CAN COPS STOP SOMEONE WHO RUNS OFF?

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court will try to decide whether people
who run away after seeing a police officer can be chased, stopped and
questioned.

The justices agreed Monday to use a case from a Chicago high-crime
neighborhood to clarify on-the-street police powers vs. individual
rights.

While many Americans might assume police have the power to chase and
question someone who flees at the sight of them, lower courts have
been deeply divided on the issue. The justices' decision, expected
sometime in 2000, could resolve that split.

At the heart of the dispute is the Fourth Amendment protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures. Courts long have interpreted that
protection to mean police without court warrants cannot stop and
question someone without a "reasonable suspicion" of wrongdoing.

State courts in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan,
Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey and Utah have said police generally
cannot make investigative stops after pursuing someone who flees after
seeing them.

But state courts in Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, North
Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin have ruled that fleeing from police can
create a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct and justify a police
stop.

Federal courts also have disagreed on the issue.

The Illinois Supreme Court used the Chicago case to bar police most
often from making such investigative stops.

In appealing that ruling, state prosecutors said a definitive ruling
is needed. "Every single day, law enforcement officers at all levels
throughout our country are confronted with ... whether to chase and
temporarily stop a person in a high-crime area who runs away at the
mere sight of the police," the appeal said.

The nation's highest court twice before had the opportunity to
consider the issue in criminal cases, but left it undecided when in
1988 and 1991 it chose

instead to focus on whether police seizures had occurred.

Sam Wardlow was convicted of a weapons violation after he was arrested
on a Chicago street in 1995 while carrying a loaded handgun in a bag.

Police officers in a patrol car had seen Wardlow spot them and take
off running. They pursued and eventually cornered him, and found the
gun after a patdown search.

The incident occurred in the 4000 block of West Van Buren Street,
described by state prosecutors as an area of "high narcotics traffic"
at that time.

Wardlow challenged his conviction for unlawful use of a weapon by a
felon and the two-year prison sentence it carried. He said he had been
subjected to an unlawful stop. His appeal in an Illinois court raised the
issue of
whether his running away from police was enough to create a reasonable
suspicion to justify the stop and patdown search.

A state appeals court threw out his conviction, and the Illinois
Supreme Court upheld that decision last September after saying "such
flight alone is insufficient to create a reasonable suspicion of
involvement in criminal conduct."

Police had acted on "nothing more than a hunch," the state court said,
and in so doing violated Wardlow's constitutional rights.