Defining a “high crime area” in Mayo v. U.S.

“High crime area.” 

Police officers invoke this phrase all the time.  Like “furtive movements, “suspicious bulge” or “excited utterance, it is a legal sounding phrase they use to justify what might otherwise be an illegal detention.  Police include it in their toolkit of phrases to throw out when drafting a police report or testifying on the stand. 

The phrase was used most significantly in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000).  In that case, the Court ruled that a suspect’s “unprovoked flight” from police in a high crime area provided the necessary legal basis for an investigatory stop under the Fourth Amendment.

Ever since that time, it seems as if every area in which police make a stop has experienced high levels of crime.  This is probably not surprising in an urban area such as D.C.  But do city-dwellers forfeit their constitutional protections?

The D.C. Court of Appeals decided, among other things, to qualify the “high crime area” phrase in its recent en banc decision in Mayo v. United States, 315 A.3d 606 (D.C. 2024). 

For one thing, the court changed the phrase to “general locational crime evidence.”  (Just imagine police officers struggling with that mouthful on the witness stand.)

More importantly, the court made clear that simple invocation of the phrase will no longer suffice.  Instead, “general locational crime evidence, if relevant and nonconclusory, may provide context for police observations of ambiguous conduct, but its appropriate weight will turn on its quantity and specificity.”

For example, evidence that the area has experienced a number of carjacking will not have much relevance in a drug case. 

That is because, going back to Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968), “[t]he facts contributing to reasonable suspicion must be specific and provide a ‘particularized and objective basis” to suspect that ‘the particular individual being stopped is engaged in wrongdoing.”

Thousands of people, the court held, “live and go about their legitimate day-to-day activities in areas” that might be labeled as having high crime rates:  “[O]ur court has long warned against reliance on the ‘high crime area’ phrase as a ‘talismanic litany’ to justify Terry stops . . .Our abiding concern is that ‘residents of certain neighborhoods . . . may be more likely to be suspected of engaging in criminal activity simply because of where they live and frequent.’”  People should not be “tarred with the sins of their neighbors.”

“We thus hold that courts should no longer give weight to a bare ‘high-crime area” label in assessing the validity of a Terry stop.”  Instead, the court should conduct a “fact-intensive inquiry” that turns on the “quantity and specificity of the information, with particular focus on the recency, frequency, and geographic proximity of the relevant criminal activity.” 

In fact, “high crime area” could be used by the defense to counter the government’s arguments that a suspect’s flight from police contributes to reasonable suspicion or probable cause:  “There are myriad reasons an innocent person might run away from the police.”  That a person is much more likely to be accused of a crime in a high crime area is one of them.