No false arrest claim after bus driver locked passenger inside luggage compartment

The facts in this case are pretty horrifying: a Peter Pan bus passenger was locked inside the luggage compartment while the bus was heading from Hartford to Boston. Let that percolate for a minute. The luggage compartment is completely dark and the bus is rolling along on the highway as you bounce around with the luggage. The bus driver was arrested fro reckless endangerment and breach of the peace, but the charges were later dropped. The driver sued the police for false arrest. The claim fails on summary judgment.

The case is Alberty v. Hunter, issued on July 21. This case got quite a bit of press coverage, for the obvious reason that being locked away under the bus is a horror show.

The plaintiff bus driver was arrested because the passenger (who is unnamed in the Second Circuit ruling) told the police after she finally exited the luggage compartment that, after she climbed into the compartment to retrieve something, the plaintiff said, "Ha! Enjoy the ride!" and shut the compartment with the passenger inside. While locked in the compartment on the road, Plaintiff called the police from her cell phone. When the police stopped the bus on the highway, the passenger identified the plaintiff as the culprit and said, "you saw me, you laughed and shut the door!" That would suggest the plaintiff did this on purpose. Plaintiff was also arrested because Peter Pan bus policy says the drivers cannot allow passengers into the compartments, and the driver is responsible for securing the compartments before driving away.

The charges were dropped after the police determined that the video footage made the whole thing look like an accident, and that the plaintiff may have thought the passenger had gotten on the bus after entering the luggage compartment to retrieve whatever she was looking for. 

Here is the problem with false arrest cases, however: even if the charges are dropped, that does not mean the police lacked probable cause to arrest. The Court of Appeals (Livingston, Jacobs and Menashi) finds the police did have probable cause to arrest the bus driver based on what the passenger said she was released from the luggage compartment. While plaintiff argued that the police should have viewed the video footage sooner and realized the whole thing was an accident, the law does not require the police to conduct a thorough investigation before making an arrest.  

The noteworthy portion of this ruling is this: plaintiff cites a case from the Tenth Circuit that says that “when a videotape of the conduct at issue is both known and readily accessible to an officer investigating an alleged crime, the officer must view the videotape so as to avoid improperly delegating the officer’s duty to determine probable cause.”  Baptiste v. J.C. Penney Co., 147 F.3d 1252, 1257 n.8 (10th Cir. 1998). That language would help plaintiff. But the Tenth Circuit later characterized this language as dicta and therefore nonbinding. And in the Peter Pan case, the video footage was not immediately available to the police. The Second Circuit says, "we have never adopted a rule that officers must watch a video known to them before arresting a suspect. We do not do so here either."