Statehouse News Stories

DeWine Asks Board To Come Up With Statewide Standards For Police Chases

The Statehouse News Bureau | By Karen Kasler,

Karen Kasler

Published May 13, 2019 at 3:37 PM EDT

Gov. Mike DeWine (right) shakes hands with Ronnie Dunn, associate professor at Cleveland State University and a member of the Ohio Collaborative Community-Police Advisory Board.

The state’s nearly one-thousand police and law enforcement agencies are required to have a chase policy, but there’s nothing in the law that says what it look like.

As a former prosecutor, Gov. Mike DeWine said he understands weighing the concerns of a potentially dangerous suspect getting away against the risk to the public of a chase.

“I’m not advocating or saying there never should be a police chase. That’s not what I’m saying at all. But what I am saying is these are life and death decisions, and it’s time Ohio had a statewide standard," DeWine said.

DeWine is asking the state’s Collaborative Community-Police Advisory Board to develop some recommendations – and mentioned there were some in a report done in 2016 by a group he created as attorney general.

While the recommendations wouldn’t be law, DeWine says agencies would likely adopt them.