Okay, we heard the tape. Some interesting details:
The caller made her call after having left the store.
She said that she had expressed her concern to the manager, who she said had walked past me, but she didn't think he'd called the police.
Gee, lady, maybe that's because he has better judgement than you do!
She identified my wife, but the responding officers didn't seem to have the foggiest idea that she was there. If they thought I was a robber, despite all the facts screaming the contrary, don't you think they would have been quite interested in apprehending my wife as well? She had gone to the bathroom while I wandered over to the SciFi section where I was ambushed.
Based on the caller's description, I have a clear sense of exactly when she saw me - I was leaning over my wife's chair looking at sweater patterns.
She said that the section of the store was near the "Baby & Maternity" area near the restrooms, but that apparently got mangled into "Children's Section" by the dispatcher, which is entirely different - that section of the store has one entrance cordoned off by bookshelves, much like the CD/DVD section.
The caller refused to give her name, drawing a useful parallel to
Florida v. J.L., in which the Supreme Court held:
An anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is not, without more, sufficient to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person. ... The tip lacked sufficient indicia of reliability to provide reasonable suspicion to make a Terry stop: It provided no predictive information and therefore left the police without means to test the informant's knowledge or credibility. See Alabama v. White, 496 U. S. 325, 327 . The contentions of Florida and the United States as amicus that the tip was reliable because it accurately described J. L.'s visible attributes misapprehend the reliability needed for a tip to justify a Terry stop. The reasonable suspicion here at issue requires that a tip be reliable in its assertion of illegality, not just in its tendency to identify a determinate person. This Court also declines to adopt the argument that the standard Terry analysis should be modified to license a "firearm exception," under which a tip alleging an illegal gun would justify a stop and frisk even if the accusation would fail standard pre-search reliability testing.
I've asked Penny to send the tape over to her usual A/V guy at JoyMark Video Services for cleanup, enhancement, and digitization, so I expect to have the audio available for everyone's download and review in the next week or so. That should cost about $75-$100, she said.
The digitized audio will provide additional useful information as to the exact timing of events. It includes everything - including radio chatter where they're running my Glock's serial number and my DL and Pistol Permit - from the transfer of the call to the clearing.
There's also another tape, from the cellphone 911 call center, which we are going to try to obtain - we only have the call after it was transferred over to Manchester.
I thought heard the dispatcher say that nothing turned up in a Manchester database of concealed carry permits, but she noted I have a Merrimack address. So it appears that there may not be a statewide database - I got the impression that she'd have had to call down to Merrimack to validate the permit. Once we get the tape online, you can see for yourself.
We're also going to do a bit more research and info-gathering here and there, I'll probably make an outing tomorrow. More soon...
