Officer Survival Spotlight

Foot Pursuits: Keeping Officers Safe

By Brian McAllister
Stock image of a man fleeing down a city street.


Instructors for the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Program begin each class addressing foot pursuit by asking students, How many officers received some form of foot-pursuit training from their respective agencies? On average only 1 to 3 percent of class participants give an affirmative answer. In courses dealing with facing a drawn gun, trainers ask, How many officers’ agencies provide training for drawn-gun scenarios? Approximately 10 to 20 percent of students answer that they received this type of instruction.

Statistically, officers’ chance of becoming involved in a foot pursuit greatly exceeds their likeliness of ever facing a drawn-gun scenario. Yet, how many foot pursuits could end with an officer encountering a drawn gun? If proactive training is a key to reducing risk to law enforcement personnel, agencies should train for foot pursuits beforehand to minimize the chance of officers facing a drawn gun while on duty.

The LEOKA Program gathers statistical data about line-of-duty deaths and assaults against law enforcement. Based on lessons learned from analyzing the data and identifying dangerous trends and patterns of behavior­, LEOKA trainers provide relevant instruction to better protect officers. Two of LEOKA’s prior research publications involved 80 critical-injury assault cases selected randomly from across the nation.1 Fifteen of these cases (19 percent) involved foot pursuits, and only one featured an officer who had received some form of foot-pursuit training prior to the incident.


A foot pursuit is a tool used by law enforcement that entails the act of chasing or pursuing on foot a fleeing offender actively trying to evade capture. Like all tools officers use, training is required for personnel to become proficient in its practical application. Critical thinking suggests a foot pursuit is not a race or a competition to determine speed, endurance, agility, or overall superiority. Rather, it resembles a chess match in which officers should calculate every action based on the suspect’s probable next move. Although time is monitored in a chess match, it should not be in a foot pursuit. In fact, slowing down the process provides more time to determine a best course of action and allows backup units additional time to respond to the scene.

As in chess, forethought wins in foot pursuits. Law enforcement personnel should study each situation with a risk-versus-reward analysis, determining what they will and will not do. Rapid assessment of the situation should be ongoing, but officers should not quickly commit themselves. They must consider the weather, lighting, terrain, and physical environment, as well as personal conditioning and stamina—theirs and the offender’s.

Brian McAllister
Brian McAllister, a retired lieutenant with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, is an instructor with the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted Program.


As in chess, forethought wins in foot pursuits. Law enforcement personnel should study each situation with a risk-versus-reward analysis, determining what they will and will not do. Rapid assessment of the situation should be ongoing, but officers should not quickly commit themselves. They must consider the weather, lighting, terrain, and physical environment, as well as personal conditioning and stamina—theirs and the offender’s.

LEOKA instructors teach that the safest way to take someone into custody involves two or more officers—enough to outnumber the offender—and contact and cover. Patience and tactics are critical given the many different factors officers must use to calculate risk. To reduce risk, officers should determine who holds the tactical advantage in a fluid situation and adjust their tactics accordingly.

Research has demonstrated that the gravity of a subject’s apparent offense should have no bearing on the way law enforcement personnel pursue that offender. One case study involved an officer in pursuit of a youthful offender observed breaking into a motor vehicle. To the officer, fleeing may have seemed the subject’s reaction to being caught. However, the offender was fleeing because of a homicide he had committed earlier in the day. The pursuit ended with the shooting death of the officer. Because no way exists to measure the desperation of an offender, every pursuit should be conducted as if the officer’s life depends on it.

Foot pursuits are nothing new to law enforcement; neither is the fact that they end in deaths or critical injuries for many officers each year. Of great concern is that few agencies provide any type of proactive training for these encounters.

A national expert in the area of risk management who speaks on the intrinsic value of having a proactive risk management philosophy in place coined the phrase, “If it’s predictable, it’s preventable.”2 The history, data, and myriad names etched upon the walls of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial suggest that agencies could do better. Thinking ahead and training proactively for what could happen, even in events as common as foot pursuits, can minimize risk and save lives.

For law enforcement, the benefit of studying history is threefold. Agencies can 1) learn how officers died in the past, 2) provide training in the present, and 3) minimize risk in the future. Much historical data is available in LEOKA’s annual publication Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, back issues of which are available, located at http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka.

Mr. McAllister can be contacted at brian.mcallister@ic.fbi.gov. 


Endnotes

Anthony J. Pinizzotto, Edward F. Davis, and Charles E. Miller III, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, In the Line of Fire: Violence Against Law Enforcement (Clarksburg, WV, 1997), 30; and Anthony J. Pinizzotto, Edward F. Davis, and Charles E. Miller III, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers (Clarksburg, WV, 2006), 25.

Brian McAllister, “By the Numbers: Turning LEOKA Data into Training Opportunities,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, April 2014, under “Officer Survival Spotlight,” http://leb.fbi.gov/2014/april/ officer-survival-spotlight-by-the-numbers-turning-leoka-data-into-training-opportunities (accessed April 8, 2015).