Duration
As we will discuss shortly, officers may try to confirm or dispel their suspicions in a variety of ways, such as questioning the detainee, conducting a showup, and seeking consent to search. But before we discuss these and other procedures, it is necessary to review an issue that pervades all of them: the overall length of the detention.
REASONABLENESS
An investigative detention must be reasonable in length. It is a temporary detention and can last no longer than needed to carry out the stop’s purpose. The officer should use the least intrusive investigative methods reasonably available to confirm or dispel the officer’s suspicion in a short time period. There is no “bright-line” rule as to the time limit for an investigative detention. The courts consider whether the officer diligently and reasonably pursued the investigation to confirm or dispel suspicions. The court may also consider the amount of force the officer used and the level of restriction the officer placed on the subject’s movement. A Terry stop must be reasonable in time, place, and manner.
Everything that officers do during a detention takes time, which means that everything they do is, to some extent, an intrusion on the detainee. Still, the courts understand that it would be impractical to impose strict time limits. 119 Addressing this issue, the Court of Appeal commented:
The dynamics of the detention-for-questioning situation may justify further detention, further investigation, search, or arrest. The significance of the events, discoveries, and perceptions that follow an officer’s first sighting of a candidate for detention will vary from case to case. 120
For this reason, the Supreme Court has ruled that “common sense and ordinary human experience must govern over rigid [time] criteria,” 121 which simply means that officers must carry out their duties diligently. 122 As the Court explained:
In assessing whether a detention is too long in duration to be justified as an investigative stop, we consider it appropriate to examine whether the police diligently pursued a means of investigation that was likely to confirm or dispel their suspicions quickly, during which time it was necessary to detain the defendant. 123
For example, in rejecting an argument that a detention took too long, the court in Ingle v. Superior Court pointed out, “Each step in the investigation conducted by [the officers] proceeded logically and immediately from the previous one.” 124 Responding to a similar argument in Gallegos v. City of Los Angeles, the Ninth Circuit said:
Gallegos makes much of the fact that his detention lasted forty-five minutes to an hour. While the length of Gallegos’s detention remains relevant, more important is that [the officers’] actions did not involve any delay unnecessary to their legitimate investigation. 125
OFFICERS NEED NOT RUSH
To say that officers must be diligent, does not mean they must “move at top speed” or even rush. 126 Nor does it mean (as we will discuss later) that they may not prolong the detention for a short while to ask questions that do not directly pertain to the crime under investigation. Instead, it simply means the detention must not be “measurably extended.” 127
DEVELOPMENTS AFTER THE STOP
The courts understand that detentions are not static events, and that the reasonableness of the officers’ actions often depends on what happened as things progressed, especially whether the officers reasonably became more or less suspicious, or more or less concerned for their safety.32 For example, in U.S. v. Sowers the court noted the following:
Based on unfolding events, the trooper’s attention shifted away from the equipment violations that prompted the initial stop toward a belief that the detainees were engaged in more serious skullduggery. Such a shift in focus is neither unusual nor impermissible.33 Similarly, the Seventh Circuit said that “[o]fficers faced with a fluid situation are permitted to graduate their responses to the demands of the particular circumstances confronting them.”34 Or, in the words of the California Court of Appeal, “Levels of force and intrusion in an investigatory stop may be legitimately escalated to meet supervening events,” and “[e]ven a complete restriction of liberty, if brief and not excessive under the circumstances, may constitute a valid Terry stop and not an arrest.”35
EXAMPLES
The following are circumstances that were found to warrant extended detentions:
• Waiting for backup. 128
• Waiting for an officer with special training and experience; e.g. DUI drugs, VIN location. 129
• Waiting for an interpreter. 130
• Waiting for a drug-detecting dog. 131
• Waiting to confirm detainee’s identity. 132
• Officers needed to speak with the detainee’s companions to confirm his story. 133
• Computer was slow. 134
• Officers developed grounds to investigate another crime. 135
• Officers needed to conduct a field showup. 136
• There were multiple detainees. 137
• Additional officer-safety measures became necessary. 138
For instance, in People v. Soun (discussed earlier) police officers in Oakland detained six suspects in a robbery-murder that had occurred the day before in San Jose. Although the men were detained for approximately 45 minutes, the Court of Appeal ruled the delay was justifiable in light of several factors; specifically, the number of detainees, the need for officer-safety precautions that were appropriate to a murder investigation, and the fact that the Oakland officers needed to confer with the investigating officers in San Jose. 139
DELAYS ATTRIBUTABLE TO THE DETAINEE
One of the most common reasons for prolonging an investigative detention or traffic stop is that the detainee said or did something that made it necessary to interrupt the normal progression of the stop. 140 For example, in United States v. Sharpe the Supreme Court ruled that an extended detention became necessary when the occupants of two cars did not immediately stop when officers lit them up but, instead, attempted to split up. As a result, they were detained along different parts of the roadway, which necessarily made the detention more time consuming. 141
Similarly, a delay for further questioning may be necessary because the detainee lied or was deceptive. Thus, the court U.S. v. Suitt ruled that a lengthy detention was warranted because “Suitt repeatedly gave hesitant, evasive, and incomplete answers.” 142 Finally, it should be noted that the clock stops running when officers develop probable cause to arrest, or when they convert the detention into a contact. See “Converting detentions into contacts,” below.
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