BARNES, INDIVIDUALLY AND AS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ESTATE OF BARNES, DECEASED v. FELIX ET AL.

Respondent Roberto Felix, Jr., a law enforcement officer, pulled over
Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations. Felix ordered Barnes to
exit the vehicle, but Barnes began to drive away. As the car began to
move forward, Felix jumped onto its doorsill and fired two shots inside.
Barnes was fatally hit but managed to stop the car. About five seconds
elapsed between when the car started moving and when it stopped.
Two seconds passed between the moment Felix stepped on the doorsill
and the moment he fired his first shot.
Barnes’s mother sued Felix on Barnes’s behalf, alleging that Felix
violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right against excessive force.
The District Court granted summary judgment to Felix, applying the
Fifth Circuit’s “moment-of-threat” rule. The Court of Appeals af-
firmed, explaining that the moment-of-threat rule requires asking only
whether an officer was “in danger at the moment of the threat that
resulted in [his] use of deadly force.” 91 F. 4th 393, 397. Under the
rule, events “leading up to the shooting” are “not relevant.” Ibid. Here,
the “precise moment of threat” was the “two seconds” when Felix was
clinging to a moving car. Id., at 397–398. Because Felix could then
have reasonably believed his life in danger, the panel held, the shoot-
ing was lawful. Id., at 398.

A claim that a law enforcement officer used excessive force during
a stop or arrest is analyzed under the Fourth Amendment, which re-
quires that the force deployed be objectively reasonable from “the per-
spective of a reasonable officer at the scene.” Graham v. Connor, 490
U. S. 386, 396. The inquiry into the reasonableness of police force re-
quires analyzing the “totality of the circumstances.” County of Los An-
geles v. Mendez, 581 U. S. 420, 427–428; Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U. S.
Comment 1, 9. That analysis demands “careful attention to the facts and circum-
stances” relating to the incident. Graham, 490 U. S., at 396.
Most notable here, the “totality of the circumstances” inquiry has no
time limit. While the situation at the precise time of the shooting will
often matter most, earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a
reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones.
Prior events may show why a reasonable officer would perceive other-
wise ambiguous conduct as threatening, or instead as innocuous.
Plumhoff v. Rickard, 572 U. S. 765, well illustrates this point. There,
an officer’s use of deadly force was justified “at the moment” partly
because of what had transpired in the preceding period. Id., at 777.
The moment-of-threat rule applied below prevents that sort of at-
tention to context, and thus conflicts with this Court’s instruction to
analyze the totality of the circumstances. By limiting their view to the
two seconds before the shooting, the lower courts could not take into
account anything preceding that final moment. So, for example, they
could not consider the reasons for the stop or the earlier interactions
between the suspect and officer. And because of that limit, they could
not address whether the final two seconds of the encounter would look
different if set within a longer timeframe. A rule like that, which pre-
cludes consideration of prior events in assessing a police shooting, is
not reconcilable with the fact-dependent and context-sensitive ap-
proach this Court has prescribed. A court deciding a use-of-force case
cannot review the totality of the circumstances if it has put on chrono-
logical blinders.
The Court does not address a separate question about whether or
how an officer’s own “creation of a dangerous situation” factors into the
reasonableness analysis. The courts below never confronted that is-
sue, and it was not the basis of the petition for certiorari. Pp. 4–9.
91 F. 4th 393, vacated and remanded.