Earlier this year, a jury awarded nearly $5 million in damages — taxpayer dollars from hardworking Chicagoans — to the estate of an 84-year-old woman who was killed and whose family members were injured when a Chicago police van ran a red light at a high rate of speed and set off a chain-reaction accident.
The investigation after the accident, in 2019, revealed the police van was racing in response to a call about someone with a gun. Tragically, the person who was the subject of the call had been taken into custody before the accident occurred.
This death resulting from a reckless police vehicle chase was not an isolated incident. The Sun-Times reported that of the 270 police chases during calendar year 2019, 180 ended in vehicle crashes and eight people lost their lives. And between 2009 and 2019, at least 62 police chase crashes resulted in numerous tragedies and more than $25 million in settlements and jury verdicts against the city and police department.
In June 2020, a two-hour, high-speed police pursuit killed Guadalupe Francisco-Martinez, another innocent bystander and the mother of six children, on the Northwest Side. Finally, after Ms. Francisco-Martinez’s tragic death, pressure mounted on CPD to revise its car chase policy and rein in the staggering losses of life and limb resulting from risky police behavior. Victims, their families and other advocates demanded change.
CPD changed its policy for officers to conduct vehicle chases in August 2020. The policy makes clear that before officers start or continue a vehicle pursuit, they must determine the “necessity to immediately apprehend the fleeing suspect outweighs the level of inherent danger created by a motor vehicle pursuit.” Chases for traffic offenses (other than DUI) and minor theft offenses are prohibited outright because the dangers outweigh the seriousness of those alleged infractions.
The policy is nearly the same as the New York Police Department policy, for example, which also balances the need to immediately arrest a fleeing person with the danger a chase poses to the public and to officers.
Blame and misreading of policy
In recent days, some public officials, as well as current and former police officers, have blamed the 2020 policy for an alleged spike in robberies. But these stories do not cite a shred of evidence connecting CPD’s 2020 vehicle chase policy to any crimes in 2023.
According to CPD’s data, there were more robberies in 2019, before the new vehicle chase policy went into effect, than there were in 2020, 2021 or 2022. While robberies are up year-to-date in 2023, there is no reason to think a 3-year-old policy suddenly caused this uptick.
The reasons behind crime trends are a complex mix of social, economic, educational and other factors and are highly unlikely to be caused by a single policy revision.
More importantly, exaggerated reports that CPD’s policy effectively bans all pursuits are wrong. The erroneous suggestion relies on a misreading — perhaps purposeful misreading — of CPD’s policy.
Faced with this reality, opponents default to suggesting that because officers do not know when they can conduct a chase, they simply do not engage. Rather than focus on better training or demanding officers follow and use the rules of their job, many call for abandoning the new chase rules altogether.
We have seen this sort of argument before. In 2015, we reported that CPD was stopping and frisking more pedestrians per capita than in New York, with a significantly disproportionate burden on Black Chicagoans.
CPD and the city entered an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to bring stop-and-frisk policies into compliance with constitutional standards.
But because CPD never adequately trained officers about what the Constitution required for a stop, officers said they no longer were allowed to conduct any such pedestrian stops. And, of course, every time there was a spike in any crime, they wrongly blamed it on the decrease in pedestrian stops.
We cannot allow this false narrative to be repeated regarding vehicle chases. Reckless vehicle chases by CPD officers have killed many and caused enormous damage over the past decades.
Simply placing reasonable curbs on those chases should not be used as an excuse to justify additional crimes or a lack of police response. Other communities have been able to implement changes to police policy without these phony debates. Surely Chicago can do the same.
Alexandra Block is the director of the Criminal Legal System and Policing Reform Project at the ACLU of Illinois.
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