A new fine could address the increasing number of motorists fleeing traffic stops in Naperville, threatening the safety of police and the community, Police Chief Jason Arres says.
In his annual midyear crime statistics report, Arres said his department had converted to a new system of tracking and reporting data to the state. While the change makes it difficult to compare year-to-year crime statistics, one thing they did observe was the escalating number of fleeing and eluding cases, he said.
The count has been on the rise since mid-2020, statistics show.
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In the first six months of 2022, 68 incidents were recorded compared to 55 in the first six months of 2021 and 13 in 2022.
By the end of 2021, there were 102 reports of fleeing compared to 51 in 2020.
If the current trend continues, the department can expect 136 incidents by the end of 2022, Arres said.
He’s hoping legislators might help by making fleeing police a felony charge.
“If it’s a felony, we can seize that vehicle,” he said. “We can try to find different tools in our toolbox to hold folks accountable for taking off.”
Arres also said he plans to introduce a proposal to the Naperville City Council next month that would allow his department to fine any person whose vehicle is used to flee the police.
“It’s basically to recoup the cost of what the police department incurs to investigate that case criminally as well as administratively,” he said.
In some cases, drivers think it’s OK not to stop for the police, making cases difficult to investigate, he said. Vehicle owners will blame another driver who borrowed the car and refuse to provide a name to police.
Proving who was driving can be a challenge and time consuming, Arres said, even if police try to search security camera videos.
Under the fine he is proposing, the owner of the vehicle will be responsible and the onus will be on them to prove the information is incorrect in court, he said.
The hope is the fine will help “deter folks from taking off from us” or from lending their cars to someone who might, he said.
Most traffic stops involve misdemeanor charges, Arres said. What’s alarming is that drivers aren’t pulling away because “I just don’t feel like stopping for police,” he said.
“There’s something they’re concealing in that car why they’re not stopping for us,” he said. “I cannot underscore how dangerous of a situation that creates in any community. … I’m shocked that we haven’t had more crashes where people just completely disregard a red light and hit somebody.”
As for the change in crime data reporting, for years Naperville cases had been tracked under the Uniform Crime Reporting. Under UCR, a hierarchy was used so only the most serious offense in an incident was counted and classified within nine categories of offenses.
On June 1, 2021, the department began calculating its data through the new National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS counts the number of victims, not the number of incidents, and includes all offenses committed within an incident.
As a result, statistics from 2022 cannot be compared to previous years, Arres said.