This white paper describes recent research by Dawn Sweet, Adele Quigley McBride, and Chris Meissner that found that trained police officers and lay persons were equally bad at determining whether people were concealing dangerous or illegal objects. Indeed, there is no evidence that anyone can determine whether someone is concealing simply by observing people from a distance as there are no objective, reliable, observable predictors that indicate a person is concealing. Thus this white paper argues that it is misguided to train officers to look for “articulable behaviors” as clues that someone is hiding contraband and that courts should reconsider their approach to assessing the evidence presented by police to justify interactions with civilians allowed under Terry.
By Adele Quigley-McBride