United States v. Joshua Brown

United States Court of Appeals

For the Eighth Circuit

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No. 22-2133

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United States of America

Plaintiff - Appellee

v.

Joshua Brown

Defendant - Appellant

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Appeal from United States District Court

for the Northern District of Iowa - Cedar Rapids

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Submitted: January 11, 2023

Filed: February 27, 2023

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Before GRUENDER, BENTON, and SHEPHERD, Circuit Judges.

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GRUENDER, Circuit Judge.

Joshua Brown was pulled over while riding his motorcycle, and a pat-down

search revealed a firearm. After the district court1 denied his motion to suppress the

firearm, Brown conditionally pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon in

1

The Honorable C.J. Williams, United States District Judge for the Northern

District of Iowa.

violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1). See Fed. R. Crim. P. 11(a)(2). He appeals the

denial of his motion to suppress, and we affirm.

I.

In the early morning hours of July 18, 2020, Cedar Rapids Police Department

Officer Kyzer Moore was patrolling a neighborhood in the southwest part of the city.

The neighborhood had been the site of several crimes involving stolen vehicles with

“switched” license plates or disguising paint jobs. Officer Moore was involved in

several of those cases.

While patrolling, Officer Moore noticed Brown’s orange motorcycle because

it was the only vehicle out at that time of day. Brown did not commit any traffic

violations and the motorcycle’s license plate was properly displayed. Officer Moore

ran a license check and learned that the plate was registered to a blue motorcycle.

Officer Moore followed the motorcycle as it turned onto Third Street

Southwest. He saw that the motorcycle was about to pull into the driveway of a

residence on Third Street Southwest. The Third Street residence was familiar to law

enforcement as one where narcotics, stolen property, and stolen vehicles were

frequently found. Officer Moore activated his lights, and Brown came to a stop. A

pat-down search of Brown revealed a firearm, several knives, and brass knuckles.

Brown was indicted on three firearm-related offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 922.

He moved to suppress the firearm, arguing that Officer Moore did not have

reasonable suspicion to make the traffic stop.

At the suppression hearing, Officer Moore testified about some of the reasons

that a license plate may not correspond to the vehicle to which it is affixed. For

example, an owner may replace an expired license plate with an unexpired plate

from a different vehicle. Or an owner may be barred or suspended from registering

a vehicle and use a license plate from another vehicle. Or the vehicle may have been

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stolen, and the driver put a different license plate on it to avoid detection. Officer

Moore also described several innocent explanations too: repainting the vehicle but

not updating the registration information, making a mistake when registering the

vehicle, or putting on the wrong license plate when an owner has several vehicles.

Officer Moore further testified that he was aware of several past vehicle-

related crimes in both the general neighborhood and the immediate vicinity of

Brown’s stop. Many of these incidents involved vehicles with colors that did not

match their registrations or vehicles that otherwise had anomalies with their license

plates. Indeed, Officer Moore was involved in at least three vehicle stops near or

linked to the Third Street residence where Brown was headed. On one of these

occasions, just a month before Brown’s stop, the driver had just left the Third Street

residence when Officer Moore conducted a license check and confirmed that the

vehicle was stolen. On another, Officer Moore stopped a vehicle that lacked a

license plate and discovered that the driver had a suspended license. He also learned

that the driver had been stopped earlier in the evening by another officer near the

Third Street residence. At that earlier stop, the vehicle had a license plate, but the

registration information did not match the vehicle’s color. Finally, on a third

occasion, only a couple blocks away from the Third Street residence, a trailer had a

license plate that did not belong on it. The trailer turned out to be stolen, and the

driver had a suspended license.

The district court found that Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion to stop

Brown and denied Brown’s motion. The court found that Officer Moore had a

particularized and objective basis for the stop based on three factors known to him

at the time. One was the color discrepancy between the vehicle and the registration

information. Another was his knowledge of the surrounding neighborhood’s

multiple incidents of vehicle theft and other vehicular crimes that involved license-

plate discrepancies and noncompliant registrations. The third was his experience

with the specific location—a residence associated with at least three cases involving

stolen vehicles, two of which were different colors than their registrations indicated.

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Brown appeals the denial of his motion to suppress, arguing that Officer

Moore lacked reasonable suspicion for the stop. He contends that changing the color

of a vehicle is “innocent, common behavior” and that Officer Moore did not have a

particularized basis to suspect that Brown had stolen the motorcycle.

II.

We apply a mixed standard of review to a district court’s denial of a motion

to suppress evidence. United States v. Mitchell, 55 F.4th 620, 622 (8th Cir. 2022).

We review factual findings for clear error, while we review de novo the ultimate

conclusion of whether the Fourth Amendment was violated. Id.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.

A traffic stop is a reasonable seizure if it is supported by probable cause or

reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. United States v. Allen, 43 F.4th 901, 907

(8th Cir. 2022). Reasonable suspicion is “a particularized and objective basis for

suspecting the particular person stopped of criminal activity.” Kansas v. Glover,

589 U.S. ---, 140 S. Ct. 1183, 1187 (2020). “The standard depends on the factual

and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men,

not legal technicians, act.” Id. at 1188 (emphasis and internal quotation marks

omitted). Officers are allowed “to draw on their own experience and specialized

training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information

available to them that might well elude an untrained person.” United States v.

Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273 (2002) (internal quotation marks omitted). In analyzing

whether an officer had reasonable suspicion, we look to the totality of the

circumstances. Glover, 140 S. Ct. at 1191.

We conclude that Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion to make the traffic

stop. He testified that a color discrepancy might indicate that a vehicle is stolen, the

driver has a suspended license, or the registration is expired. These are all valid

reasons to make a traffic stop. See, e.g., United States v. James, 52 F.4th 1035,

1037-38 (8th Cir. 2022) (stolen); Glover, 140 S. Ct. at 1191 (license); United States

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v. McLemore, 887 F.3d 861, 864-65 (8th Cir. 2018) (registration). And his suspicion

was based cumulatively on particularized, objective facts: the color discrepancy

between the vehicle’s paint and its registration information, his knowledge of the

neighborhood where the stop occurred, and his experience with the specific location

of the stop. See Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 124 (2000) (“[T]he fact that the

stop occurred in a ‘high crime area’ [is] among the relevant contextual

considerations in a Terry analysis.”); United States v. Dortch, 868 F.3d 674, 680 (8th

Cir. 2017) (holding that an officer had reasonable suspicion to conduct a pat-down

search based in part on his familiarity with a specific building associated with gang

activity).

Brown argues that a color discrepancy cannot factor into an officer’s

reasonable suspicion. We see no reason why it cannot under appropriate

circumstances. The Seventh Circuit case United States v. Uribe, 709 F.3d 646, 651-

52 (7th Cir. 2013), is instructive. There, the court held that color discrepancy alone

could not support reasonable suspicion of vehicle theft to make a traffic stop absent

any evidence suggesting otherwise. Id. at 652. But that is not the situation here

because color discrepancy was not the sole basis for Officer Moore’s suspicion.

Instead, the discrepancy was a contributing factor along with his particularized

knowledge of and experience with vehicle-related crimes involving license-plate

mismatches near the location of Brown’s stop. Uribe acknowledged such a

distinction: “Where our sister circuits have considered color discrepancies, they

have relied on the discrepancy as only one of several factors establishing reasonable

suspicion.” Id. at 651 & n.4. One of these sister-circuit cases, United States v.

Cooper, 431 F. App’x 399, 402 (6th Cir. 2011), upheld a finding of reasonable

suspicion based on an officer’s testimony about his knowledge and experience with

vehicle-related crime and the fact that the vehicle was spotted in a high-crime area.

Like the officer in Cooper, Officer Moore “described a specific, circumscribed

location” (the Third Street residence) and “noted the frequency of car thefts and other

crimes in that area.” See id. Thus, the district court did not err in concluding that

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Officer Moore had reasonable suspicion based, in part, on the color discrepancy

between the vehicle and its registration.2

Brown counters by pointing to possible innocent explanations for the color

discrepancy. We are not persuaded. The Supreme Court has “consistently

recognized that reasonable suspicion need not rule out the possibility of innocent

conduct.” Navarette v. California, 572 U.S. 393, 403 (2014) (internal quotation

marks omitted). Ultimately, “the relevant inquiry is not whether particular conduct

is ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty,’ but the degree of suspicion that attaches to particular types

of noncriminal acts.” United States v. Sokolow, 490 U.S. 1, 10 (1989). And as we

have already noted, this degree of suspicion may be informed by an officer’s

particular knowledge and experience. See Arvizu, 534 U.S. at 273. Further, the

totality-of-the-circumstances test “precludes th[e] sort of divide-and-conquer

analysis” that Brown attempts in attacking Officer Moore’s partial reliance on the

color discrepancy. See United States v. Collins, 883 F.3d 1029, 1032 (8th Cir. 2018).

Our task is not to analyze the individual fact of a color discrepancy “in isolation” but

rather in the totality of the circumstances. See id. In all, Officer Moore’s extensive

testimony about his personal knowledge and experience with license-plate

anomalies and vehicular crimes both at the specific location of the stop and in the

surrounding neighborhood satisfy us that he had reasonable suspicion to stop Brown.

2

Brown points to United States v. Rodgers from the Ninth Circuit, which

expressed doubt about whether color discrepancy and presence in a high-crime

location can give rise to reasonable suspicion. See 656 F.3d 1023, 1027 (9th Cir.

2011) (“[The two factors] at best provide a thin basis for reasonable suspicion that

the car was stolen.”). But Rodgers is distinguishable because it did not involve an

officer’s experience with a specific, circumscribed location like the Third Street

residence here or the location in Cooper. At any rate, “[i]n the context of a

commonsense, nontechnical standard like reasonable suspicion, which must be

evaluated in light of the whole mass of facts and circumstances present in a given

situation, it is natural for cases that resemble each other in certain ways or at a high

level of generality to come out differently as a result of key details that weigh

differently in one than in the other.” Dortch, 868 F.3d at 681.

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III.

For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the district court’s denial of Brown’s

motion to suppress.

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