Chicago police say they will NO LONGER chase suspects who flee in certain cases as crime skyrockets

The Chicago Police Department announced it will no longer chase fleeing suspects in certain cases as crime skyrockets in the Windy City. 

The department announced the new policy at a Tuesday press conference and said it will go into effect after ‘every officer is trained,’ Superintendent David Brown said. 

‘There’s a few clarifications that officers need to be aware before we hold them accountable,’ Brown said on Tuesday. 

Although he did not go into specifics of what officers needed clarification on, Brown emphasized that the new policy made it ‘safer’ for his cops and ‘enhances law enforcement to do their job.’ 

The superintendent emphasized that 25 officers have already been shot or shot at this year, and the new foot pursuit policy would help eliminate potentially dangerous physical interactions with law enforcement and suspects, especially armed assailants. 

The new policy outlines the limited times when a foot pursuit is permissible as long as it outweighs the potential harms to an officer or risks public safety.

One of the instances includes when a suspect is ‘committing a felony, Class A misdemeanor, [or a] traffic offense that endangers the physical risks of others’ or if criminals have or are about to commit an ‘arrest-able offense.’ 

Officers will be permitted to pursue suspects who are engaging or about to engage in: battery, assault, unlawful use of weapons, and criminal residence trespassing, among others.

However, police must refrain from foot pursuits in case of: public drinking, land trespassing, and simple assault, the policy read. 

Law enforcement will have to have reasonable suspicion is committing a crime that endangers the public before pursuing the suspect on foot. 

‘The safety of our community members and our officers remains at the core of this new foot pursuit policy,’ Brown said at the press conference on Tuesday. 

Crime in the city has soared 34 percent of this year. Theft, burglary, and robbery are all up significantly at 65, 31, and 21 percent, respectively. 

Brown said the new policy, as radical as it may seem, is actually not new to law enforcement, just new to Chicago. 

‘There’s a lot of departments that have foot pursuit policies and there’s new policies being put in from other departments,’ he said, although not specifying which departments he was basing the new policy off of. ‘There’s a lot of data out there to inform us on what foot pursuit do.’ 

Brown said there was two things foot pursuit policy do to help law enforcement. One benefit is ‘help keep officers safe’ and help the department ‘train officers.’ 

‘At the end [of a foot pursuit], is obviously a lot of physicality between the suspects and officers. Once you chase someone, now you have to put them in custody, so oftentimes that leads to a lot of physicality. Officers getting injured, suspects getting injured, innocent bystanders get injured,’ he said. 

He still said ‘officers’ would make the final call when and when not to pursue suspects, but the documentation provided after the pursuit will allow Chicago to learn and teach its officers how to remain safer, Brown said. 

The policy change announcement comes after protest took place across America following the death of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez and 13-year-old Adam Toledo in officer-involved shootings. 

The shootings called for the police department to review its foot pursuit policy, but Brown said on Tuesday that the department has been discussing this policy for ‘years.’ 

Shootings are down 17 percent and murder is down 11 percent, according to the Chicago PD.  

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