Background
On the evening of November 12, 2020, four plainclothes officers patrolling in an unmarked vehicle in Queens observed Terrell Bryant walking near the corner of 109th Avenue and Farmers Boulevard. There was no report of criminal activity and no indication they were in a high-crime area. The officers made a turn onto Farmers Boulevard and watched Bryant walk up the driveway of 105-31 Farmers Boulevard, looking around. The officers continued to the end of the block, made a U-turn, and returned — about one minute later — to find Bryant emerging from the driveway of 105-33 Farmers Boulevard (one house over), walking close to a fence.
The officers stopped their vehicle, exited, identified themselves as police, and asked Bryant to stop. He fled on foot. During the pursuit, Bryant discarded a firearm. He was charged with attempted criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree. Supreme Court, Queens County denied suppression after a hearing, and Bryant pleaded guilty. He received a sentence and appealed the suppression ruling.
The Court’s Holding
The Appellate Division reversed the judgment of conviction, granted suppression, dismissed the indictment, and remitted for CPL 160.50 proceedings. Applying the four-level framework from People v. De Bour (40 NY2d 210), the court found that when the officers exited their vehicle, said “police,” and told Bryant to stop, the encounter escalated to at least a De Bour level-two common-law inquiry; when they pursued him, it became a level-three seizure requiring reasonable suspicion.
The court held that the observed facts — walking into one driveway, then emerging from an adjacent driveway, looking around — were equivocal conduct “susceptible of many innocent interpretations” and “at most equivocal and suspicious.” Critically, the officers had received no reports of criminal activity, did not observe Bryant looking into windows or concealing any tools, and were not in an area with elevated crime. Because the police lacked reasonable suspicion to pursue, the pursuit was unlawful. Bryant’s abandonment of the firearm during the unlawful chase was not sufficiently attenuated from the illegality, making both the gun and his subsequent statements inadmissible.
Key Takeaways
- Walking between two adjacent residential driveways while “looking around” — without more — does not provide the reasonable suspicion needed to justify a police pursuit under De Bour level three.
- Officers must ground their pursuit in specific, articulable facts pointing to criminal activity; equivocal behavior, even if suggestive, is insufficient when innocent explanations are equally plausible.
- Firearms discarded during an unlawful pursuit are suppressible under the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine, and any resulting statements are likewise excludable as direct products of the illegality.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the enduring vitality of De Bour‘s graduated framework in New York — a standard more protective than federal Fourth Amendment doctrine alone. NY practitioners should note that New York courts apply an independent state constitutional analysis that can require suppression even where federal courts would not. Defense counsel challenging pedestrian stop-and-frisk evidence or pursuit-triggered discoveries should focus on whether each increment of police intrusion was supported by the precise quantum of suspicion the De Bour level demands. Prosecutors and police departments should ensure officers document specific articulable facts — not generalizations about looking around — to establish each level of their encounter.