PHILADELPHIA — The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has urged judges statewide to use caution when evaluating whether police who testify in court have accurately described a neighborhood or block as a “high crime area,” saying some officers tend to apply that designation “as a matter of routine” — or even sometimes use it to try to justify legally questionable pedestrian stops.

The guidance came in an opinion released last week in which the high court declined to create strict legal standards for how and when judges should consider an area “high crime.”

Instead, the justices said, judges should weigh a variety of factors to determine if the label is accurate, including an officer’s testimony or expertise, crime data, or tactics law enforcement might use to target certain offenses in certain areas — all of which must be elicited by prosecutors in cases where the term may be significant.

Still, Justice Kevin M. Dougherty, writing for the majority, warned that the label has become “overused” and turned into a “box-checking heuristic” for some officers who conduct pedestrian stops.

And he urged judges who may encounter the issue “to review high-crime area designations with caution and emphasize that merely intoning buzzwords is never sufficient to prove an area is high in crime.”

In a separate opinion, Justice David Wecht went even further, writing that state and federal laws that currently allow the label to be considered at all are “deeply problematic.”

“A person is not responsible for the crimes of his neighbors,” Wecht wrote. “Absent a genuine, articulable, particularized, and individual basis to suspect a person of criminal activity, we should adhere to our first principles — the ‘people shall be secure in their persons,’ regardless of the neighborhood in which they find themselves."

The opinions were the latest development in the long-running local debate over stop-and-frisk, a legal police tactic in which an officer can stop a person on the street if the officer has “reasonable suspicion” that the person’s behavior could be connected to a crime.

The tactic was widely used by police in Philadelphia more than a decade ago, but the American Civil Liberties Union sued in 2010 because officers were overwhelmingly stopping people of color, often without legal justification. The city agreed to let the ACLU monitor the practice, and stops have plummeted in the years since — from from about 200,000 in 2015 to around 12,000 last year.

The issue in this case was raised by Anthony Lewis, who was convicted of illegal gun possession in 2022, about a year after officers had stopped him on the street in North Philadelphia.

During that encounter, court documents said, the officers believed that Lewis and a group of men were illegally gambling on a street corner.

When the officers approached, the documents said, he and the others ran away. And when police caught up with Lewis, the documents said, officers discovered he’d been carrying a bag that contained a firearm he was not legally allowed to possess (DNA also later linked him to the gun, the documents said).

When the case went to court, Lewis contended that the arresting officers lacked the “reasonable suspicion” required to pursue him in the first place. The officers responded by testifying that their decision was informed by their knowledge that the area was a hot spot for illegal gambling and drug sales.

Common Pleas Court Judge Shanese Johnson sided with the officers, ruling that their pursuit was legally justified. After a bench trial, Lewis was convicted and sentenced to two-to-four years behind bars.

In his appeal, Lewis and his attorneys again argued that the officers lacked reasonable suspicion to pursue him. And this time, they added that the officers’ testimony in court calling the neighborhood a “high crime area” was both inaccurate and insufficient to overcome the lack of other reasons they had to chase him.

In addition to seeking to overturn Lewis’ case, his attorneys also proposed new rules for the future, saying that if law enforcement wanted to use the “high crime” label in court, they should have to prove it by passing a four-prong admissibility test — one that would require police and prosecutors to present a judge with evidence including crime statistics, geographic boundaries, and other metrics.

The high court declined to accept that proposal, saying it was “incompatible with the realities of street-level policing,” and adding that reasonable suspicion was a fluid concept that should not be reduced to strict, multipronged legal test.

Still, the court said judges can and should consider a variety of factors when seeking to make case-by-case determinations of whether a high-crime distinction is appropriate or relevant.

And it also said judges should be aware of how often some officers use the term, sometimes inaccurately.

“Some officers tend to intone the mantra ‘high-crime area’ simply as a matter of routine, seemingly motivated by the knowledge that the term has occasionally ‘tip[ped] the scales toward reasonable suspicion,’” Dougherty wrote.

It was not immediately clear how or if the opinion might have any impact within the Philadelphia Police Department. A police spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, and a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department declined to comment.

Wecht, in his opinion, was plainspoken about what he viewed as an antiquated concept that should be left in the past.

“The commonly invoked, broad characterizations of entire neighborhoods and the like as ‘high-crime’ are too dangerous to liberty to continue to tolerate, ” he wrote, “and we should discard them as a matter of Pennsylvania constitutional law."

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