FREE CASE EVALUATION

Question: Can police pull me over in Maryland if they receive a call from another motorist about my driving?

Answer: Yes, but what they need to do is, let’s say that they get an anonymous call or somebody calls in and says that there’s a car swerving all over the place. The officer needs to get up to them and actually observe the conduct that was complained about. So they can’t just pull right up and just pull the car over based off of a random or anonymous call. They need to actually somewhat confirm that this is true or that this is the car.

So, what they generally will do is they will pull up, they will observe even if it’s just for 15 seconds, they see the car swerving, and the person called in said that the car was swerving—then they have enough to stop the car and at least investigate some more. Otherwise, they would need to actually have the person who made the phone call come in and testify as to the driving. But in order for it to be a valid stop, generally the officer needs to observe some sort of that conduct in order to actually have a guaranteed solid stop, which some officers don’t do. And that’s, those are good grounds for drop.