Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of People v. DeBour,¹ the watershed decision that articulated a four-tiered method for evaluating the propriety of street encounters initiated by police officers. Convinced of its continuing vitality, 16 years later the Court of Appeals expressed its confidence in DeBour's analysis² and recently applied the same analysis to traffic stops.³

Despite DeBour's clear delineation of four tiers or levels of encounters, lower courts have occasionally permitted an additional type of encounter that has not yet been fully addressed by the Court of Appeals. Recently, an appellate judge touched on the issue when, in disagreeing with her colleagues, she opined that “the majority is sanctioning a fifth level of police intrusion, somewhere between the common-law right of inquiry and the forcible stop, not justified by the DeBour analysis.”⁴ This column will discuss the propriety of such encounters.

Four Levels

Pursuant to level one of DeBour, an officer can approach a citizen to request information; this is permissible when there is some objective credible reason for that interference, although not necessarily indicative of criminality. Under level two, an officer can conduct a common-law right to inquire; this is activated by a founded suspicion of some minimal level of criminal activity.