Officer John Pardue was driving around in an "affluent neighborhood" of Del Mar at 4:00 a.m. when he sees a guy cross a street in the residential neighborhood and begin to enter his Toyota Prius. There's no particular reason to think that this guy's doing anything wrong, but (like any other neighborhood) there have been some occasional car break-ins in the area, and Officer Pardue has a "hunch" that the guy might be up to no good. So Officer Pardue pulls up behind the Prius, shines his spotlight on the guy, hops out of his car, and starts asking the guy questions. When the guy says he's simply resting on a drive down from L.A. -- an answer the officer finds suspicious because "the residential street was several turns away from Interstate 5" -- the officer puts the guys into cuffs and sits him on his patrol car. It only takes around 15 seconds between the time the officer pulls up behind the Prius until the time the guy's in cuffs.
Now, as it happens, in turns out that Officer Pardue's "hunch" that the guy was up to no good was spot on. The guy ends up having a ton of loose change, gift cards and other stuff that he's been stealing from cars in the area, plus he's got an outstanding warrant and tries to ditch a bindle of methamphetamine outside view of the cops (but gets caught). So the guy gets charged.
The question at issue in the case is whether Officer Pardue had a reasonable basis to stop the guy. Justice Dato writes the majority opinion and says that, everything considered, pulling up to the guy, shining the spotlight on him, hopping out of the car and immediately questioning him constituted a "seizure" and that there wasn't (at that point) a reasonable basis for it. But Justice Dato also concludes that the evidence need not be suppressed nor the convictions reversed because the guy ending up having an outstanding warrant so the exclusionary rule doesn't require suppression. Justice Benke files a "concurring and dissenting" opinion saying that there was a reasonable basis for the stop given the underlying suspicious circumstances. (This is, to me, simply a concurring opinion, since everyone agrees that the judgment below gets affirmed on the merits, but whatever.)
Okay. All interesting. Nicely articulated perspectives on all sides.
I just thought that it was somewhat surprising -- particularly in the modern era -- that there wasn't at least some comment made about who it was here that got stopped. And why.
Let me say this with extraordinary confidence: If it was me (Shaun) getting into my Prius at 4:00 a.m. in Del Mar -- which it well could be -- there's zero chance that Officer Pardue shines a spotlight on me and hops out of his car, much less that he promptly puts me in cuffs once I tell him that I'm resting on my way down from L.A. I'm 54. I'm White. I look like the "usual" guy in Del Mar.
I strongly suspect that the guy here does not look like me. His name is Omar Kasrawi. I can't tell for sure his age or what he looks like, but I did notice that there's a guy with that name who lives a couple miles away from me who's 32 years old and works as a server at a Red Lobster. I suspect that one big difference between Mr. Kasrawi and me, quite frankly, is that he's more brown than I am -- which I suspect might play some role in why Officer Pardue had a "hunch" that Mr. Kasrawi was a criminal visiting Del Mar rather than someone living (or visiting someone) there.
Now, look, I suspect there might be other things as well. There's zero evidence from the opinion that Mr. Kasrawi was "nervous" or anything like that, but the fact that he was younger probably played a role in why someone like him gets stopped (and cuffed) by the police whereas someone my age doesn't even merit inquiry. Plus, if he's ditching methamphetamine, there's a nonzero chance that he's perhaps got the "look" of a meth addict; probably stealing from cars to support the thing. Fair enough.
But there's a lot of contemporary discussion and debate about the role of race and ethnicity in police interactions these days. So I was a little surprised that there wasn't at least a tangential mention of those realities in either of the two opinions in the case. If only as a recognition that the take one has on Fourth Amendment jurisprudence -- e.g., whether getting a spotlight shined on you at 4:00 a.m. and interrogated by the police simply because you're getting into your Prius on a public street -- might have very differential effects on different groups of people. For people like me, whether that's okay or not probably won't have much of a practical effect at all; it's extremely unlikely to happen. By contrast, for people who perhaps look differently than I do, it might make a very big difference indeed, and affect in a very nontrivial way how they experience their daily lives.
Not that any opinion by the California Court of Appeal is going to solve the underlying problem, of course. But maybe at least a little recognition could be worthwhile.
'Cause reading the opinion just brought home in a very concrete way to me that my experience in Del Mar at 4:00 a.m. might well be very different from the experience of someone else. Even if we're doing the exact same things in the exact same way, and the only difference between us is how we "look" to the police and whether they have a "hunch" about us or not. They may end up in cuffs after 15 seconds -- guilty or not -- whereas I get in my Prius unmolested and drive away untouched and unquestioned.
I know, I know: Not a huge revelation. This is nothing that no one's said a thousand times before.
But perhaps worthy of at least brief note regardless.
