NCJ Number
141393
Date Published
Unknown
Length
26 pages
Annotation
Interviews were conducted with 36 police officers from five departments in a single county in the Chicago metropolitan area and one large Army Military Police Command (MPC) to examine the relationship between attitudes, values, and beliefs and police pursuit policies and practices.
Abstract
Officers, who were asked to report every pursuit in which they had been involved over a 12-month period, overwhelmingly responded (94 percent) that they believed a no-pursuit policy would result in a higher number of pursuits and attempts to elude. When asked to expand on their beliefs, most indicated that they did not think most citizens would be encouraged to elude even if a no pursuit policy were common knowledge. Officers in Oatville, which has a no-pursuit policy, reported no pursuits or attempts to elude during the study's timeframe, but many officers resented the limitation placed on their "professional discretion" by the implementation of their no-pursuit policy. Virtually all of the underreporting by interviewed officers did not constitute blatant acts of outright deception but were done in an effort to avoid supervisory and administrative scrutiny as well as paper work. Only unavoidably obvious, full-blown pursuits, often those that result in an accident, death, or injury, become part of the official record. The pursuit attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors of officers correlated closely to the three pursuit policy categories, i.e., discouraging/highly restrictive, restrictive, and discretionary. Both pursuits and attempts to elude appear to increase in number as the restrictiveness of the policy decreases, but officer underreporting also decreases. 2 tables and 11 references