Background
The State charged Ranken E. AhToong with attempting to flee or elude an officer and obstructing an officer. Deputy Trent Schafer had pursued a pickup truck after observing that it had only one illuminated headlight, hearing its tires squeal, and seeing it swerve and pass him at high speed. The truck accelerated after Schafer activated his emergency lights. At the end of a dead-end road, the driver jumped from the still-moving truck and ran into a wooded area. An audiovisual recording showed a small, black, rectangular object fall onto the road as the driver exited.
Officers established a perimeter and used drones rather than pursuing the driver into the woods. Deputy Allen Horn found a powered-on cell phone near the truck and gave it to Schafer. Schafer pressed the phone’s side SOS button and called 911, then asked the dispatcher for the number assigned to the phone. He did not go beyond the emergency-call function or access digital files, applications, photographs, contacts, or call logs. The opinion describes his conduct as pressing the button and calling 911 without resolving ambiguous testimony about whether an additional screen manipulation was required.
Schafer entered the number into the sheriff’s office Spillman system, which produced information associated with AhToong. Schafer then learned an associated address and used that information and Facebook on his own smartphone to locate AhToong. Officers arrested him two days later. AhToong moved to suppress the phone number and all evidence derived from it, arguing that the officer’s actions were a warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment and article I, section 11 of the Wisconsin Constitution. The Dane County Circuit Court granted suppression, reasoning that manipulating a phone to obtain a number not otherwise apparent to police was a search. The State appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals reversed. Applying the two-step standard from State v. Eason, it reviewed historical facts for clear error and the application of constitutional principles de novo. The narrow question was whether an officer in lawful possession of a phone conducted a Fourth Amendment search by pressing its side button, calling 911, and obtaining its number from the dispatcher. AhToong conceded that Schafer lawfully possessed the phone, so the seizure’s lawfulness was not at issue.
The court rejected both recognized routes for establishing a search. Under the physical-trespass theory associated with United States v. Jones, the brief use of an accessible SOS function was not comparable to attaching a GPS tracker that monitored a vehicle for 28 days. Police attached nothing to AhToong’s phone and obtained only its number. The court also noted Riley v. California’s recognition that officers may take certain steps involving phones without a warrant, including turning a phone off, removing its battery, or disabling automatic locking to prevent encryption.
Under the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy theory, the court distinguished accessing digital content from using the emergency-call function to obtain a number transmitted to a third-party dispatcher. Riley concerned searches of digital information on phones and whether those searches qualified as searches incident to arrest; it did not make every manipulation of a phone a search. The court found Georgia’s State v. Hill persuasive and rejected the contrary analysis in the unpublished Christopher Jones decisions. It also found Kyllo and Arizona v. Hicks inapposite because those decisions concerned technology not in general public use and intrusions involving a home. State v. Flynn additionally supported the limited nature of an investigation aimed at identifying a suspect.
The holding was expressly confined to the circumstances presented: Schafer sought and received only the phone number, without accessing other information. The court did not decide whether different or additional emergency data would change the analysis. Because it found no search, it did not address the State’s alternative abandonment and exigent-circumstances arguments. It also did not separately analyze the Wisconsin Constitution because AhToong did not seek an interpretation different from Fourth Amendment doctrine.
Key Takeaways
- Pressing a lawfully possessed phone’s SOS button and calling 911 to obtain only its assigned number was not a Fourth Amendment search on these facts.
- The court rejected both physical-trespass and reasonable-expectation-of-privacy theories, rather than holding that every phone manipulation is permissible.
- Riley’s warrant rule for digital phone content did not control acquisition of the number from a 911 dispatcher without access to files or other phone content.
- The suppression order was reversed; abandonment, exigency, and scenarios involving additional emergency information were not decided.
Why It Matters
The decision addresses a question the court described as novel in Wisconsin and supported by little directly comparable authority nationwide. It supplies a fact-specific framework distinguishing emergency-call acquisition of a phone number from searches of stored digital content, while engaging with conflicting federal and state decisions.
For suppression litigation, the opinion emphasizes the precise government conduct and information obtained. It does not create a universal rule for all emergency-phone functions, location information, or enhanced emergency data. The decision was recommended for publication, and the filed notice states that it remains subject to further editing.