New York stands alone among the fifty states in applying a four-tiered framework to evaluate the constitutionality of police-initiated encounters with the public. Established by the New York Court of Appeals in People v. De Bour, the framework was designed to afford New Yorkers greater protection against arbitrary police intrusion than the federal standard articulated in Terry v. Ohio. This Note argues that nearly five decades of judicial interpretation have transformed De Bour’s promise of heightened protection into a pliable instrument of unchecked police discretion, rendering the framework unworkable and constitutionally inadequate.
This Note employs a two-part methodology. Doctrinally, it traces the development of De Bour through its common law progeny to demonstrate how judicial interpretation has progressively eroded the framework’s protective promise. Empirically, it synthesizes 146 New York Appellate Division decisions from the decade following Floyd v. City of New York, distilling each into a formula that maps the factors courts employed and the often-unpredictable progression across De Bour’s four levels of permissible police engagement. This analysis reveals that in over 75% of the cases reviewed, courts relied on vague, racialized, and non-criminal behavioral factors—such as furtive movement, flight, “blading,” and presence in a high-crime area—to justify escalations in police intrusion.
This Note concludes that De Bour no longer serves the ends of justice and calls for its replacement with a single, uniform standard requiring articulable suspicion of an ongoing or completed felony or misdemeanor for all police-initiated encounters. The analysis contributes to existing Fourth Amendment scholarship by offering a systematic empirical account of De Bour’s structural failures and a concrete doctrinal path toward greater protection of civil liberties in New York.