In my misspent youth, I ditched school and went drinking with some friends at a bar which didn’t card. The cops came through the front and the back and i dove out of a side window and climb the neighbors fence. A cop came after me, but I think that he gave up because I went through three yards, down onto a canal bank and I got home. Tore my pants and twisted my ankle, but the cops never got me.
I SAW a guy run from the cops in Chicago over off Kedzie near 47th. They were chasing him on foot and he ran up the embankment and clambered over the fence and across the CTA tracks. After that, they were cruising the neighborhood looking for the guy and they even went into a few businesses. They never found him.
How do I know?
I was on the roof of a building changing the belts on a few fans and after I came down and got back in service truck and was driving away a few hours later the SAME GUY was over on Archer walking SE towards Pulaski. He’d taken his jacket off and had it tied around his waist, but he still had the same hat on and same bright ass colored sneakers on.
I think the two most important components to evading the police on foot would be motivation and physical/environmental factors.
The cop, as the one doing the chasing, has to have some motivation to catch you. It’s obvious that, for him to even engage in a foot chase, he has to feel strongly enough about catching you (do policemen chase down jaywalkers or people with unpaid parking tickets?) At the other end of the spectrum, law enforcement have different SOPs with regards to chasing armed suspects, those seen as potentially dangerous, and those seen committing a felony. While it’s reasonable to assume that the police will chase after felony suspects, it could be too dangerous to simply send a uninformed officer sprinting after suspect X. This goes double for car chases - as others have pointed out, it is in fact quite common for the police to abandon high-speed chases if the risk outweighs the “reward.”
As to whether or not one can physically beat a cop in a footrace, that comes down to things like physical condition, clothing, and terrain. Various buddies of mine used to evade university/local police when we would do late-night exploring around campus. Personally, I would be fucking amazed if a uniformed officer had managed to catch me in those days… a fit, ~20-year-old long-distance runner in shorts and trainers vs. a beat cop in a heavy toolbelt and dress shoes?
Granted, the sample size is small (two or three times) and since there wasn’t really a crime being committed… I’m sure if we had been tagging a school building or doing some B&E, there would have been other units called in and things would have turned out differently. As it was? It wasn’t worth it to commit to anything other than a token chase.
I would also imagine that in a crowded urban or semi-urban area, one could blend in with the crowd/lose visual contact and effectively disappear. Running through a field or down a country road? More difficult.
I doubt if everyone’s hero Ralph Nader even mentions my old Willys! Did he mention the Jeep?
Unsafe? Willys CJs? Hmmm, No seat belts, no rollover protection, no airbags, and no doors. High Center Of Gravity (COG or CG), short coupled, fold down windscreen, non-collapsible steering wheel shaft, and no body to protect the passengers from any impact. It might be considered unsafe.
The only safety feature on the CJ-2A is that the top sustainable speed is 45 MPH! They will go almost anywhere though. Just not very fast.
I concur, the Willys is much less safe then the Corvair.
I have a good friend who’s done such a thing on a motorcycle. He was on a flat, straight, deserted tertiary highway at 3AM on a school night, and at wide open throttle - trying to find the bike’s top speed.
225kph indicated, if anyone is interested.
The only car he passed head-on had “POLICE” written between the headlights in reflective decaling. The choice was made to leave the throttle fully open for about 45 seconds, and choose a perpendicular rural side road that he knew would connect to another tertiary highway running parallel to the original one he was on. The intention was to get back to the city he’d started in, his route forming a U-shape. I’d heard that there was an almost unstoppable urge by runners to run home, turns out this has some truth in it. He lost sight of the cruiser shortly after turning onto the perpendicular rural road, and raced through the next tertiary highway heading back to his city.
Immediately after crossing a bridge marking the city limits, he was set upon by three cruisers semi-hidden spots. They probably figured out his path immediately after the first cruiser saw him turn down the perpendicular rural road. Not a lot of options for our freedom-seeker highway wise, and they surmised that the sportbike rider probably wasn’t from the sticks.
Stage two of the run involved 3 separate, small groups of cruisers following, and then being evaded by running stop lights and tripling the speed limits while tearing through the city (still towards home). It was like he was being handed off between groupings of cruisers that could make contact, ascertain direction, and then break off pursuit when something truly dangerous was done by the rider. Only one of the cruisers took any sort of aggresive action with the biker, when a cop tried to squeeze the motorcycle into curbing as the biker was passing the cruiser.
Having arrived home with less than 10 seconds since seeing the most recent cruiser, our freedom-seeker decided parking at his house and hiding under his bed wasn’t the best plan. He decided on a quick blast to the neighbouring town (one last grouping of cruisers was evaded by pointing the bike towards a red light, slamming open the throttle, and our friend closing his eyes and deciding he’d had a good life even if if didn’t last through the intersection) with the intention of hiding for the night. He ended up parking/concealing the bike on a residential road during a momentary respite, and sleeping hidden under a huge pine tree in an apartment complex.
The most confusing part to me was the follow up to my friend’s story. No police ever showed at his door, and he’s since had brushes with the law for minor speeding, etc. Looks like he got away completely scot-free.
In order to be a complete jerk, we ask that old threads in GQ only be bumped to provide new information. Since this is an old thread, I’m going to close it. I also note that you have been bumping old threads in other forums. It would be better not to bump old threads without good reason.
