For All Those Fourth Amendment Buffs Out There

Here is a link, via Fourth Amendment.com, to an excellent new law review article entitled, "The High-Crime Area' Question: Requiring Verifiable and Quantifiable Evidence for Fourth Amendment Reasonable Suspicion Analysis". The article, authored by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson & Damien Bernache, starts off describing a scenario: two men in two different neighborhoods in America are standing on a street corner with a paper bag. Police officers patrolling each neighborhood see the men, and they flee when seeing the officers. One man runs through a poverty-stricken neighborhood with a high crime rate while the other runs through an affluent neighborhood with a low crime rate. Under current Fourth Amendment law, suspicious action and unprovoked flight occurs in a “high-crime area” alters the Fourth Amendment reasonable suspicion
analysis.

The article is an interesting read into what goes into reasonable suspicion analysis, and can help when figuring out how to investigate and prepare those suppression motions.