Full Opinion

Notice: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the Atlantic and Maryland Reporters. Users are requested to notify the Clerk of the Court of any formal errors so that corrections may be made before the bound volumes go to press. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS No. 19-CF-0143 D.W., APPELLANT, V. UNITED STATES, APPELLEE. Appeal from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (2017-CF2-014804) (Robert A. Salerno, Judge) (Argued en banc December 10, 2025 Decided July 2, 2026) Jaclyn S. Frankfurt, Public Defender Service, with whom Samia Fam, Dennis Martin, KC Bridges, Mikel-Meredith Weidman, and Victoria Hall-Palerm, Public Defender Service, were on the briefs, for appellant. Mark Hobel, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Michael R. Sherwin, Acting United States Attorney at the time the brief was filed, Matthew M. Graves, United States Attorney at the time the supplemental brief was filed, and Elizabeth Trosman, Suzanne Grealy Curt, Amy Joy Thomas, Chrisellen R. Kolb, and John P. Mannarino, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the briefs, for appellee. Before BLACKBURNE-RIGSBY, Chief Judge, BECKWITH, EASTERLY, MCLEESE, DEAHL, HOWARD, and SHANKER, Associate Judges, and GLICKMAN, Senior Judge. 2 Opinion for the court by Associate Judge DEAHL, with whom BLACKBURNE- RIGSBY, Chief Judge, EASTERLY, HOWARD, and SHANKER, Associate Judges, and GLICKMAN, Senior Judge, join. Opinion concurring in the judgment by Associate Judge MCLEESE at page 28. Dissenting opinion by Associate Judge BECKWITH at page 44. DEAHL, Associate Judge: Appellant D.W. was standing with a group of six other people outside the Geraldine apartment complex one afternoon. The group was hanging out near one of the complex’s breezeways, near the end of a long walkway that ran about 100 feet to the public sidewalk in front of the complex. A police cruiser with four officers stopped near the entrance to that walkway, and two uniformed officers exited the car and started toward it. Within two or three seconds, right as the officers stepped onto the walkway, D.W. and one of the other men in the group saw the approaching officers and took off running. The officers chased D.W. for about a minute, following him through a parking lot, down an alley, and through a nearby home’s rear and side yard to a tall chain-link fence that D.W. scaled. The initially pursuing officers gave up the chase at that point, but a different officer jumped the fence after D.W. and managed to grab his leg as he was trying to hop over a second tall fence. D.W. dropped a gun as he was being apprehended. D.W. was charged with several firearm-related offenses and, after the trial court denied his motion to suppress the gun, he was convicted of all counts at a stipulated trial. D.W. appealed his convictions, and a panel of this 3 court vacated them on the grounds that officers lacked reasonable suspicion to seize D.W. See D.W. v. United States, 339 A.3d 175, 182-83 (D.C. 2025). This court sua sponte granted en banc rehearing and vacated that opinion. D.W. v. United States, 341 A.3d 27, 27 (D.C. 2025). We now hold that the officers had the requisite reasonable articulable suspicion to justify their seizure of D.W. when they grabbed his leg. We reach that conclusion largely because D.W. ran upon the mere sight of police officers approaching from a substantial distance, with little indication that they were intent on stopping, searching, or even questioning him in particular. D.W. had not been singled out in any way and, to that point, had little reason to think he could not simply go about his business. The desperation of D.W.’s flight, in which he scaled two tall fences, and the testimony that at least “five to ten” “violent crimes” occur per year at this particular apartment complex further supports our conclusion. Considering those circumstances in their totality, we conclude that D.W.’s seizure was supported by reasonable articulable suspicion, so that the trial court correctly denied his suppression motion. We thus affirm D.W.’s convictions. I. Background One August afternoon, several uniformed officers in the Metropolitan Police Department’s Crime Suppression Team drove to the Geraldine apartment complex 4 in Southeast D.C. on “routine patrol” as part of their “normal, everyday operations.” The officers were not responding to a specific call or report of criminal activity. They were there “just to check the area” for “any type of illegal activity,” as they had done before on numerous occasions, believing the Geraldine to be a “high-crime area.” A police cruiser with four officers in it stopped at the entrance of a long walkway that ran from the sidewalk to the entrances of three apartment buildings in the complex. The walkway also led to a breezeway—a passageway through two of those buildings—that was a bit past those building entrances. D.W. was hanging out with six other individuals near that breezeway. There did not appear to be any other people outside in that part of the complex. Officers Dmitry Gendelman and John Bewley exited the car and approached the walkway. Below is a screenshot from Officer Gendelman’s body worn camera footage just before D.W. and another man broke off from the group and sprinted away from the officers. To highlight a few details, two of which come into clearer focus as the video progresses: (1) Bewley is in the forefront of the footage a few feet from the walkway; (2) one entrance to the apartment buildings is to the left of the walkway about halfway up, a second is straight ahead, and a third is to the right, though it is obscured by some bushes here; and (3) several individuals are gathered near the breezeway, which is to the left of the entrance that is straight ahead, though they are barely visible in this screenshot. Gendelman is about 100 feet from the breezeway at 5 this point in our estimation, see infra note 3, though there was no finding about the precise distance in the record aside from testimony that the officers were “pretty far away.” D.W., 339 A.3d at 178. Within about a second of the above—as the officers stepped onto the walkway—D.W. and an otherwise unidentified man in a blue shirt took off running through the breezeway, with D.W. running at a “full sprint.” The two officers ran after the men. As the officers approached the breezeway, four of the five people who remained did not react in any noticeable way, but one man lifted his shirt as if to show that he had nothing in his waistband. The officers ran by that group and through the breezeway, then chased the fleeing men through a small parking lot, down an 6 alley, and through the rear and side yard of a nearby home. D.W. effectively eluded Gendelman and Bewley after about forty-five seconds when he jumped a tall chain- link fence that was about six feet high. At that point, Officers Gendelman and Bewley both turned their attention to the man in the blue shirt, who had stopped running near the front door of a nearby house and put his hands up as the officers apprehended him. Gendelman handcuffed the man, lifted his shirt, patted down his “crotch area” for weapons, and left him handcuffed in public view as officers canvassed the area for any discarded contraband. That man was ultimately released after officers apparently found nothing incriminating on him or in his flight path. Turning back to D.W.: While he escaped Gendelman and Bewley by scaling a tall chain-link fence, a third officer on the scene, Krishaon Ewing, was not so easily evaded. Ewing had arrived at the complex in a second cruiser parked outside the view of those in the breezeway. After hearing calls about the ongoing chase, Ewing ran through the complex and got close to D.W. just after he climbed over the first tall fence. Ewing then likewise scaled the fence and chased D.W. for another fifteen seconds or so until D.W. tried to scale a second tall fence. Ewing grabbed D.W.’s right leg as he reached the top of that fence and repeatedly shouted “Stop” and “I’m not letting go,” at which point D.W.’s pants got snagged on the fence. Ewing then 7 saw D.W. pull out a firearm from his pants and drop it on the ground. Several other officers caught up to the pair within seconds, helped dislodge and apprehend D.W., and recovered the firearm that D.W. dropped. At the suppression hearing, Officers Bewley and Ewing testified to the above facts and to their views that the Geraldine complex was a “high-crime area.” Bewley did not know exactly how many violent crimes had occurred at the complex in the previous year or two but agreed it was “common knowledge” among MPD officers that it was a high-crime area, which he described as an area where “five to ten” or more “violent crimes” occur per year. According to Bewley, the complex was “known for drug trafficking, drug sales and gun violence,” and he had personally responded to reports of homicides and assault with a dangerous weapon there. When asked if he would consider the Geraldine a high-crime area if “hypothetically” there were only “four violent crimes” there in the past year, Bewley said “[n]o.” Bewley also testified that he had performed searches of men at the complex before and that those searches typically involved checking their “crotch area” in the same manner that Gendelman had searched the man in the blue shirt before releasing him. Bewley further agreed that suspects who are stopped might be handcuffed and detained in plain view of the public, as the man in the blue shirt was, and forced to wait there for “possibly” thirty minutes, and “quite possibly” an hour or more if 8 that’s how long it took to complete a sweep of the surrounding area. Bewley also agreed it was “typical for some men” to put their arms out in a T-shape or lift their shirts when officers approach them at the Geraldine. As for Ewing, he had made “a lot of arrests” and recovered “numerous” firearms and narcotics at the complex in the past, and he said it had a “reputation” as a high-crime area, which he described as an area where officers “consistently do drug busts . . . [and] recover firearms” and where “multiple shootings and stabbings have occurred.” Like Bewley, Ewing had seen people at the Geraldine lift their shirts to expose their waistbands in response to approaching officers before, though he would not venture a guess about how many times he had seen that behavior. While he testified that there were some generic “complaints” about “drug activity” in front of the complex, he did not know if there were any complaints on the day D.W. was arrested. According to Ewing, when he first arrived at the complex, he began speaking to people mingling outside about those generic complaints. As depicted in Ewing’s body worn camera footage, which initially captured no audio, three people in the area where he arrived simply went about their business with no apparent reaction to him. Ewing then approached another group of four people a bit further down the block. One man in that second group, after some verbal exchange with Ewing, put 9 his arms straight out to his sides (forming a T-shape) just as Ewing’s camera began capturing audio. The audio picks up as Ewing says “I’m gonna check and make sure alright,” suggesting that Ewing had just asked if the man had any weapons on him, and the man had answered in the negative while holding his arms out to submit to a patdown search. Within a second, before Ewing could conduct that search, Ewing heard another officer’s calls indicating there was a chase in the back of the complex. Ewing took off running toward it and eventually caught D.W., as described above. 1 After hearing the testimony and reviewing the body worn camera footage, the trial court denied D.W.’s motion to suppress, calling it a “very close case.” The court found that D.W. was seized when Officer Ewing grabbed his leg, so that the relevant question was whether officers had reasonable articulable suspicion to seize him at that point. The court found that the officers had that requisite suspicion, stressing three factors: (1) D.W.’s “immediate and headlong” flight upon the “mere sight of police”; (2) the fact that his flight was “sustained over a distance” with D.W. 1 D.W. presented one witness of his own at the suppression hearing—a defense investigator. She testified that, based on public crime data, there had been no homicides within 1,000 feet of the Geraldine in the year before D.W.’s arrest, and there had been only one homicide—a stabbing—in the previous three years. The investigator focused her search exclusively on homicides near the Geraldine, however, and she did not look up any information about the prevalence of other violent crimes, gun arrests, or drug offenses at or near the complex, so the trial court found her testimony was of little import. 10 “jumping fences along the way in an apparent desperation to escape”; and (3) the officers’ testimony about the Geraldine being a “high-crime area.” The trial court denied D.W.’s suppression motion and convicted him of all counts at a stipulated trial. He now appeals those convictions, challenging the denial of his suppression motion. II. Analysis The only issue in this case is whether the officers had reasonable articulable suspicion to seize D.W. when Officer Ewing grabbed his leg. We review that question de novo and defer to the trial court’s factual findings unless they are clearly erroneous, though our review of the record is not limited to the trial court’s express findings. See Mayo v. United States, 315 A.3d 606, 616-17 (D.C. 2024) (en banc). That is, in addition to those findings, we may “examine[] other record evidence presented at a suppression hearing to determine whether the government proved that a defendant’s constitutional rights were not violated.” Id. at 617. Police officers may lawfully stop a person under the Fourth Amendment if they have “reasonable suspicion supported by specific and articulable facts that the individual is involved in criminal activity.” Id. at 620 (quoting Golden v. United States, 248 A.3d 925, 933 (D.C. 2021)). Although reasonable articulable suspicion 11 requires “considerably less than proof of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence,” id. (quoting Kansas v. Glover, 589 U.S. 376, 380 (2020)), officers must articulate more than an “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or hunch of criminal activity,” Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119, 123-24 (2000) (quoting Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 27 (1968)). Reasonable suspicion is based on the totality of the facts available to the officers at the moment of the seizure. Mayo, 315 A.3d at 620 (citing Terry, 392 U.S. at 21-22). When assessing the totality of the circumstances, we are required “to consider ‘the whole picture,’” cognizant that “the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts—especially when the parts are viewed in isolation.” District of Columbia v. R.W., 146 S. Ct. 1069, 1072-73 (2026) (per curiam) (quoting District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 60-61 (2018)). We agree with the trial court that three factors, when taken together, provided officers with the reasonable articulable suspicion necessary to justify their seizure of D.W. They are: (1) D.W.’s headlong flight upon the mere sight of officers headed in his general direction from a substantial distance, with no indication that they were focused on him in particular or that he would not be allowed to go about his business; (2) the officers’ testimony about criminal activity at the Geraldine complex; and (3) the desperation evinced by D.W.’s protracted and somewhat treacherous flight, including his successful jumping of one tall fence and thwarted scaling of another. 12 The first factor does the heavy lifting in our analysis, while we accord substantially less weight to the other two factors. Before fleshing out the importance of those factors, and the counterpoints that D.W. offers, we first provide a primer on this court’s recent en banc opinion in Mayo. The parties agree that Mayo is central to this appeal. A. Mayo v. United States D.W.’s principal argument is that “Mayo requires reversal” of his convictions because it established that headlong flight in an area that officers generically describe as “high crime” cannot, without more, provide reasonable articulable suspicion for a seizure. That is too sweeping a reading of Mayo, which repeatedly stressed that the “context” of the flight weighs heavily in assessing how incriminating it is, Mayo, 315 A.3d at 612, 623, 625-27, 634, as we will further explain below. In Mayo, three officers in MPD’s Gun Recovery Unit, or GRU, pulled their unmarked vehicle into an alley in the Kenilworth neighborhood, where a group of at least five people were hanging out. Id. at 612-13. As with the present case, the officers were not responding to any report of criminal activity and did not see any criminal activity afoot. Id. at 613. At least one of the officers, while still sitting in 13 his vehicle, immediately focused his attention on Mayo, who had “disengaged” from the core group and begun talking “with a man in a wheelchair” nearby as the officers pulled their vehicle up. Id. While Mayo had his back to the officers so that they “could not actually observe Mr. Mayo’s hands,” Mayo’s arm movements suggested his “hands were moving somewhere in front of him near the waistband level.” Id. at 623-24. That raised the officers’ suspicions. The three officers then exited their car as the entire group casually dispersed in reaction to their presence. Id. at 614, 622. Upon exiting their car, the three officers immediately “singled Mr. Mayo out from the already-dispersed group,” with two officers walking directly toward Mayo, and the third officer walking parallel to him in a flanking maneuver. Id. at 628 (describing “two officers directly behind Mr. Mayo and another taking a parallel path”). Mayo walked away from the officers at first, just as the other individuals in the alley had done. Id. at 613, 628. Undeterred, the officers “closed in on him” and said: “Hey, we just want to talk. We just want to talk to you. Do you have any guns?” Id. at 628. At that point, Mayo ran away from the converging officers and one of the officers leapt at him and “managed to trip up one of Mr. Mayo’s feet,” which constituted the relevant seizure in need of justification in Mayo. Id. at 613. In analyzing the extent to which those facts contributed to reasonable articulable suspicion, we stressed that flight’s incriminating weight “depends on 14 context.” Id. at 626; see also id. at 627 (“[W]e consider to what degree Mr. Mayo’s flight, considered in context, could have been reasonably interpreted by the officers as consciousness of guilt.”). The relevant context in Mayo was that, just prior to Mayo’s flight, the “officers took a series of actions that they should have reasonably understood to communicate to a person in Mr. Mayo’s position that they planned to stop him” with no legal justification for doing so, despite his initial attempt to simply walk away. Id. at 628. That context severely mitigated any consciousness of guilt that could have been inferred from Mayo’s flight. See id. at 627-28. And the fact that Mayo had initially walked away from officers likewise did not “significantly bolster the government’s showing of articulable suspicion” because that was merely an attempt by Mayo “to exercise his right not to participate in an encounter with police officers.” Id. at 622 (quoting Bennett v. United States, 26 A.3d 745, 753 (D.C. 2011)); see also Brown v. United States, 590 A.2d 1008, 1019 (D.C. 1991) (“Citizens have no legal obligation to talk to the police.”). We further explained that those facts were “nothing like” the facts in Wardlow, where the Supreme Court held there was reasonable articulable suspicion to seize a fleeing suspect after he “took one look at police officers” driving by him in a police caravan “and ran.” Mayo, 315 A.3d at 627-28 (discussing Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 121-22). Mayo stressed that “[f]light is not merely a box that, once checked, automatically justifies a stop.” Id. at 625 (quoting Posey v. United States, 201 A.3d 15 1198, 1204 (D.C. 2019)); see also id. (“[F]light cannot imply consciousness of guilt in all cases.” (quoting Miles v. United States, 181 A.3d 633, 641 (D.C. 2018))). Unlike in Wardlow, where the officers did not seem to be focused or converging on Wardlow before he fled, the officers in Mayo “had communicated [to Mayo] that they specifically suspected him,” without sufficient basis, “of criminal activity and were targeting him for investigation” prior to his flight, thereby substantially reducing the incriminating value of his flight in the reasonable suspicion calculus. Id. at 632. In Mayo, we also reaffirmed “that locational evidence about criminal activity presented by the government can be a relevant consideration” in the reasonable suspicion calculus. Id. At the same time, we hastened to “disavow the unhelpful ‘high-crime area’ label” that had permeated our cases, id., explaining that such “bare” and “conclusory” labels were too generic to be afforded any real weight. Id. at 634. We instead explained that “the value of general locational crime information in interpreting potentially suspicious conduct will be a fact-intensive inquiry” that turns on “the quality and specificity of the information, with particular focus on the recency, frequency, and geographic proximity of the relevant criminal activity.” Id. at 635. The only specific locational evidence offered in Mayo was an officer’s testimony that his unit had recovered “over 10 guns” in the previous three years in the “Kenilworth area,” a neighborhood “of unknown boundaries.” Id. at 636. That 16 “weak tea,” as we described it, was not “sufficiently specific or well-grounded to place Mr. Mayo’s innocuous conduct in a different light or make his flight more indicative of consciousness of guilt.” Id. Based on that totality of circumstances considered “collectively,” id. at 622, 637, we concluded that officers did not have reasonable articulable suspicion to seize Mayo given (1) the circumstances of his flight, which was prompted by the officers’ seeming disregard of his attempt to simply walk away from them; and (2) the weak general locational crime testimony. Id. at 637. B. The Present Case We reaffirm the principles articulated by this court in Mayo, 2 and now turn to the application of those principles to the present case. We first assess the relevant 2 Our concurring colleague, who was the lone dissenter in Mayo, incorrectly asserts that this court in Mayo utilized a “divide-and-conquer” approach “rather than considering factors collectively.” Post at 29-30 (McLeese, J., concurring in the judgment). And because the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the longstanding principle that pertinent factors must be viewed collectively when conducting Fourth Amendment analyses, see R.W., 146 S. Ct. at 1072-73, our colleague argues that we “should be reconsidering Mayo rather than reaffirming it,” post at 30. This critique is unfounded, as our dissenting colleague persuasively explains. See post at 44-49 (Beckwith, J., dissenting). The court in Mayo expressly and substantively considered the totality of circumstances “collectively,” including the flight and the particular details of the “general location[al] crime evidence presented by the government” “taken together” with the other pertinent factors. Mayo, 315 A.3d at 622, 637. We did not impose any “threshold requirement” for weighing any factor in the reasonable articulable suspicion calculus, as the concurrence posits, post at 31-32, 17 context of D.W.’s flight, which is quite different from that in Mayo, and far more analogous to the context that justified a seizure in Wardlow. We then consider the locational crime evidence and the desperate nature of Mayo’s flight, though we accord substantially less weight to those factors. Unlike in Mayo, officers had not singled D.W. out before he ran away, nor was it obvious upon their arrival that they were even particularly interested in the group that D.W. was a part of. When D.W. took off sprinting through the breezeway, Officers Gendelman and Bewley had just arrived on the scene and were about 100 feet away from him as they started up the walkway that led both to the breezeway aside from requiring that the evidence be “relevant” and “nonconclusory.” Id. at 632- 34 (rejecting the bare “high-crime area” label because it invites a non-fact-specific analysis). Those are requirements that R.W. itself reiterated. 146 S. Ct. at 1071 (requiring a “‘particularized and objective basis’” for suspecting criminal wrongdoing (quoting United States v. Arvizu, 534 U.S. 266, 273 (2002) (emphasis added))). We instead explained why, under the particular circumstances in Mayo, we attached little weight to the incriminating force of the flight and general locational crime evidence both as standalone factors and when viewed in combination with the totality of other circumstances. Our concurring colleague “do[es] not object to courts initially considering the general significance of individual factors before considering the totality of the circumstances,” post at 34, and while those individual factors will “often [be] greater than the sum of [their] parts,” R.W., 146 S. Ct. at 1072, that is not invariably so. An insignificant standalone factor, like the paltry evidence of Kenilworth being a “high-crime area” in Mayo, might be just as insignificant when considered alongside other factors. This court simply did not engage in the sort of “divide-and-conquer” approach that our concurring colleague now alleges in perceiving a conflict between the Mayo and R.W. opinions. Mayo already steadfastly adhered to the principles since reaffirmed in R.W., so that R.W. provides no occasion to reexamine Mayo’s analysis. 18 and to the entrances of three buildings in the complex. 3 They did not yell toward, point at, or otherwise signal to the group that they were coming for them. For all D.W. knew, those officers were going to one of the three apartment building entrances that were closer to the officers than he was, perhaps in response to a domestic dispute or other call. In other words, while the facts in Mayo looked “nothing like” Wardlow, id. at 627, 4 the facts here look an awful lot like Wardlow, in which the court opined that “[h]eadlong flight—wherever it occurs—is the consummate act of evasion.” 528 U.S. at 124. The Supreme Court recently reiterated the point, noting that “‘unprovoked flight upon noticing the police . . . . is certainly suggestive’ of 3 The division more modestly estimated that D.W. was “over fifty feet” away from the officers. D.W., 339 A.3d at 178. While that is certainly true, it is also safe to say the officers were closer to 100 feet away even on a conservative estimate. A Google Maps overlay of the Geraldine complex and its accompanying scale are available here: https://perma.cc/DZ99-FRDY?type=image. They show that the walkway from the sidewalk to the building straight ahead, even before the left turn to the breezeway, is about 100 feet long. See Pahls v. Thomas, 718 F.3d 1210, 1216 n.1 (10th Cir. 2013) (taking “judicial notice of a Google map” and its estimated distance between two points as a “source[ ] whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned” (alteration in original) (quoting Fed. R. Evid. 201(b)); Reed v. State, 595 S.W.3d 391, 395 (Ark. Ct. App. 2020) (collecting cases and noting that “there seems to be an emerging consensus that courts can use Google Maps to establish the distance between two geographic points”). 4 One member of this majority did not participate in Mayo, and he doubts the court reached the right result after applying the relevant legal principles to the facts of that case. See D.W., 339 A.3d at 186 (Glickman, J., concurring dubitante). 19 wrongdoing.” R.W., 146 S. Ct. at 1072 (quoting Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 124). Here, D.W. “took one look at police officers” who were at a considerable distance from his group “and ran” before they had indicated any particular focus on him. See Mayo, 315 A.3d at 627-28 (discussing Wardlow, 528 U.S. at 121-22). So in contrast to Mayo’s flight, D.W.’s headlong flight could far more “reasonably [have been] interpreted by the officers as consciousness of guilt.” Id. at 627. We note two other factors that add some further support for the stop, though we attach significantly less weight to them: (1) the general locational crime evidence here was more particularized than it was in Mayo, both in its detail and in its geographical focus on this particular apartment complex (though it was still somewhat vague); and (2) D.W.’s protracted and treacherous flight evinced far more desperation than Mayo’s brief dash away from converging officers before he was seized. On the first point, we agree with D.W. that the officers’ testimony that the Geraldine had a “reputation” as a high-crime area and was “known” for drug- and gun-related crimes should be given little to no weight. Those observations are on par with the bare and conclusory “high-crime” descriptors that we gave no weight to in Mayo. But there was quite a bit more here, and it was far more particularized to the Geraldine complex itself rather than to a boundary-less neighborhood, as in Mayo: 20 (1) Bewley testified that he had personally responded to reports at the Geraldine of “homicides, assault with dangerous weapon, guns, [and] knives”; (2) Bewley explained, when opining that the Geraldine is a high-crime area, that what he meant by that is it was an area where at least “five to ten” “violent crimes” occur per year; (3) Ewing had personally responded to complaints from residents about drug activity in front of the Geraldine; and (4) Ewing had recovered “numerous firearms [and] narcotics” and made “a lot of arrests” for firearms and narcotics at the complex. The officers did not offer any hard statistics to back up these assertions, which certainly could have added to their weight. But this testimony is still markedly stronger than the cryptic testimony in Mayo that “over 10 guns” were recovered in the boundary- less “Kenilworth area” across a three-year period. Id. at 636. It has at least some slight weight in the reasonable suspicion calculus, in our view. On the second point, the desperation evinced by D.W.’s flight also adds some slight support in favor of the officers having reasonable suspicion for a seizure. Recall that D.W. led officers on an extended chase for approximately a minute in and around the Geraldine complex—through a parking lot, down an alley, through a yard, over a tall fence, and halfway over a second fence. That D.W. “went to such lengths” to escape the police made it even more reasonable for officers to infer that he was running not because of “mere fear” or an “ordinary desire to avoid police contact,” but rather because of consciousness of guilt. See Miles, 181 A.3d at 644 21 (citing Dalton v. United States, 58 A.3d 1005, 1013 (D.C. 2013)); see also Duhart v. United States, 589 A.2d 895, 900 (D.C. 1991) (“[T]he circumstances of the suspect’s efforts to avoid the police must be such as [to] permit a rational conclusion that flight indicated a consciousness of guilt.” (quoting In re D.J., 532 A.2d 138, 141 (D.C. 1987))). We do not mean to overstate the point. If you are going to run away from the police in the first place—which an innocent person might do for “myriad reasons,” Miles, 181 A.3d at 641—you are in some sense in for a penny, in for a pound, and will likely go to some lengths to get away. But the stakes of failing to escape surely inform how far you are willing to go. To illustrate the point, if a suspect flees across a heavily trafficked highway with speeding cars brushing just past him, there is far more reason to think he is seeking to evade arrest for a serious crime, rather than to avoid the considerable indignities of a brief stop and search. While scaling tall fences over the course of a protracted chase is not nearly so perilous as that, it does evince some desperation that, in our view, lends context and weight to the incriminating nature of D.W.’s flight. See Dalton, 58 A.3d at 1012-13 (concluding that the police had reasonable articulable suspicion to stop Dalton where, in addition to his unprovoked flight upon “noticing” the officers, he “abandoned his bicycle in a traffic lane and fled on foot onto the nearby sidewalk”). 22 Considering (1) that D.W. fled immediately upon the mere sight of approaching officers, (2) the somewhat detailed and geographically particularized testimony about persistent crime at the Geraldine complex, and (3) the desperation evinced by the nature of D.W.’s flight, we conclude that officers had reasonable articulable suspicion to seize D.W. at the time Ewing grabbed his leg. C. D.W.’s and the Dissent’s Counterpoints D.W. and our dissenting colleague nonetheless implore us to consider the officers’ frequent patrols at the Geraldine and the fact that some individuals there seemed conditioned to submit to the mere approach of officers. D.W. stresses that (1) both Bewley and Ewing agreed it was “typical” for some people at the complex to open their arms out in a T-shape or lift their shirts in response to officers; (2) Ewing said he had searched and chased people at the Geraldine before; (3) Bewley said he had searched the “crotch area” of some people before; and (4) Bewley agreed it was typical to handcuff suspects in public view for extended periods as officers canvassed the surrounding area. Those serious indignities visited upon at least some seemingly innocent people, D.W. argues, severely mitigate the incriminating weight one can reasonably attribute to his flight. We take the point for what it is worth, but we are not convinced on this record that officers had engaged in such systemic provocation at the Geraldine that they 23 should have understood D.W.’s flight as more consistent with the “apprehensiveness that would naturally be felt” by someone in his shoes than with consciousness of guilt. Mayo, 315 A.3d at 632 (quoting Dozier v. United States, 220 A.3d 933, 942 (D.C. 2019)). Unlike the GRU in Mayo, there was no testimony that the Crime Suppression Team had a broadly known reputation for using aggressive tactics or was specifically known among Geraldine residents for using those tactics, see id. at 631 (noting the GRU’s “reputation” and the trial court’s findings that Mayo’s group “knew” about the GRU), and we cannot infer such widespread abuse on the record before us. While our dissenting colleague asserts there was “undisputed evidence” that the Crime Suppression Team employed what she views as “aggressive” police tactics at the Geraldine, post at 50, in fact no witness—only our colleague— described their tactics that way. That is unsurprising given that the defense did not present any witnesses of its own to testify about the policing methods used at the Geraldine, or the residents’ reactions to them. That record comes strictly from Officers Ewing and Bewley, who described heavy policing in an area that seemed to call for it—that is, a heavy police presence at a distinct complex that was rife with crime, with the frequent patrols regularly yielding arrests for serious crimes. 5 5 The defense did present an investigator who testified about the prevalence of homicides near the Geraldine in the three years before D.W.’s arrest. But that investigator rather curiously—one might say conspicuously—searched only for data 24 D.W. and our dissenting colleague counter that three of the other thirteen people outside the Geraldine that day—twelve Black males and one Black female— responded to the officers’ approach in a manner suggesting that people at the Geraldine regularly experienced aggressive policing: (1) one man by the breezeway lifted his shirt as Bewley and Gendelman ran past him after D.W. (four men in that area had no obvious reaction to the officers’ approach); (2) the “man in the blue shirt” also fled through the breezeway just as D.W. had, despite officers recovering no guns or drugs on him or in his flight path; and (3) one man placed his arms in a T-shape after some unknown verbal exchange as Ewing approached him (five men and one woman in Ewing’s vicinity had no obvious reaction to his approach). That is surely some evidence that police had used heavy-handed tactics at the Geraldine, or in policing the District’s Black residents more generally. See Dozier, 220 A.3d at 944 (noting that Black individuals might have a “particularly justified” fear of police that can mitigate the incriminating weight of their flight). We agree in principle with our dissenting colleague that this at least slightly mitigates the incriminating nature of D.W.’s flight, but it does not drag the totality of circumstances below the reasonable suspicion bar. Notably, the significant majority of people at the Geraldine just went about their business when the officers on homicides in that area, and offered no testimony about other violent crimes or the frequency of arrests for illegal guns and drugs in the area. 25 approached, in contrast to Mayo, where everybody in the area dispersed upon the GRU’s arrival. See 315 A.3d at 622. As for the one other person who fled—the man in the blue shirt—while it appears that no incriminating evidence was found on him or in his flight path, that does not mean he was “innocent,” as our dissenting colleague declares. Post at 50. He did not testify as to his innocence, nor did anybody else, and we cannot entirely discount the possibilit