised that Defendants had accepted drugs and hidden them in the secret compartment.

Sergeant Meier called over the department radio frequency for an officer to stop the Mountaineer on I-5, without saying why. Officer Hulben, a motor officer of Glendale PD's traffic division, heard the call and knowing that Sergeant Meier was head of a vice/narcotics detail, surmised that the Mountaineer must be involved in a drug case. Officer Hulben sighted the Mountaineer and observed it straddling two lanes of traffic. He stopped it for the California infraction of failing to drive within a single lane and arrested Defendant 1 for driving without a license, although subsequently that charge proved unfounded. Defendant 2 was given a ride to the police station but not arrested. While the Mountaineer was stopped, a drug dog alerted to the area of the secret compartment. Police opened the secret compartment to discover 8kg of cocaine inside.

PROCEDURE: Based on the overt actions observed, the United States indicted Defendants for conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 8kg of a mixture or substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine, 21 U.S.C. § 846. Defendants moved to suppress the cocaine, arguing that Officer Hulben's lack of personal knowledge for the reason behind the stop meant that he had no probable cause to search the vehicle. The trial court disagreed, applying the collective knowledge doctrine to Sergeant Meier's personal knowledge of probable cause, and noting that an open call over a police radio to stop a certain vehicle was so unusual as to alert all officers that the stop would not be ordinary. MOTION TO SUPPRESS DENIED. Defendants pleaded guilty and received sentences of 120 months, on condition that they could appeal the denial of suppression to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On appeal, Defendants conceded that Sergeant Meier had probable cause to search their vehicle.

DECISION: An officer's subjective motive for stopping a vehicle is irrelevant, so long as the officer had some legally sufficient reason for stopping it. The invalidity of Defendant 1's arrest for driving without a license was also irrelevant because Officer Hulben already had probable cause to detain Defendants until a drug dog arrived. Probable cause was present because Sergeant Meier's knowledge of probable cause carried over to Officer Hulben by virtue of the collective knowledge doctrine, also known as the fellow officer rule.

The exact factual situation in this case had not yet come up to the Ninth Circuit, but other Circuits had considered nearly identical facts, and applied the fellow officer rule to deny suppression. The Ninth Circuit had aggregated the facts in cases where officers working the same case, but with no one officer knowing all the facts, had communicated with each other. This imputation of missing pieces was one type of fellow officer situation. The second type was the present case, where officers involved in an investigation communicated with other officers in the same department who had no knowledge at all of that investigation. In some prior cases, the officers requesting assistance had stated reasons for asking, but even then, the supplied facts would not have independently established probable cause in the mind of the officer who actually stopped or searched the suspects. All officers on a department work on the same team and officer safety, along with the sheer complexity of modern police work, may not allow disclosure of any details other than a bare request or order to stop or arrest a subject. Denial of suppression AFFIRMED in all respects.

Judge Kozinski wrote a separate concurrence to emphasize that this case was not one where the requesting officer had no probable cause to start with, but instead featured a perfectly valid officer safety tactic of making a drug stop look like an ordinary traffic stop.

EDITORIAL: Spot-on! Judge Kozinski is truly a prize package. All you need to do now is have the narcs build a good case to start with. Bad guys might be listening to radio scanners too.