Hanging Out in High Crime Area Not Sufficient Reason for Frisk

Police patrolling an area of San Antonio, Texas, where a series of gang related drive-by shootings recently occurred, didn’t have a reasonable suspicion to stop a group of people standing on the sidewalk, the Fifth Circuit said.

The gun found in Raymond McKinney’s waistband should therefore have been suppressed, and his conditional guilty plea to being a felon in possession of a firearm must be vacated, the opinion by Judge Leslie H. Southwick said.

Instead of holding an evidentiary hearing before refusing to suppress the gun, the district court merely looked at the police reports and their videos of the ...