There was an interesting discussion over at masslive.com about whether police can initiate highway stop based entirely on an anonymous tip. “Can police use tips to stop a motorist? It depends”.
The answer implies that it is assuming an anonymous 911 call about an erratic driver who the caller suspects may be drunk or driving dangerously.
The police can’t stop you based entirely on a tip. If they get a report about a dangerous driver on the roads, after locating the car, they follow for a while to independently verify and corroborate that the driver is doing something that warrants a vehicle stop. They wait to witness some act of speeding, weaving across lanes (marked lanes violation), reckless driving (negligent operation), or other driving behavior that could mean a suspected OUI.
The answer in the article suggests that the police can pull you over if the tip suggests your driving could be an “imminent threat to life and property”.
However, this is not a great legal argument for the prosecutor and is absolutely beatable in court. We’ve won cases where the police only had an anonymous tip, and the charges were dismissed.
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What would an “imminent threat” even be, if no danger is instantly observable by the police? It’s just a car driving down the road!
The remedy for this, from the Commonwealth’s view, is for the tip not to be anonymous. If the prosecutors can find the person who made the call and bring them into court as a witness to describe what they saw, then this can be enough reason to make the stop legal, even if the police didn’t witness any bad driving.
But finding a person who made an anonymous 911 call can be hard to do. Even if the person who called in the tip to the police left his or her name, he or she can be tough to track down, and tougher to get to show up in court on the day of the trial. We have beaten cases where the case was dismissed because the witness that predicated the stop didn’t show up in court.