Nowhere left to run, police car chased a fugitive while riding on his trailer
A police operation in Hamilton County, Ohio, delivered the sort of spectacle that sounds too absurd to survive first contact with reality. Last Saturday, a white SUV did not settle for merely fleeing officers. It somehow managed to haul one of the pursuing police cars away on its own trailer.
As the chase reached its climax, officers were met with a scene that looked almost surreal. Behind the fleeing SUV, on the trailer it had been towing, sat a Cincinnati Police Department patrol car. The official report does not explain exactly what piece of automotive acrobatics allowed the police vehicle to end up there, but the incident pushed mobile resource management into truly experimental territory. For one brief and unstable moment, the pursued and the pursuer became a single moving unit.
The PIT manoeuvre, however, served its usual reminder that kinetic energy asks nobody for permission. When the SUV veered towards a tree, the police car perched on the trailer made its own contribution to the landing, rolling over on to its roof in the middle of the road.
The incident ended with the SUV catching fire and those involved being taken to hospital, but it also left a rather pointed question hanging in the air about the efficiency of tactical planning. The 90 minute operation crossed two states and finished with police having to ram the very trailer carrying one of their own vehicles. It was the automotive equivalent of chasing a train that had already left the station, except this time the locomotive had lost control and the carriage was full of law enforcement.
Prosecutors are now considering additional charges, but the event itself has already secured a place in history. It is not often that a fugitive, in the course of trying to escape, ends up offering police free transport, even if in the most dangerous way imaginable.
