Last year, a federal district judge found that officers working for an Uptown New Orleans security district did nothing wrong when they pulled over several young Black men who were searching for a lost chihuahua, allegedly drawing guns on them. 

Even if they had drawn their guns, the officers acted reasonably, ruled U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon of the Eastern District of Louisiana. With that, Fallon tossed out the civil rights case against the officers, which had been filed by Bilal Hankins, one of the young men. 

Hankins was 18 at the time, and had been searching for the dog along with two young friends, who were 21 and 12 years old.

Now, a federal appellate court has reversed Fallon’s ruling, ordering that the lawsuit can move forward.

The justifications the officers made — that it was dark out, that there had been car burglaries in the neighborhood, and that the car was registered to an address in a different neighborhood — were not legally sufficient to conduct the stop on the young men, and based on the allegations, likely violated Hankins’s constitutional rights, a panel of judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found in a written ruling issued last week. 

The Fifth Circuit panel also found that based on the allegations, the officers’ actions violated “clearly established law” – meaning that they could not invoke the doctrine of qualified immunity to protect themselves from suit. 

Qualified immunity protects government officials like police from liability while performing the duties of their jobs even if they do something unconstitutional — as long as they can prove the conduct did not violate “clearly established” law. 

Civil rights advocates organizations have long argued that qualified immunity allows police to avoid accountability for a wide range of misconduct. 

Relying on a historical case where courts found that officers had made an unjustified stop despite more specific explanations, the Fifth Circuit panel noted that the justifications in the Hankins case were “much farther from reasonable suspicion” than that case, they ruled.

 “[The officers] were thus on notice that these facts did not amount to a particularized suspicion of criminal activity permitting a stop,” the court found. 

Ruling sets stage for potential trial

The ruling sends the case back down to Fallon for further proceedings – and a potential trial. On Tuesday, a trial date was set for February 24, 2025.

“This is a monumental victory, particularly in the Deep South, where we know from our clients this still happens daily” said Nora Ahmed, legal director at the ACLU of Louisiana, who represented Hankins as part of the ACLU’s Justice Lab initiative. 

“Black people affirmatively approaching officers for police assistance is not suspicious and does not justify stopping them, let alone seizing them with a firearm,” she said.

Hankins sued after he and his friends were stopped in the summer of 2020, shortly after the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, when civilian-police tensions were particularly elevated.

Driven by the 21-year-old in a BMW registered to his mother, the three young men first approached an officer at around 11:30 p.m., as they were searching for a neighbor’s lost chihuahua, named Duchess, in the Hurstville neighborhood of Uptown New Orleans. 

They asked for help from Kevin Wheeler, a Levee District police officer working a paid detail for the Hurstville Neighborhood Security District. According to Hankins, they gave Wheeler the address of Hankins’ home nearby and described Duchess, who was ailing and needed her medicine.

The story seemed false to Wheeler, who was hired by the Levee District after a five-year stint at the New Orleans Police Department, where he was fired in 2012 for violating the department’s “truthfulness policy.” To Wheeler, the lost-dog narrative was “a ruse to disguise that these kids may have been up to no good,” he told investigators later.

Suspicious officers follow, stop dog searchers 

So, instead of helping search for the dog, Wheeler ran the BMW’s plate, saw that it was registered to a woman in New Orleans East, and called for backup. His call was answered by Ramon Pierre, a security district colleague who worked a day job with the Housing Authority of New Orleans Police Department. In separate cars, Wheeler and Pierre began trailing the young men, and eventually pulled them over. 

At first, when they put on their lights, the young men did not stop, since they had just spoken with Wheeler. Instead, they took a corner, to get out of the officers’ way. 

The young men did stop after the officers followed them on that turn and got onto the squad car’s loudspeaker, telling them to pull over.

Both Wheeler and Pierre had their weapons drawn, pointed at the young men, as they ordered them out of the BMW, the lawsuit contends. Both officers deny drawing their weapons. One of the young men later told investigators that only Pierre drew his weapon, while Wheeler had his hand on his holstered gun.

After finding that the address from the BMW’s registration matched the license of the 21-year-old driver, the officers let them go. According to Hankins, Wheeler apologized, saying, “You know, three young men, in a nice car, in this neighborhood.”

The next year, in June 2021, Hankins – calling the incident a “classic case of racial profiling” – filed a civil-rights lawsuit against Wheeler and Pierre, along with their employers, the Hurstville Security District, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, and the Orleans Levee District Police, which were named in the suit for failing to train or supervise their officers.

Officers argued, unsuccessfully, they had valid grounds to stop

Lawyers for Wheeler and Pierre argued that the officers had plenty of legitimate suspicion. It made sense to stop the young men, they said: it was late in the evening, the BMW was registered to an address in New Orleans East, and he had previously gotten reports of kids in the neighborhood pulling on car door handles.

Judge Fallon agreed. Given the “totality of the circumstances,” he ruled, the officers were legally justified to stop the young men – and even pull their weapons. Fallon deemed that was “reasonable… (for the officers) to point their guns  at the car as they conducted a Terry stop late at night.”

But last week, the panel of Fifth Circuit judges disagreed.

The officers’ explanations, including their “broad assertion” about crime in the area lacked specifics needed for the encounter to rise to the level of a legal stop, the panel ruled. 

“We are left with: A college-aged male in a car registered to a woman’s name in a different neighborhood of the same city, driving slowly on a residential street at night after approaching an officer to ask for assistance finding a lost chihuahua,” the court wrote. “Taken together and mindful that we must construe all disputed facts in Hankins’ favor, we cannot say that these are ‘specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,’ allow us to decide there was reasonable suspicion.”

The family has lived in the neighborhood since 1957, said Bilal’s mother, Lona Edwards Hankins. Growing up there, she knew the dangers that young Black men like her brothers had faced in police encounters, but she wanted more for her sons. 

 “I had hoped that my child would not face the same police brutality that my brothers faced and that I would not have to feel the same horrific emotions my mother felt by having a gun pulled out on her child, simply because of the color of his skin,” she said.

She was grateful, she said, that the Fifth Circuit panel found that her son deserved a day in court.