CO: Standing outside of a liquor store in a high crime area and looking left and right and turning away when police car was visible was not RS

Being in a high crime area and standing in front of a liquor store and looking left and right a few times before going in was not reasonable suspicion. When defendant saw a police car, he turned away. This didn’t rise to the level of “casing the place” like Terry. People v. Revoal, 2012 CO 8, 269 P.3d 1238 (2012)*:

P17 Although we must consider the location and the hour together with Revoal’s actions, the actions of looking left and right and wandering across the parking lot in a seemingly aimless fashion (as opposed to engaging in more deliberate conduct) are too ambiguous to amount to reasonable suspicion that a crime had occurred, was in progress or was about to occur. Revoal’s behavior falls below the level of suspicion aroused by the observed behavior in Terry, where the defendants paced “alternately along an identical route, pausing to stare in the same store window roughly 24 times,” conferring with each other in between passes and then conferring with a third individual. Terry, 392 U.S. at 22-23. In contrast, Revoal was not looking in any shop windows, nor was he standing or walking where he could access a store to rob it. He did not, at any time, confer with any other person in the vicinity. “There is nothing unusual in … standing … on a street corner, perhaps waiting for someone. Nor is there anything suspicious about people in such circumstances strolling up and down the street, singly or in pairs.” Id. This is particularly so in an area where businesses are open and other individuals are present.

P18 Finally, although flight from police may support an informant’s claim that an individual is engaged in drug trafficking, Canton, 951 P.3d at 910-11, an attempt to avoid coming into contact with a police officer does not, without more, justify an investigative detention of the individual. Rahming, 795 P.2d at 1342. Here, Revoal’s change in direction did not convert the relatively innocuous set of circumstances the police observed into justification for an investigatory stop.