Oh boy.
Attachment 46910
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Oh boy.
Attachment 46910
I guess Newark is next...
"this decision may drive crime up"
not like serving the public is your sole purpose or anything..
This kind of policy was disastrous in Milwaukee. We're still trying to recover from it.
Domestic law enforcement has, broadly, been about "preservation of life" over "deterrence of crime" for quite awhile. If you witness an injury hit/run you're supposed to stop and render aid to the injured, not chase the hit/run suspect. This is an outgrowth of that, combined with liability. The pendulum continues to swing that way.
Anyway,
I saw this on PoliceOne and almost posted it a few days back. A blanket prohibition seems ridiculous. You can't chase an active shooter? I get it's "temporary" while they look at their existing policies, but wow.
We are in the process of slightly tightening our pursuit policy to eliminate pursuing for traffic infractions with no other reasonable suspicion only. Honestly, we don't do a lot of that anyway. It's not worth getting someone hurt or killed over.
So criminals now have the reasonable expectation that they can flee the scene of a crime, or even bolt from a traffic stop without consequence? Carjack people and no one will chase them? Really, WTF?
Is this policy in effect for crimes perpetrated against the political class of Atlanta or just for crimes against the little people?
:confused:
I almost got fired in FTEP for terminating a pursuit and flatly refusing to continue when my FTO ordered me to. We were chasing a guy on a sportbike who ran a stop sign in front of us. After he almost T-boned a minivan, passed a pedestrian with about six inches to spare, and headed into the downtown core area just as school was getting out, I shut off the lights and slowed down.
I had a non-trivial concern me and the FTO were going to get into a fist fight but I wasn't going to back down because we had the guy's plates, and since he was wearing shorts and had distinctive tattoos on his calves, I felt like we'd catch up to him later.
In between bouts of arguing, I coordinated with our consolidated dispatch agency to have a neighboring jurisdiction check out the ROs address. About 45 minutes later they caught the guy in his driveway and hooked him for me.
My decision was controversial at the time, but I stood by it then, and do now.
A complete no-chase policy is stupid though.
Oh they just disbanded the narcotics unit too!
“The officers will be re-assigned to violent crimes since drugs are usually involved.”