Reasonable Suspicion Legal Definition
Do you know what reasonable suspicion legal definition is? To conduct a stop and frisk, police need a legal standard of criminal procedure and balancing test by implementing reasonable suspicion for whoever is suspected of imminent illegal armed and dangerous behavior or past criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion is based on the totality of the circumstances as understood by those versed in the field of law enforcement; it is commonly described as something more than probable cause.
U.S. Supreme Court defines Legal definition of reasonable suspicion :
the sort of common-sense conclusion about human behavior upon which practical people . . . are entitled to rely.” Further, it has defined reasonable suspicion as requiring only something more than an “unarticulated hunch.” It requires facts or circumstances that give rise to more than a bare, imaginary, or purely conjectural suspicion
And what does totality of circumstances mean? It refers to an assessment based on all the circumstances, which includes objective observations, information from police reports, and consideration of the modes of patterns of operation of certain kinds of lawbreakers.
So reasonable suspicion means that any reasonable person would suspect that a crime was in the process of being committed, had been committed or was going to be committed very soon.
So what is main difference of reasonable suspicion vs probable cause? Reasonable suspicion is a step before probable cause. At the point of reasonable suspicion, it appears that a crime may have been committed. The situation escalates to probable cause when it becomes obvious that a crime has most likely been committed.
Source: Definitions of Probable Cause vs. Reasonable Suspicion


