A Chicago police officer remained hospitalized Thursday after being struck Wednesday night by a CPD vehicle during a foot pursuit on the city's West Side. CPD and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability have opened investigations into the incident.
In a separate incident on Sept. 20, 2025, Illinois State Police troopers said the episode began around 1:15 a.m. after they spotted a vehicle that had just been hijacked near West Ogden Avenue and West Polk Avenue. When troopers attempted a traffic stop, three people allegedly got out of the car and ran on foot, the outlet reported. The driver of the vehicle then allegedly crashed head-on into a CPD squad car near West Madison Street and North Pulaski Road before being taken into custody after trying to flee again on foot, per the same account.
In the September 2025 incident, both the officer and the suspect were hospitalized afterward, though their conditions were unclear in the initial report. A separate dispatch captured by Citizen identified an injured officer at 3243 W. Douglas Boulevard on Oct. 28, 2026, and noted that firefighters were sent to assist police at the scene.
Officer Remained Hospitalized Days Later
As reported by the Chicago Tribune, sources said the officer was injured on the West Side when he was struck by a Chicago Police Department vehicle during a foot pursuit, and he remained hospitalized Thursday. The Tribune's reporting adds a detail not found elsewhere in the available record: what prompted the pursuit in the first place was not known at the time of publication, and a CPD commander did not respond to the newspaper's inquiry.
A CPD spokesperson declined to comment on specifics of the incident, the Tribune reported, but confirmed that the department has opened an internal investigation. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability has also opened its own investigation, according to an agency spokesperson cited in the same reporting.
A Pattern of Costly, Dangerous Chases
This incident lands amid years of scrutiny over how Chicago police conduct vehicle pursuits. Chicago recorded 270 police chases in 2019, and two-thirds of them — 180 — ended in crashes, with eight people killed, according to internal emails reviewed by the Chicago Sun-Times. Supervisors ordered chases terminated in 112 of those pursuits that year, yet half of them still ended in crashes, the newspaper found. The department eventually revised its pursuit policy in 2020 to require marked squad cars to take the lead in chases and to keep lights and sirens on throughout.
The financial toll has continued to mount this year. Chicago taxpayers have spent at least $52 million since the start of 2026 to settle nine lawsuits tied to people injured or killed during police pursuits, with insurers covering another $9 million, per WTTW News. That reporting also recounted the case of Guadalupe Francisco-Martinez, who was killed in June 2020 when a squad car struck her vehicle during a pursuit that spanned 30 miles across the city, and the case of Tuong Lam, killed in 2018 when a fleeing driver crashed into his car at the end of a 1.5-mile chase that reached 90 miles per hour.
A Cook County jury separately found that officers violated CPD's 2018 vehicle-pursuit policy by chasing a driver wanted only on suspicion of a traffic violation while in an unmarked police vehicle, according to the WTTW account. No charges had been announced in connection with the September 2025 West Side crash as of the latest reporting. In the October 2026 incident, key details — including what sparked the pursuit — remained unresolved.
