Opinion
NOT TO BE PUBLISHED
APPEAL from a judgment of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County No. VA100216 Ross M. Klein, Judge.
Jeffrey Lewis, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant.
Edmund G. Brown, Jr., Attorney General, Dane R. Gillette, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Pamela C. Hamanaka, Assistant Attorney General, Scott A. Taryle and Nima Razfar, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent.
CHAVEZ, J
Appellant Johnny Barocio, Jr. pled no contest to a charge of second degree robbery in violation of Penal Code section 211. He contends that the trial court erred in denying his motion to suppress evidence seized following his illegal detention. We affirm.
All further statutory references are to the Penal Code.
FACTS AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
On March 22, 2007, at 1:00 a.m., while alone on patrol in a high crime area known for burglaries, narcotics, and robberies, Huntington Park Police Officer Abigail Caballos noticed defendant and codefendant Victor Acevedo (Acevedo) confronting Emmanuel Paz (Paz). The two men appeared to be involved in a verbal dispute with Paz, who was trapped between them and a building. The men were both within a foot of Paz and “in his face.” When Officer Caballos pulled up, defendant and Acevedo began to walk away, while Paz stood still, looking at the police car. Acevedo halted on Officer Caballos’s order, but defendant continued walking until she gave three or more orders to stop.
The parties refer to the officer as “Ceballos” in the briefs.
Upon being questioned, Paz, who was wearing a “Jack-In-the-Box” uniform, told Officer Caballos that he did not know the other two men. Defendant looked at Paz and said “I asked him for change.” Despite Officer Caballos’s order to be quiet, defendant looked at Paz and in a loud, belligerent manner, said “I [was] ask[ing] you for change, right.” Believing that defendant was trying to intimidate Paz, Officer Caballos handcuffed him and put him inside the police car. Paz then told Officer Caballos that he had left the bus and was crossing the street when defendant and Acevedo, who looked like gangsters, approached him and asked for money. When Paz told them he did not have cash, but only had coins, defendant demanded the coins. Paz gave up the coins out of fear for his safety.
At the suppression hearing, the trial court determined that the encounter between Officer Caballos and defendant was nonconsensual, but that the detention was justified because the officer had a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was occurring based on the time, the location, and the officer’s observations of the men’s behavior.
DISCUSSION
Defendant contends that the trial court erred when it denied the motion to suppress because the officer made an unjustified detention. We disagree.
Under section 1538.5, subdivision (a)(1), it is well settled that a defendant may make a motion to suppress evidence obtained as a result of an unreasonable search or seizure. “In ruling on a motion to suppress, the trial court must find the historical facts, select the rule of law, and apply it to the facts in order to determine whether the law as applied has been violated. [Citation.] We review the court’s resolution of the factual inquiry under the deferential substantial evidence standard. The ruling on whether the applicable law applies to the facts is a mixed question of law and fact that is subject to independent review. [Citation.]” (People v. Ramos (2004) 34 Cal.4th 494, 505.) To determine whether evidence procured by a search or seizure should have been suppressed, we consider only the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. (People v. Carter (2005) 36 Cal.4th 1114, 1141.) “The proponent of a motion to suppress has the burden of establishing that his own Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the challenged search or seizure.” (Rakas v. Illinois (1978) 439 U.S. 128, 131, fn. 1.)
A police officer may detain a suspect based on a reasonable suspicion that the suspect has committed or is about to commit a crime. (People v. Bennett (1998) 17 Cal.4th 373, 387.) This detention is considered a limited intrusion justified by special law enforcement interests. (Ibid.) “A detention is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when the detaining officer can point to specific articulable facts that, considered in light of the totality of the circumstances, provide some objective manifestation that the person detained may be involved in criminal activity.” (People v. Souza (1994) 9 Cal.4th 224, 231 (Souza).) Reasonable suspicion can arise from information that is less reliable than that required to show probable cause and is dependent on the content of information possessed by the police and its degree of reliability. (People v. Bennett, supra, at p. 387.)
Here, Officer Caballos articulated specific facts that suggested defendant was involved in criminal activity which required her immediate action. Officer Caballos was on patrol in the early morning hours in an area known for robberies, drug dealing, and burglaries, when she saw Paz cornered by defendant and Acevedo. She could see that defendant and Acevedo were aggressively confronting Paz by talking to him “in his face” while within a foot of him. Paz was boxed in, unable to move away from the men. As she pulled up in her police vehicle, defendant and Acevedo attempted to evade her by walking away. These circumstances clearly justified the initial detention. Once detained defendant and Acevedo were questioned in a minimally intrusive manner over a short span of time for further investigation. Then after 10 minutes from the time Officer Caballos first saw the men, she handcuffed defendant in order to complete the contact. The length of investigation was reasonable and minimally intrusive.
Nevertheless, defendant contends that Officer Caballos’s observation of people arguing on a public sidewalk did not provide a basis for her to conclude that criminal conduct was occurring. Appellant cites People v. Aldridge (1984) 34 Cal.3d 473 (Aldridge) where our Supreme Court invalidated a detention based on the defendant’s flight from a parking lot when police entered the lot, which was known as a site for drug transactions. In Souza, however, our Supreme Court held that Aldridge was not pertinent to detention cases. (Souza, supra, 9 Cal.4th at p. 240.) The Souza court stated, “Because the Aldridge holding rested solely on California constitutional grounds, it is not pertinent authority for determining the propriety of the temporary detention in this post-Proposition 8 case; the issue, as we just explained, must be resolved under the federal Constitution.” (Souza, supra, at pp. 232-233.) The facts in the instant case are similar to those in Souza, where “the presence on the sidewalk at 3 a.m. of two people who appeared to be talking to the occupants of a car parked in total darkness in . . . ‘high crime area,’ coupled with the evasive conduct by the occupants and defendant’s sudden flight when [the officer] directed his patrol car’s spotlight toward the group, justified a brief, investigative detention.” (Id. at p. 242.)
Appellant’s citation to People v. Wilkins (1986) 186 Cal.App.3d 804, 810-811 also does not assist him. That case, where the court held that the defendant’s action of slumping down in a car in an area known for narcotics activity late at night was insufficient to cause a reasonable suspicion of criminality, is factually dissimilar. We also note that the Wilkins court relied heavily upon Aldridge in making its determination that the detention was unjustified. (Wilkins, supra, at p. 811.)
Here, early in the morning, in a high crime area, Officer Caballos observed aggressive behavior of two men against a single man who was trapped against a wall. As the officer drove up, the aggressors attempted to elude her. We conclude that the totality of circumstances establish that there was a reasonable suspicion to detain defendant for the time that it took to investigate the situation. There is no violation of the Fourth Amendment and the trial court committed no error.
DISPOSITION
The judgment is affirmed.
We concur: BOREN, P. J., ASHMANN-GERST, J