What does reasonable suspicion mean

See What's the difference between an arrest and a detention or "stop and frisk"? Officer Haulk is downtown, wearing plain clothes at in the afternoon. He notices two men, Joe and Calvin, standing at a street corner. Something about them doesn't seem right to him, so he continues to watch them from a distance. He sees Calvin walk down the street, past some stores. Calvin pauses and looks in a store window, then turns around and rejoins Joe.

Joe then walks to the same store window, looks in, and returns to Calvin. Joe and Calvin trade off walking to the same window and looking in it until each has done so six times. Officer Haulk sees a third man walk up to Calvin and Joe and engage them in conversation, then walk away.

Calvin and Joe continue their pacing for another ten minutes, then walk in the direction of the third man. Suspecting that they are "casing a job" before committing a robbery, Officer Haulk approaches the three men and identifies himself as a police officer.

He asks for their names and receives a mumbled, unintelligible response. Haulk then grabs Calvin, spins him around, and pats him down; he finds a pistol in Calvin's jacket pocket. He also pats down the other two men, finding another gun on Joe.

The police officer does not need physical evidence in order to have reasonable suspicion. If a police officer has reasonable suspicion, he may briefly stop the person involved, but an officer may not make an arrest based on reasonable suspicion alone.

For example, if a driver is driving erratically, swerving between lanes, and failing to stop for traffic signals, a police officer may have reasonable suspicion that the driver is drunk. The officer may pull the driver over, but the officer may not arrest the driver unless there is further evidence of drunk driving to establish probable cause for the arrest.

If after being pulled over a driver fails a sobriety test, that may provide probable cause for an officer to make a drunk driving arrest. Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Reasonable Suspicion Reasonable suspicion is a term used to describe if a person has been or will be involved in a crime based on specific facts and circumstances.

It may be used to justify an investigatory stop. Reasonable suspicion is more than a hunch that a crime has committed but does not require as much evidence as probable cause, which is needed to obtain search and arrest warrants. To evaluate reasonable suspicion, the court must decide if a reasonable person or reasonable officer would also infer that a person is involved in a crime were the circumstances the same.

The Supreme Court ruled in Terry V.