Lightfoot calls for police foot-chase policy
Move comes in wake of 2 fatal shootings, including a 13-year-old
In less than 48 hours in two separate city neighborhoods last month, police fatally shot someone following a foot chase, including a Little Village 13-yearold whose death has roiled City Hall and renewed calls for change in the practices of the Chicago Police Department.
Adam Toledo’s age and the fact he was killed by a police officer touched off familiar vigils and marches — and led to a quick promise from Mayor Lori Lightfoot that the city would, at last, adopt a policy to limit foot pursuits.
The shooting of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez after another foot chase received less attention, but his family is also seeking to understand what led to his fatal encounter with police. Both cases remain under inves
“We want answers. We want to know why he was being chased. I’m tired of seeing this not only in my city, in the North Side of Chicago. I’m tired of seeing that everywhere, in the South Side.” — Roxana Figueroa, a cousin of Anthony Alvarez, on behalf of his family at a recent protest
tigation and police video of the shootings has yet to be released, though Chicago police have said a gun was present and they faced an “armed confrontation” in each case.
“We want answers. We want to know why he was being chased,” Roxana Figueroa, a cousin of Alvarez, said on behalf of his family at a recent protest. “I’m tired of seeing this not only in my city, in the North Side of Chicago. I’m tired of seeing that everywhere, in the South Side.”
In a news briefing after Toledo was shot, Lightfoot, who was elected in part on a platform of police reform, called for the new footchase policy to be in place by summer, a time when the city typically faces some of its toughest crime challenges. Many agree the risks such chases produce have to be reduced, but exactly what the policy could look like remains to be seen.
Lightfoot did say police have started the process, there will be focus groups with officers and with the community as a plan is developed, and Chicago will look to adopt strategies from across the country.
“I’ve spoken to a number of different mayors over the course of this last week,” she said. “I think we can stand up a policy that continues to protect our communities but does it in a way that doesn’t put all involved at risk.”
The mayor did not address why creating a policy was not a priority sooner, even as calls for limits are hardly new.
Over the past several years, the U.S. Department of Justice, experts and academics have all pointed out the need to create new policies around foot chases in an effort to reduce the frequency of the highly charged and inherently dangerous encounters between the police and the public.
“This was among the things, again, that were highlighted and dramatized in the Justice Department’s investigation (of the Chicago Police Department) that is ... four years old,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who specializes in police accountability issues.
The DOJ’s 2017 investigation noted there were numerous incidents where CPD officers chased and shot someone fleeing “who posed no immediate threat to officers or the public,” and that in some cases, a person’s act of fleeing alone was enough for the officer to end the pursuit in fatal gunfire.
“CPD has long had detailed policies regarding vehicle pursuits,” the 2017 report said. “It does not have a foot-pursuit policy. It should.”
And a report filed last month from a court-ordered monitor overseeing a consent decree to improve Chicago’s policing practices noted that incidents in which Chicago police deploy deadly force during a foot chase have been on the rise.
Experts said good policies on foot chases balance the need for police to chase some suspects while also minimizing the use of excessive force.
Models in other cities
Other large city police departments have implemented guidelines on foot pursuits in recent years — a few of them after similar backlash over officers fatally shooting someone during a chase.
Chicago police Superintendent David Brown implemented a foot-chase policy for the Dallas Police Department during his time there as police chief from 2010 to 2016.
The policy was put in place following the controversial fatal police shooting of James Harper in 2012 in the city’s Dixon Circle neighborhood. It initially prohibited Dallas police officers from engaging suspects alone during foot chases, though it was later relaxed.
Some departments have implemented policies that reflect the view of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which takes the position that “foot pursuits are inherently dangerous” and “whenever possible, foot pursuits should be avoided.”
The association’s guidance suggests officers should consider alternatives to foot pursuits such as aerial support, canine searches, containment of the area, saturation of the area, and apprehension at another time and place when the officer knows the identity of the subject.
The New Orleans Police Department’s foot-chase policy, implemented under that city’s own federal consent decree, states that the safety of officers and the public “shall be the primary consideration” when an officer decides whether to start or continue a foot chase. It also cautions that “officers must be mindful that immediate apprehension of a suspect is rarely more important than the safety of the public and Department personnel.”
Sheila Bedi, a civil rights attorney from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law who has been involved in Chicago police consent-decree litigation, said the best policies tend to reflect that the chases can become dangerous because of the rush of adrenaline officers experience. And they mandate that officers will not be punished if they don’t engage in a foot chase. The policies encourage officers to weigh the danger with what they might gain in a pursuit, she said.
“Foot pursuits are an extreme policing tactic,” Bedi said, also noting the risk that police will use it more in Black and Hispanic communities.
“The reality is these restrictions are common sense,” she said.
It’s unclear how a foot-pursuit policy would affect Chicago, where officers are responding to a volume of shootings largely unmatched in other cities and where many arrests are the result of an officer chasing someone from a scene.
Even though there’s no specific CPD policy for foot pursuits, the department has issued a training bulletin that states that “department members will engage in a foot pursuit only when they have reasonable articulable suspicion to conduct an investigatory stop or probable cause to arrest.”
Instant decisions
In the case of Adam Toledo, police said they first responded to the alley where he was killed after ShotSpotter equipment alerted them to gunshots.
About two minutes later, a responding cop had apparently shot Toledo and called for an ambulance, highlighting how quickly such scenarios can unfold on the street.
According to recordings of police scanner traffic from that night, a dispatcher put out a call of shots fired at about 2:37 a.m. The muffled voice of an officer could soon be heard over the radio saying, “Someone’s running!”
Just moments later came the call for an ambulance.
In the days after Toledo died, Brown confirmed that chain of events and offered a description of what happened. ShotSpotter had detected eight gunshots in the 2300 block of South Sawyer Avenue, and police were there in less than a minute. They saw two males, including one with a gun, Brown said, and chased them on foot.
“The officer fired his weapon at approximately 2:38 a.m., striking Adam in the chest. A gun was recovered,” said Brown, who issued a later statement noting how fast police have to make life-and-death choices.
“The split-second decision to use deadly force is extremely difficult for any officer, and is always a heavy burden to bear for officers involved in fatal shootings,” he said.
He also extended condolences to Toledo’s family and said such an incident involving a juvenile had been on his mind.
Toledo’s family described him as “a loved and supported 13-year-old boy.” One of the family’s lawyers has said Toledo actually wanted to be a police officer.
“Adam was a good kid. He had no criminal history. He went to Gary Elementary School,” attorney Adeena Weiss Ortiz told reporters on April 2. “And all we know is that he was shot.”
The shooting of Toledo came less than 48 hours before Anthony Alvarez was also fatally shot by an officer during a foot chase. Chicago police said Alvarez “produced a handgun which led to a confrontation with police” in the Portage Park neighborhood, but didn’t explain why officers tried to stop and chase Alvarez.
It was not immediately clear whether Alvarez pointed the gun at officers or if he fired gunshots at them. Police spokesman Tom Ahern posted a photograph on Twitter of a tan handgun that he said belonged to Alvarez.
The man’s family said Alvarez worked full time as a machine operator at a meat factory in Franklin Park, and that his life revolved around his daughter, work and soccer. They suggested he could have had a permit for a gun he carried because he lived in a rough area, they said, arguing the focus should be on why officers chased him in the first place.
Past cases
About seven years ago, another young teen was fatally shot by Chicago police during a foot chase in Portage Park, the same community area where Alvarez was shot and killed March 31.
Fourteen-year-old Pedro Rios was running from police on the Fourth of July in 2014 while he had a long-barreled .44 Magnum revolver. He was shot twice.
Though the city claims he pointed the pistol at an officer, and the shooting was ruled justified by the city’s now-defunct Independent Police Review Authority, his family’s attorney denies the official version, saying Rios never pointed the gun and that it was in his waistband the entire time. A federal lawsuit is still pending.
The lawyer agreed that a new, formal CPD foot-chase policy is in order — and should have been created before the latest shootings.
“Of course, you need a better foot-chase policy,” said Mark A. Brown, an attorney with Lane & Lane in Chicago who is representing the family of Rios in their lawsuit. “You have to have a foot-chase policy that applies specific rules and gives specific guidelines as to how to handle the foot chase. Of course, you can’t imagine a world where officers would never run after anybody. That is never going to happen, and it wouldn’t be a safe environment.”
A 2016 Chicago Tribune investigation found that between 2010 and 2015, foot chases played a role in more than a third of the 235 police shootings where someone was wounded or killed.
A new area of concentration
Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has studied police pursuits, said foot-chase policies by police departments are generally newer than those that deal with vehicle pursuits.
In 2013, Alpert co-authored an article for a law enforcement trade publication about how data from a small sample of foot pursuits by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department showed “significant” rates of injuries among officers and suspects.
“Given that relatively little is known about the dynamics of foot pursuits and their outcomes, agencies should begin collecting detailed data on foot pursuits to track and analyze these events and outcomes,” Alpert and his co-author, fellow University of South Carolina criminologist Robert Kaminski, wrote in the January 2013 issue of The Police Chief magazine. “This would allow the development of (evidencebased) policies that would help administrators determine whether or not they should develop foot-pursuit policies and how restrictive they should be. It also would allow supervisors to know if their officers or deputies are engaging in unsafe practices on the streets.”
In an interview with the Tribune on Wednesday, Alpert agreed with other experts who call foot pursuits inherently dangerous, and that rules are needed to protect police as well.
“You may lose someone. You may not be able to arrest someone. But you don’t want to put an officer in a situation where he or she is likely to be ambushed or attacked,” Alpert said. “If you’re chasing someone who just shot three people, you might take more risks than if you’re chasing someone who stole bubble gum from a grocery store.”
Two veteran Chicago police officers contacted by the Tribune expressed uncertainty and concern about how their jobs on the ground would change with a foot-chase policy, including whether the policy itself would be too restrictive. They declined to be identified for the story because they are not authorized by the Police Department to talk to the media.
One of them said he was concerned word would spread and more suspects would simply flee police on foot. The other, a rankand-file cop, predicted the policy would be some sort of “balancing test” when deciding to pursue a suspect on foot, an instant assessment of whether a crime is serious enough to give chase and if doing so would put the officer, the suspect or other civilians in danger.
“If you have an armed suspect running with a gun, are you kidding me?” the rank-and-file officer said incredulously. “What if the cops let someone go (with) a gun and then they hear (the) person shot someone?”
Futterman, the University of Chicago law professor who also helped push for the Chicago Police Department to fall under a federally mandated consent decree, said a foot-chase policy doesn’t mean that police should never initiate a chase. But it’s to take into account if the risk of the chase outweighs the danger of the person not being apprehended at that moment, and then assessing a situation and using good judgment.
“The goal in terms of this stuff,” he said, “is also to avoid the need for those split-second decisions.”