Watching National Treasure last night, during the scene where Nicholas Cage is being chased through the streets of Philadelphia by the Sean Bean’s evil henchmen, I started thinking about how I’ve never seen an adult being chased in earnest by another adult. In the movies, it happens all the time.
Have anyone ever seen someone being chased?
While in the Underground in Toronto one evening I heard a police whistle. Immediately the crowd parted and seconds later a very fast young man came running through with a police officer (in uniform and wearing those clunky leather shoes) about two steps behind.
One afternoon while driving back to the office I saw a white minivan darting through traffic followed by (yes, I counted) 11 police cars. That chase wound up lasting more than 2 hours and covering about 50 miles on three highways and numerous city streets.
When I was a kid, my best friend and I were minding our own business when a perp came scrambling over our fence. He ran through our driveway and off to the street. A couple of cops followed a secord or two later.
Another time, while another friend’s porch (same street), some guy comes running down the street with his screaming wife right on his heels, brandishing an axe!
With this kind of action on our street, we didn’t watch much TV as kids 
We never saw who was on the run, but about twice a year when we lived in Oakland the skies above our apartment would be visited by a police helicopter, complete with searchlights.
That still happens here in San Diego, but now it’s usually the Coast Guard looking for a lost surfer.
I’ve seen sydney police running down someone in Marrickville. Then when they caught him they stood him up and searched him right there on the street before carting him off.
I’ve been in two ride-alongs with cops in Germany and South Africa that ended up in high-speed chases. Both were in speeds of excess of 130 mph. The first ended up with the motorcycles getting away. The second ended up spectacularly with the car shot to bits with 30 bullets from an R-5 rifle discharged by the cops. I wasn’t in the cop car directly involved in the chase–we were about a minute behind trying to catch up. Those Johannesburg cops sure can drive.
I’ve never seen a footchase but I’ve seen a car chase. About twenty years ago in my hometown, Gainesville, FL (which is not a particularly large town). I was at the Publix and this little red hatchback came cruising by with a couple of police cars in pursuit. Ten minutes later, it came cruising (wasn’t really flying, it was maybe going 50 mph) back by on the parallel street with even more police cars in pursuit. I later read that it was a high school girl who totally panicked when being pulled over for something minor and everything snowballed from there.
I saw the NYPD chasing an actual bank robber on the George Washington cloverleaf. (Allow Rt 95, Major Deegan, Harlem River Express way, West Side Highway and others to somehow all interconnect).
I was on my way to a Yankee game and the traffic was held up despite being extra early. We saw police cars everywhere and immediately thought, uh-oh terrorist attack?
They were chasing a white van. Van shot off on road down below and last I saw.
I jumped on the Deegan north as traffic was moving and navigated through the lower Bronx by looking for the El (Train).
When we got to the game we heard what we saw was police pursuing an escape vehicle from a Yonkers bank robbery. This was a Saturday Game in July of 2002 or 2003. It was Old Timers day.
The chase was less excited than successfully navigating unknown South Bronx Streets.
One day I was driving in the fast lane of the freeway, and I looked in the rear view mirror, and I saw a car coming up fast. This is not unusual, so I signalled and moved over into the next lane. What happened next was unusual. The driver I had seen me blew past at about 90 mph, followed in rapid succession by maybe nine or ten patrol cars. As the bizarre caravan receded from me, a flock of 5 or 6 helicopters followed overhead. In fact, I was able to monitor the progress of the chase for the next 30 minutes by watching the helicopters.
Meh. Just another L. A. commute.
In the 1970s, I worked in a state government office. One day a man came into the office and calmly shot one of my co-workers in the head. Several brave guys chased the shooter out the door and down the street. They caught him about a block away, threw him to the pavement, took away his gun, and sat on him until the police arrived. Needless to say, this was very upsetting to all of us. The injured co-worker underwent surgery, and survived.
The shooter served six months in the penitentiary, which totally amazed me. He very nearly killed someone, and he served less time than people I know whose sole offense was smoking a joint.
one night, while delivering pizza in my grad school days, I was standing on a porch and a woman was running to me screaming for help… a man was chasing her, and he tackled her at the foot of the porch steps and she basically fell up the 3 steps to my feet. the guy was rummaging around her so I yelled at him very loud and then kicked him very hard in the head. he looked at me as if I called him a name and ran off with her purse, unfazed by the kick which was hard enough to rip a hole in the top of my Reeboks.
I then realized after that I was holding 2 pizzas and a bag with 2 glass 16-ounce bottles of soda… I should have hit the guy over the head, but it all happened in about 10 seconds and he was gone…
perhaps this qualifies as witnessing the tail end of a chase?
About two months ago, I was headed back to my office after lunch and heard some commotion. This is not entirely unusual on Market St, but the commotion was getting louder, and a black guy pops out of the crowd at the corner and runs across the street, dodging moving cars on his way to the other side.
People of any color running through traffic isn’t all that unusual either, but what set this one apart was that he was handcuffed, with his hands behind his back. And being chased by cops.
That is the ultimate slap in the face, only 6 months. I think the judge must of been smoking the joints. I had a friend serve that long for possesion. Strange country we live in.
I see them all the time, but then, I do live on the border. Once I had the chasee nearly knock me down as he ran past. He came out of nowhere-- I didn’t hear running footsteps or people reacting, just bam! The agents who were chasing him nabbed him about half a block further. Them I did hear coming, those belts they wear make a lot of noise.
The most interesting chase I had a great view of from some scaffolding, since I was painting a mural. A group of teens had crossed the border and made a run for it through downtown and then onto the highway, maybe half a mile to my location. Border Patrol agents in vehicles and on foot were getting nowhere since the kids would zig zag through the bushes in the meridian and split up and so on. A couple of the kids were rounded up when they reached a spot with no bushes, a few more in the parking lot of the WalMart, but at least two, maybe three went into the WalMart. They were in there for awhile and so I was turned away when they were dragged out, so I only saw two loaded into the vehicles. The whole thing was rather unusual, even around here.
The area I live in has limited access, there are only 2 roads in and out. One of the roads has access to a divided state highway. The local state troopers have discovered that getting the bad guys into our neighborhood is a sure way to catch them, there are many dead end roads and pursuits usually end quickly after we hear the sirens. A week ago I watch a kid in an older Honda Civic trying to outrun half a dozen police officers. He didn’t get far.
About 10 years ago I was driving home from work. A bunch of police cars lined up side to side and slowed to about 30 mph forcing everyone to slow down. I figured it was a rolling blockade because someone was driving the wrong way on the freeway. A few minutes later a red Ferrari and a blue Corvette came flying up from behind and both took to the shoulder to avoid the blockade. The Ferrari made it around the police up front and took off like a rocket on the now empty freeway. The guy in the Corvette gave up and came to a stop. In the newspaper the next day it was reported that the guy in the Ferrari was caught about 10 miles from where I saw him and he was clocked driving over 160 mph.
I was getting ready to drive to work one Sunday morning (5am and no cars on the road), when I heard a siren. Then I heard racing engines, and finally a screech of tyres at the bottom of my street. A car shot past at a great rate of knots. Moments later a cop car did likewise.
This isn’t that unusual in Sydney, but this was the very early stages of the car chase. Over the next ten minutes, I could hear them as the wanted bloke weaved through my suburb’s grid of streets. Slowly more police cars joined in. Finally, it sounded like the Blues Bros in surround sound. Englines, sirens, screeching rubber in all directions around my house.
The scary part is that I was rapidly becoming late for work and I had to drive out of there. It was scary. Every single intersection had me stopping dead, peering all around, creeping forwards, looking again, then flooring it to the other side - and that was just when I had the right of way. I was glad to get out of the area that morning.
I was stopped on a bridge once because of a car chase. The bridge was under construction and the chasee’s got in the wrong lane (it dead ended).
One guy jumped off the bridge and the other gave up. It made an episode of greatest police chases. You could see our bright red van right in the front watching all the action.
foot chase
There used to be a rather poorly run social service agency down the block from my house. I was on the front porch, watering hanging baskets, when I saw this man running full-tilt away from another man. The man being chased was shouting for help as he ran, obviously terrified.
He saw me and veered toward the house. It might have been foolish, but he was blatantly terrified I waved him into the house and slammed the door shut. I figured the important thing was to get him safe and everything else could be sorted out later.
Turned out his ex-girlfriend’s crazy, abusive SO (or something like that) laid in wait for him with a knife when he showed up for an appointment. He gasped out a plea to call the cops, so we did, immediately. The cops responded immediately, and actually the chaser was pounding on my front door when they arrived.
car chase
This was purest farce.
Every summer there are festivals of some sort just about every month on the plaza downtown, which is about six blocks from my house. They’re usually a lot of fun–Cajun themed, Jamaican, etc.–good food, good music and good drink. Of course a few party animals overdo once in a while.
I’d moseyed back home and was chatting with my neighbors in the front yard. We heard sirens, lots of sirens, wailing and coming closer. Then we saw cars quickly pulling to the side, and a a parade of cops cars. I mean, at least 15 cop cars, all with lights whirling and sirens at full blast, though they weren’t coming fast.
They were ‘chasing’ a rusted-out POS Neon that was belching clouds of black smoke and grinding away at 30 m.p.h., max. It was driven–nursed along–by two weedy twerps who apparently thought the car fairy would magically undo the horrendous mechanical problems tearing the guts out of their car so they could peel out and leave the cop parade in the dust, just like in the movies, dude!
We got a good look because most funeral processions run faster this car chase.
We just shook our heads.
I saw a car chase once. It was a few months ago on our street. We heard the police search helicopter circling overhead (not unusual for this area), and MrWhatsit jokingly asked, “So is it on our street?”
I stuck my head out the front door and observed that yes, it was training its searchlight on our street. “Yeah!” I called back, and he came out of the kitchen to check things out as well. Just then three police cruisers in rapid succession came tearing down our street, and when they got to the intersection, one went right, one went left, and one went straight. “Wow, that was interesting,” we said almost simultaneously to each other.
And then a van pouring smoke out of the rear came speeding the wrong way down our one-way street, tailed by 9, count 'em, 9 cruisers with sirens wailing. I was still standing on my porch in slack-jawed amazement when MrWhatsit said that maybe it would be a good idea to come inside now?
So I shut the door and went inside. Later on the 11 o’ clock news I saw a reporter broadcasting live from our street. Apparently the van driver had robbed a local grocery store and then been chased by the police several blocks until he got to our street. Apparently when he reached the end of the street, he crashed the van into someone’s front yard and then tried to escape on foot, but was tackled by a waiting bystander and then tasered by an officer. The van was a loss and had to be towed.
When working night security at the university, I got into a couple of foot races with people who didn’t want to talk to us or the police. Once, there were some people creeping around cars in a parking lot. I went to ask them what they were doing, and they took off, figuring they could outrun the dumb security guy. Little did they know I was running 10k races at the time! 
It was the hardest thing to catch them, too! They were playing military games, wearing camofloge uniforms one a dark night! After a couple hundred yards, when they realised I wasn’t going away, they split up. I continued chasing one of them and he finally gave up after running for several minutes. The stupid thing is that they weren’t doing anything wrong, but I didn’t know that. Why run? Pissed me off enough that I had to chase him, I took him back to his car and we kept him there for quite a while.
A couple of us security guards were having dinner in a nearby pizza place, and a guy busted the window from the outside and took off running. By the time we got out, I could still see him, and gave chase, but he had too much of a lead time, and got away. The campus police did find him later when he went to the hospital for stitches.
Fortunately, things were pretty quite for the most part, and I only saw the campus police draw their guns once, but that’s another story.
In Japan: I was walking in the Shibuya train station once and heard a commotion. Just as I was looking around, and rather poorly dressed man, looking like he was in his 50s was runing by followed by a similarly looking woman, also in her 50s. The woman was shreaming at him to stop. It happened so fast that I didn’t have time to react, even if I would have known what to do. Should I have tackled him? Tripped thim? Bet money on the outcome? Was she a nut? Did he steal something from her? Don’t know.