JOHN HALL, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Defendant-Appellee.
No. 19-1347
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
ARGUED DECEMBER 12, 2019 — DECIDED MARCH 23, 2020
Before BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 12 CV 6834 — Harry D. Leinenweber, Judge.
Plaintiffs brought an action under
We conclude that officers may execute a name check on an individual incidental to a proper stop under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 16 (1968), as long as the resulting delay is reasonable. Plaintiffs have failed to establish that they suffered an underlying constitutional violation such that the City can be held liable under Monell. We therefore affirm.
I. Background
For many years, CPD used “contact cards” to document Terry stops and other interactions between police and citizens. Each contact card details personal information about the stopped individual, including his or her physical description, address, social security number, driver‘s license number, and employer information. Between January 2010 and January
Roughly two-thirds of these contact cards, by Plaintiffs’ estimation, include a notation like “name check clear,” “NCC,” or “N.C. Clear“—indicating that officers completed a name check during the stop. When on the street, officers perform a name check in one of two ways: (1) radioing a dispatcher at the Office of Emergency Management and Communications (“OEMC“); or (2) entering search criteria into a Portable Data Terminal (“PDT“) located in the officer‘s vehicle. When an officer conducts a name check via a radio call, the officer reads to the dispatcher the individual‘s information. The dispatcher records that information and performs the inquiry on the officer‘s behalf through his own terminal at OEMC. The amount of time it takes to obtain the results of a name check from an OEMC dispatcher can vary if, for example, the dispatcher must first respond to higher priority radio traffic. To perform a name check from a police car, the officer types the individual‘s first and last name into a name inquiry screen on the PDT. When an officer searches in this manner, the results come back seconds later.
In their deposition testimony, several officers testified that they generally would conduct a name check during an investigatory stop, and that it was up to their discretion whether to do so. They testified that they typically asked for citizens’ identification cards during street encounters and that people usually waited for the officers to return their ID cards before leaving. They also attested that preventing the subject of a stop from running away motivated their practice of holding onto the ID. Officer Carol Burns, for example, explained that
Until November 2018, Chicago‘s Aggressive Panhandling Ordinance—City Ordinance 8-4-025, MCC § 8-4-025—prohibited certain behaviors while panhandling. The ordinance made it unlawful for a panhandler to solicit a person at specified locations, such as within ten feet of a bus stop, on a public bus, in a restaurant, in a gas station, or within ten feet of an automatic teller machine. The ordinance also prohibited touching a solicited person without his consent, blocking the path of a person entering a building or vehicle, following a solicited person, or panhandling in a group of two or more persons.
Plaintiffs—John Hall, Bonita Franks, Kim Pindak, George Gardner, McArthur Hubbard, and Vernon Dennis—are residents of the City of Chicago who have each panhandled in the City. CPD officers stopped Plaintiffs numerous times and documented those stops with contact cards. From 2005 to 2015, Chicago police records show 65 contact cards for Gardner; 7 for Franks; 39 for Pindak; 33 for Dennis; 54 for Hubbard; and 53 for Hall. These contact cards reflect that, in many of the stops, the officers performed name checks. Plaintiffs did not have a recollection of the specific details of these stops and varied when describing their duration and to what extent name checks caused a delay. Dennis testified that a call to the dispatcher for a name check took “maybe two to three minutes,” with a “minute or two delay” because other people
Although no Plaintiff suggested that the officers used force or intimidation to obtain their IDs, Plaintiffs testified that they did not feel free to refuse the officers’ requests or leave before the officers returned their IDs to them. Gardner, for example, testified that “if you don‘t give [an ID] to them, they‘re going to say you resisted, you[‘re] hiding something … like you have warrants or something on you.” He elaborated, “They got your ID card, and if you leave, they‘ll say you fleeing from a police officer. That‘s a violation against you.” Pindak testified that officers would use “verbal restraint,” saying, “You can‘t go until we‘re done.” He alleges that, when he asked the officers for his ID back, the officers said they would return the ID only “[w]hen they were done.” Gardner similarly testified that, during about half of his encounters with police, the officers told him, “We‘ll let you go if you don‘t have any warrants, or, If you‘re clear, we‘ll let you go.”
The officers completed some contact cards following interactions where they had observed one of the Plaintiffs violating the Aggressive Panhandling Ordinance. A contact card for Dennis, for example, reads, “Subject observed panhandling within 15 feet of a bus stop in violation of city ordinary [sic]. Subject warned, name check clear.” Another for Hubbard indicates, “Subject walking up to people asking for money. [Responding Officer] informed Subject of panhandling ordinance. Name check clear.” Other times, the officers performed
Plaintiffs filed a suit pursuant to
Plaintiffs eventually abandoned their claims against the individual officers but moved for summary judgment against the City, and the City filed a cross-motion. The district court denied Plaintiffs’ motion and granted the City‘s. In doing so, the district court held that if officers have reasonable suspicion of an ordinance violation, they may permissibly detain an individual to investigate the possible violation. Therefore, there was no underlying constitutional violation for Plaintiffs to succeed on a Monell theory in these instances. Plaintiffs appealed.
II. Discussion
We review the district court‘s summary judgment ruling de novo and consider facts and draw inferences in the light most favorable to the Plaintiffs. Villas at Winding Ridge v. State Farm Fire and Cas. Co., 942 F.3d 824, 830 (7th Cir. 2019). Sum-
The Supreme Court held in Monell that plaintiffs may sue municipalities under
A. Fourth Amendment Seizure
“[W]henever a police officer accosts an individual and restrains his freedom to walk away, he has ‘seized’ that person.” Terry, 392 U.S. at 16. The test for whether a seizure has occurred is an objective one—we ask, considering the totality of the circumstances, “whether ‘a reasonable person would feel free to terminate the encounter.‘” United States v. Lopez, 907 F.3d 472, 487 (7th Cir. 2018) (quoting United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, 201 (2002)); see also Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429,
Consequently, merely asking for identification does not amount to a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court has provided,
In the ordinary course a police officer is free to ask a person for identification without implicating the Fourth Amendment. “[I]nterrogation relating to one‘s identity or a request for identification by the police does not, by itself, constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure.” … [Q]uestions concerning a suspect‘s identity are a routine and accepted part of many Terry stops. … Knowledge of identity may inform an officer that a suspect is wanted for another offense.
Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial Dist. Court of Nevada, Humboldt Cty., 542 U.S. 177, 185–86 (2004) (quoting INS v. Delgado, 466 U.S. 210,
We thus turn our analysis to the issue at the heart of Plaintiffs’ claims—whether the time between Plaintiffs handing the officers their IDs and the officers returning their IDs to them is a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. While Plaintiffs testified that they did not feel free to leave while police had their IDs, this testimony is irrelevant to our objective inquiry. Drayton, 536 U.S. at 202 (The “reasonable person test” is “objective and ‘presupposes an innocent person.‘“). Testimony from the officers that they kept a person‘s
Nevertheless, Pindak testified that, when he asked for the officers to return his ID, the officers told him that he could not leave until they were finished running his name check. Gardner similarly testified that the officers told him they would let him go if his name check was clear. Consistent with Pindak‘s and Gardner‘s testimony, Officer Burns asserted that she instructed individuals on whom she performed name checks that they were “free to go” if their name checks were clear. Considering these explicit instructions in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, they have raised an issue of fact as to whether a reasonable person would feel free to leave in these circumstances. Plaintiffs therefore have demonstrated a genuine issue of material fact exists as to whether they were seized.
B. Reasonableness
We therefore proceed to the question of whether these potential seizures were reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Because it is uncontested that the officers observed Plaintiffs violating the Aggressive Panhandling Ordinance, they had reasonable suspicion to justify Terry stops of these individuals. “It is nevertheless clear that a seizure that is lawful at its inception can violate the Fourth Amendment if its manner of execution unreasonably infringes interests
Plaintiffs argue that, for a delay resulting from a name check to fall within constitutional limits, an officer needs more than reasonable suspicion that an individual committed the offense for which he or she was stopped: there must also be individualized suspicion to justify the warrant check, such as that the person detained is wanted on a warrant. Otherwise, they contend, the delay is unrelated to confirming or dispelling the suspicion that caused the officer to initiate the stop and is therefore unreasonable. But Plaintiffs too narrowly define the “mission” of a Terry stop. In the traffic context, the Supreme Court has said that “[b]eyond determining whether to issue a traffic ticket, an officer‘s mission includes ‘ordinary inquiries incident to the traffic stop.‘” Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348, 355 (2015) (quoting Caballes, 543 U.S. at 408). “Typically such inquiries involve … determining whether there are outstanding warrants against the driver.” Id. “These checks,” the Court wrote, “serve the same objective as enforcement of the traffic code: ensuring that vehicles on the road are operated safely and responsibly.” Id.
Accordingly, several sister circuits “have expressly held that officers do not exceed the permissible scope of a Terry stop by running a warrant check, even when the warrant check is unrelated to the crime suspected.” United States v. Young, 707 F.3d 598, 606 (6th Cir. 2012) (citing Klaucke v. Daly, 595 F.3d 20, 26 (1st Cir. 2010)); see also United States v. Christian, 356 F.3d 1103, 1007 (9th Cir. 2004). We agree. As a warrant
Plaintiffs note the above cited cases all involve a different circumstance than the one we have here: traffic stops rather than street stops. They argue that the concerns about driving safety that the Court mentioned in Rodriguez are not at play with street stops, and thus warrant checks are not incidental to street stops like they are to traffic stops. We are persuaded, though, by the Tenth Circuit‘s view of this issue. In United States v. Villagrana–Flores, 467 F.3d 1269 (10th Cir. 2006), the Tenth Circuit wrote,
Officer safety … is just as strongly implicated where the individual being detained for a short period of time is on foot, rather than in an automobile. An officer detaining a pedestrian has an equally strong interest in knowing whether that individual has a violent past or is currently wanted on outstanding warrants.
Id. at 1277. We therefore hold that an officer‘s completion of a warrant check during a street stop where the officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is not per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
This is not to say, however, that completion of a warrant check that extends the duration of a street stop is always reasonable. Indeed, the length of the delay impacts the reasonableness analysis. In Utah v. Strieff, 136 S.Ct. 2056 (2016), the Supreme Court held that running a warrant check incidental to a traffic stop did not require application of the exclusionary
Here, most Plaintiffs testified that they estimated that warrant checks typically delayed the stops by anywhere from four to seven minutes. No reasonable jury could find that this length of delay is objectively unreasonable in these circumstances, particular when Plaintiffs were unable to recall any of the specifics of their alleged encounters with police. See United States v. Teslim, 869 F.2d 316, 322 (7th Cir. 1989) (holding a detention lasting five to seven minutes was reasonable because of its brief duration); United States v. Robinson, 455 F.3d 832, 834 (8th Cir. 2006) (noting cases in which seizures of less than ten minutes were upheld as de minimis intrusions that did not amount to unreasonable seizures). Even viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the Plaintiffs, the longest delay
In a footnote, without any legal citation, Plaintiffs state that “detaining a citizen for the sole purpose of running his or her name for warrants in the absence of individualized reasonable suspicion of criminal wrongdoing constitutes an unreasonable seizure.” They later argue that the district court erred by ignoring ample evidence that police detained citizens for warrant checks without reasonable suspicion of a crime. But Plaintiffs never develop a separate legal argument about why name checks in this context are constitutionally suspect. Instead, the section of Plaintiffs’ opening brief discussing their theory as to the underlying Fourth Amendment violations focuses entirely on the delays from name checks performed during otherwise proper Terry stops. “We have announced that ‘[i]t is the parties’ responsibility to allege facts
Therefore, because name checks of a reasonable duration performed when officers have reasonable suspicion of ongoing criminal activity do not violate the Fourth Amendment, Plaintiffs have failed to raise an issue of fact that they suffered an underlying constitutional violation. The City thus cannot be liable under Monell.
AFFIRMED.