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STATE v. PRATER5/22/1998
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The judge therefore granted Prater's motion to suppress the evidence stemming from the investigative stop of his car. The state petitioned this court to review Judge Cutler's order, and this court granted the petition.
The state does not contend that Judge Cutler erred in her second ruling: that the information that had been broadcast in the trooper dispatch, consisting as it did only of a description and location of a vehicle, did not by itself suffice to create reasonable suspicion. The sole issue in this petition is the correctness of Judge Cutler's first ruling: that the additional information in the REDDI report known to the dispatcher could not be imputed to the officers or considered in determining whether there was reasonable suspicion to justify the stop.
This court did not decide this issue in Mix. This court's Mix opinion focused on the stopping officer's actual knowledge, information,
and observations and points out that there was no information available to him other than a cursory radioed dispatch and the fact that the officer observed the described car thirty seconds later. See Mix, 893 P.2d at 1272 (e.g., "Hoffman had absolutely no information . . .," "Hoffman had no further insight . . .," etc.). However, in the concluding paragraph of the Mix opinion, this court left open the possibility that additional evidence might suffice even if it were known only to the dispatcher as opposed to the officer:
In this case, in which the officer making the stop had no indication that the "locate" was based on reliable firsthand information and in which the state presented no evidence that the dispatcher or some other officer had relevant knowledge that could possibly be imputed to Officer Hoffman, we cannot find that the stop was supported by a reasonable suspicion of imminent public danger.
Id. at 1273 (emphasis added).
In Mix this court relied on and quoted language from the then-latest edition of LaFave's treatise on search and seizure. See Mix, 893 P.2d at 1272. The corresponding section of the nowlatest edition of this treatise sets out the following requirements (quoted from United States v. Hensley, 469 U.S. 221, 105 S.Ct. 675, 682, 83 L.Ed.2d 604 (1985)) governing whether a stop based on a directive through police channels will be upheld:
t is only necessary that (i) the officer making the stop have acted "in objective reliance on a flyer or bulletin"; (ii) "the police who issued the flyer or bulletin possessed a reasonable suspicion justifying a stop"; and (iii) "the stop that in fact occurred was not significantly more intrusive than would have been permitted the issuing department."
4 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 9.4(i), at 233-34 (3d ed. 1996) (footnotes omitted). In Hensley, the United States Supreme Court upheld an investigative stop that police made on the basis of a "wanted" flyer even though the police who actually conducted the stop did not personally know of any facts underlying reasonable suspicion to stop Hensley, on the ground that the police who had issued the "wanted" flyer had personally known of facts constituting reasonable suspicion. Hensley, 105 S.Ct. at 683-84.
Most of the cases cited by LaFave that apply these requirements, including Hensley, involve information or directives from a police officer, as opposed to a dispatcher, and acted upon by another police officer. Judge Cutler distinguished Prater's case from such cases on this ground, ruling that such cases involved "a `police team' rule or `fellow officer' rule" and that " dispatcher at the police station does not have the same kind of `team' connection with the arresting officers in this case.
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