UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT ________________

No. 23-1707, 23-1802 ________________

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

v.

DEANDRE JACKSON & QUINTEL MARTINS Appellants

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On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (D.C. Nos. 2-21-cr-00054-001; 2-21-cr-00054-002) District Judge: Honorable Juan R. Sanchez ________________

Argued on May 2, 2024 Before: KRAUSE, CHUNG, and RENDELL, Circuit Judges

(Opinion filed: November 6, 2024)

Susan M. Lin [ARGUED] Kairys Rudovsky Messing Feinberg & Lin 718 Arch Street, Suite 501 South Philadelphia, PA 19106

Counsel for Appellant DeAndre Jackson Todd R Fiore Todd Fiore Law 834 Chestnut Street Philadelphia, PA 19107

Counsel for Appellant Quintel Martins Kevin L. Jayne [ARGUED] Sandra M. Urban Office of the United States Attorney 615 Chestnut Street, Suite 1250 Philadelphia, PA 19106

Counsel for Appellee

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OPINION OF THE COURT ________________

KRAUSE, Circuit Judge.

We ask much of our law enforcement officials, whose daily responsibilities in maintaining order and public safety can expose them to great personal risk. So while the Fourth Amendment bars police officers from taking unnecessary or excessively intrusive measures in conducting investigative

2 stops, it allows them to take reasonable safety precautions commensurate with the danger they confront.

In this consolidated criminal appeal, Appellants DeAndre Jackson and Quintel Martins claim that officers took excessive safety measures in conducting an investigative traffic stop, so that the District Court erred in denying their motions to suppress evidence recovered from that stop. We cannot agree because, in the circumstances of the stop—in which an officer found himself alone in a dark corner of a high- crime neighborhood with three individuals he reasonably suspected were driving a stolen vehicle and attempting to evade him in the early hours of the morning—the precautions taken by that officer and those who immediately joined him at the scene were reasonable measures to ensure the suspects did not possess dangerous weapons and would not otherwise jeopardize their safety. Accordingly, we will affirm. I. Background

A. Factual Background

At around 1:10 AM on the morning of October 2, 2019, Collingdale Police Officer Thayer McCauley was patrolling Delaware County, Pennsylvania with an unarmed trainee when he spotted a car with a broken taillight, a damaged Massachusetts license plate, and a scratched registration tag. He entered the car’s information into a police database and learned that its registration was expired and that its license tag was not assigned to a particular vehicle make or model. Because those vehicle code violations indicated that the car might be stolen, Officer McCauley decided to conduct a traffic stop. The car he was driving was a conspicuously marked police car and when he pulled behind the vehicle, even before

3 he engaged his police siren, the driver immediately made a series of abrupt turns and sped off, going well over the speed limit of 15 miles per hour. Even as the officer accelerated to over 30 miles per hour and even though this was a residential neighborhood, the vehicle quickly outpaced him and disappeared from view.

About forty minutes later, at around 1:50 AM, Officer McCauley saw the same vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. He made a swift U-turn and continued in pursuit, but as he pulled behind it, the car immediatel