Full Opinion

Filed 10/22/26 CERTIFIED FOR PUBLICATION IN THE COURT OF APPEAL OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA SECOND APPELLATE DISTRICT DIVISION EIGHT THE PEOPLE, B348094 Plaintiff and Respondent, Los Angeles County Super. Ct. No. 25CMCF00027 v. ANTHONY THOMAS, Defendant and Appellant. APPEAL from an order of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, Danette J. Gomez, Judge. Reversed and remanded with instructions. Laura Vavakin, under appointment by the Court of Appeal, for Defendant and Appellant. Rob Bonta, Attorney General, Charles C. Ragland, Chief Assistant Attorney General, Susan Sullivan Pithey, Assistant Attorney General, Scott A. Taryle and David A. Voet, Deputy Attorneys General, for Plaintiff and Respondent. ____________________ Police suspected Anthony Thomas was up to no good. They searched his car, found a gun, and charged him with a gun crime. Usually police need probable cause to search a person or a car, but probable cause is legally unnecessary if the search qualifies as an inventory search. The rationale for this lesser standard is that a proper inventory search is not for the purpose of finding evidence of a crime, but rather serves community caretaking functions divorced from prosecutorial investigations. This weakened standard for an inventory search—no probable cause is needed—creates a law enforcement temptation about which courts must be vigilant. In this case, no community caretaking function justified this search, which lacked probable cause. We suppress the gun evidence. I Police saw Thomas violate two traffic ordinances—speeding and driving over the center line. Officers never ticketed Thomas for these traffic infractions. Rather, they observed Thomas park in a marked spot in a parking lot. Thomas began to walk away, but police drove up and spoke to him. Thomas did not try to run away. The officers told Thomas, “We know why you pulled in here.” Thomas said he pulled into the lot because he had to pee, which was why he had been speeding. The officers ran a check on the car’s license plate for warrants but, due to their mistake with the plate number, the search came back with no information. Police admitted this “no information” response made them suspicious: “For us, it meant there was something wrong with the vehicle. Possibly it was some sort of -- we needed to conduct a V.I.N. verification. And at 2 that point I advised [Thomas] that the vehicle would be impounded.” The arresting officer believed Thomas was “possibly in a stolen vehicle.” She repeated she “suspected it could be a stolen vehicle.” The police said the basis for this impound decision was subdivision j of section 22651 of the Vehicle Code. This provision authorizes police to impound vehicles that are illegally parked and that are displaying no license plates or other evidence of registration. Thomas’s car, however, was parked legally and indeed was displaying license plates. The prosecution has not suggested the car lacked proper license plates. With our emphasis, the arresting officer candidly testified that “my intent was to impound the vehicle at that time and conduct further investigation.” Thomas said the car belonged to his mother, who was renting it. This explanation proved to be true. Before arresting Thomas and impounding the car, the police did not check the car’s vehicle identification number to see if it was stolen. A later check showed the car was not stolen but rather rented, as Thomas had explained at the scene. The arresting officer admitted, “I probably should have [run] the V.I.N. of the vehicle immediately, but I did not. And that was my mistake.” Thomas volunteered that he had “some sort of warrant.” Without going to her police cruiser to verify whether Thomas actually had a warrant, police told Thomas they would still be impounding the car when he was arrested on the warrant. They cuffed him. 3 Eventually police did verify Thomas had a misdemeanor warrant. They arrested him and searched the car on the spot. Inside they found a backpack with a protruding pistol. Police charged him with a gun crime. Thomas moved to suppress the gun. A police officer testified to the events we have described. At this suppression hearing, however, the prosecutor never asked the lone testifying officer whether her subjective motivation for the impound was to investigate a possible crime. Through counsel, Thomas argued to the trial court that “the inventory search doctrine is being used as a post-hoc justification for this invalid search. . . . [F]or the inventory search to be valid, the People must establish that a car was lawfully impounded for reasons other than a criminal investigation, that the search is not for contraband or evidence, and the search is under standardized procedures. . . . [N]one of these elements have been met.” Rather, Thomas maintained, police ran the wrong license plate, got a “no information” return by mistake, and then used their error to fortify their surmise that something was amiss deserving further investigation. So they decided to search the car on the pretext of an inventory search. Thomas argued that the stated justification for the impound was subdivision j of section 22651 of the Vehicle Code, which was inapplicable because Thomas had parked his car in a completely legal manner. Thomas contended that the real reason police searched his car was that “they were looking for evidence of some kind of crime.” It was “a criminal-investigation search and not an actual inventory search” as shown by the fact the first words police 4 uttered at the scene were “we know why you pulled in here.” This initial statement showed the officer “believed that [Thomas] was doing something wrong. She believed that [Thomas] was engaging in some kind of potential criminal activity.” The trial court denied Thomas’s motion. The court made no factual finding about the officers’ subjective motivation for impounding the car. After pleading guilty to a firearms charge, Thomas properly appealed the search issue. II This case presents a question of federal law. A search authorized by state law may be unreasonable under federal constitutional standards. (Cooper v. California (1967) 386 U.S. 58, 61.) The burden is on the government to justify warrantless searches. We independently review the federal question of whether a search fits within an exception to the federal warrant requirement. (People v. Simon (2016) 1 Cal.5th 98, 120.) This was not a proper search incident to arrest because there was no reason to believe evidence of the arrest offense might be found in the vehicle. (Arizona v. Gant (2009) 556 U.S. 332, 335.) The reason for the arrest was the warrant. No one suggests the car contents might relate to the warrant. This was not a proper automobile search because there was no probable cause to believe the car contained evidence of a crime. (Sellers v. Superior Court (2026) 19 Cal.5th 75, 89.) This was not a proper inventory search because the prosecution failed to offer evidence of a community caretaking function, which is required for a proper inventory search. This function cannot be a ruse for criminal investigation, because searches to obtain evidence of crime require probable cause as a 5 justification. (Florida v. Wells (1990) 495 U.S. 1, 4; Illinois v. Lafayette (1983) 462 U.S. 640, 643.) A decisive issue thus is whether an improper investigatory purpose was the subjective motivation for the police decision to impound the car. (People v. Torres (2010) 188 Cal.App.4th 775, 791.) Case law gives examples of community caretaking functions that are non-investigatory in character. Police might search a crashed car they have impounded because they justifiably believed it might contain a gun they did not want vandals to purloin. (Cady v. Dombrowski (1973) 413 U.S. 433, 437 (Cady).) This gun-safety motivation was “totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.” (Id. at p. 441.) In other examples, police on occasion may have to move damaged cars from roads to storage facilities to keep traffic flowing and so forth. Similarly, they may impound cars in violation of parking ordinances. These impounding officers are not searching for evidence of crimes; they instead are managing traffic arteries and public spaces for the welfare of the traveling public. These actions, and the inventory searches that accompany them, do not require a probable cause justification. (South Dakota v. Opperman (1976) 428 U.S. 364, 368–369.) The evidence at this suppression hearing, however, established no innocuous public-service management function. Thomas had parked the legally rented car in a proper slot in an open parking lot. In the uncrowded lot, Thomas’s car was not blocking or impeding traffic. The license plates, which were lawful, supplied no reason for police suspicion or intervention. 6 The prosecution tells us the parking lot was of a closed business and suggests cars therefore could not park there. No testimony supported this post-hoc theory. The evidence did not suggest parking in this lot was restricted by time or in any other way. Moreover, had the car somehow been in an inconvenient spot, police afforded Thomas no opportunity to telephone someone to move the car elsewhere, such as his mother, whom Thomas accurately told officers had lawfully rented the car. (See Blakes v. Superior Ct. (2021) 72 Cal.App.5th 904, 914.) Nor was there testimony about how long Thomas’s misdemeanor arrest might separate him from the car. Police did speak to a security guard at the lot but did not ask whether Thomas’s car posed any sort of issue. They asked only if the guard knew Thomas. The guard did not know Thomas. This proved nothing. No testimony supported the notion that Thomas’s car might have been a target for vandals or theft on this guarded lot. (Cf. Cady, supra, 413 U.S. at p. 443.) Police made their investigatory suspicions plain when they told Thomas straight away “we know why you pulled in here.” As stated, the police motivation “was to impound the vehicle at that time and conduct further investigation.” The inventory exception does not give police a blank check to investigate their intuitions that a car search might turn up evidence of a crime. The prosecution refrained from questioning the officer about her subjective suspicion. The trial court did not make findings on that score. The burden was on the prosecution, and the prosecution did not make its case to justify this warrantless search. 7 Active law enforcement is essential to public safety. Discovering gun crimes serves the public. Judges are all too familiar with how easy availability of an illegal gun can turn a minor dispute into homicide. But officers cannot use an inventory search as the justification when, as here, their goal was to hunt for evidence of illicit conduct, and they provided insufficient evidence of a caretaking need. Police must develop probable cause when they suspect someone is a criminal and they think a search will prove it. DISPOSITION We reverse and remand for the trial court to vacate its order denying the suppression motion and to issue an order granting the motion. WILEY, ACTING P. J. We concur: VIRAMONTES, J. SCHERB, J. 8