Chicago police officers will no longer be allowed to chase people on foot simply because they run away or they’ve committed minor offenses, the department said Tuesday, more than a year after two foot pursuits ended with officers fatally shooting a 13-year-old boy and 22-year-old man.
, who were armed when they ran from police in separate March 2021 pursuits, are not mentioned in the news release announcing the policy or the policy itself. But those pursuits — particularly that of Alvarez — cast a shadow over the policy.Nusrat Choudhury, legal director at ACLU of Illinois, talks about the need for a new Chicago police foot pursuit policy and why she believes the change is long overdue.
The policy includes a number of circumstances in which an officer must call off a chase, including a requirement that the pursuit must end if a third party is injured and needs immediate medical attention that can’t be provided by anyone else. If officers realize they do not know exactly where they are, which is possible in a chaotic situation in which they are running through alleys and between houses, they must stop.
"How do you change the culture that you have to chase those bad guys no matter what, no matter how dangerous to everyone who is around you?" University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman said. "You create polices that make it so you can’t be disciplined, chewed out, criticized for following a policy and not engaging in an inherently dangerous act."
The city also had plenty of evidence about the dangers of foot pursuits, including a Chicago Tribune investigation that found that a third of the city’s police shootings from 2010 through 2015 involved someone being wounded or killed during a foot pursuit.