Chicago cop accidentally fires gun during arrest after police chase
Chicago cop accidentally fires gun during arrest after police chase
An expressway police chase ended with a Chicago police officer accidentally firing their gun while arresting three suspects Thursday morning in the Austin neighborhood.
The Brief
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- A police chase that began on I-94 ended in the Austin neighborhood early Thursday when a suspect vehicle crashed, and three people were taken into custody.
- During the arrest, a Chicago police officer accidentally fired their gun, though no one was reported injured by the discharge.
- Two suspects and an officer were hospitalized for observation, and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability is investigating the incident.
CHICAGO – An expressway police chase ended with a Chicago police officer accidentally firing their gun while arresting three suspects Thursday morning in the Austin neighborhood.
Police chase
What we know:
Around 3 a.m., Illinois State Police said troopers spotted a vehicle possibly wanted in connection to a recent Chicago robbery on I-94 near 63rd Street.
The vehicle sped away after troopers tried to initiate a traffic stop. A police chase began and spilled onto city side streets. The vehicle eventually crashed near Cicero Avenue and Monroe Street and the occupants tried to run away, state police said.
While Chicago police were taking the three suspects into custody, one of the officers “accidentally discharged” their gun, according to CPD.
Two of the suspects and an officer were taken to local hospitals for observation. Police said a weapon was recovered at the scene.
Charges are pending for the three suspects.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) said they are investigating the shooting.
Traffic was shut down in both directions on Cicero Avenue between Jackson Boulevard and Madison Street.
What you can do:
COPA is asking anyone with information on the shooting to call their office at (312) 746-3609 or visit their website.
This story is developing. Check back for updates.
COPA releases video of November shootout involving off-duty CPD officer
By Matthew Cramer
Updated on: January 22, 2025 / 5:55 PM CST / CBS Chicago
CHICAGO (CBS) — The Civilian Office of Police Accountability released video Wednesday of a shootout involving an off-duty Chicago Police officer in the Washington Park neighborhood this past fall.
The incident happened just before 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 24, on 57th Street near Michigan Avenue.
Surveillance video shows an off-duty officer notice someone approaching and pointing a gun in their direction.
The officer is seen pulling their service weapon, and an exchange of gunfire followed.
No one was hit in the shootout.
COPA released three surveillance video clips — one before the shootout, one showing it as it happened, and one showing it from a distance. No bodycam video was released.
‘Make my Glock go full auto’: How criminals turn standard firearms into illegal machine guns
ByChuck Goudie and Barb Markoff and Christine Tressel 
Saturday, August 5, 2023
Anthony Prisco, from south suburban Oak Forest, has been charged with selling 25 machine gun conversion kits.
CHICAGO (WLS) — There is an epidemic of mass shootings, with two happening on average every day in America this year.
The mass attacks are made possible in many cases by shooters with automatic weapons, frequently converted guns by a simple-and small-metal switch.
A 20-year-old man from suburban Oak Forest man was arrested by ATF agents and charged with selling 25 machine gun conversion kits, which use small, metal switches that turn a legal Glock pistol into a fully-automatic weapon.
Federal law enforcement agents said Anthony Prisco was in a machine gun deal with an informant who told him, “Make my Glock go full auto.”
“It takes a pistol that normally requires, one, squeezing the trigger per round to fire, and turns it into a fully-automatic machine gun, meaning that the pistol will continue to fire as long as there’s triggers held down, and there was ammunition in the weapon. What this does, it does a couple things. First of all, it puts the police officers at a tremendous disadvantage, because they’re firing legitimate weapons, which fire one shot per pull the trigger. They can’t match the speed of the rounds that are being put out by a fully automatic pistol,” said retired CPD Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy.
Roy told the I-Team the threat grows for police and the public from the easy to obtain or make metal switch.
Prisco is now being held without bond at the MCC Chicago after he was arrested in an Oak Forest neighborhood, where, investigators said, he lived with his parents. Authorities also said that home is where he made the gun kits on a 3D printer.
According to a federal complaint, Prisco was on probation from a similar machine gun conviction in Cook County. He was never jailed for that crime.
Roy said the arrest was significant.
“Between the police and the ATF, they just save a lot of lives, because, you know, the average rate of fire with one of these switches installed on a clock pistol is 1,000 rounds a minute. That’s a theoretical number, because you just can’t keep enough ammunition going into it. But still, the ability to fire 50-60 rounds of ammunition within one minute, it’s just, it’s terrible,” Roy said.
In addition to the raw firepower, Roy said, beat cops are now frequently outgunned, and a major problem for public safety is that small fully-automatic pistols are not easy to control, so bullets may go everywhere.
Federal agents used a car with hidden cameras to record audio and video of the alleged machine gun deals, according to ATF.
Prisco’s court-appointed attorney has not yet responded to an I-Team request for comment.
Gang Violence Smolders On Hot Chicago Streets
July 28, 20126:21 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
11-Minute Listen
The Chicago police gang enforcement unit makes an arrest after stopping a car with four suspected gang members in June.
Robert Ray/AP
This has been a summer of blood, sweat and tears in Chicago. The city has been scorched by historic heat, and the homicide rate has soared. When the sun goes down behind the glimmering lakeshore skyline, blocks on the South and West Side of the city can ring with shots and sirens.
The streets of neighborhoods like Englewood, Grand Crossing and Garfield Park are empty, even during the day. In the middle of this summer, it is rare to see a child ride a bike or walk a dog.
“A child should not have to say, ‘I can’t go out because I might get shot.'” resident Michelle Harris says at a community meeting at the Englewood police station. “That’s bad, that’s bad.”
Chicago’s street gangs span generations. The Black P. Stone Nation and Gangster Disciples gangs are older enterprises than Microsoft and Yahoo.
You can see those names on police blotters this summer, but they may be names that smaller gangs just put on like a baseball cap. The word most people now use is “cliques.”
Petty Offenses
Jeff Williams is a former gang member. Tattoos roll from his wrists to his shoulder. He now works in the streets for CeaseFire, a group that tries to quell gang violence, and sees a lot of this summer’s killings as personal.
Two miles of 16-story towers, including the Robert Taylor homes in the foreground, stretch toward the Chicago skyline in 1996. They have since been torn down.
Beth A Keiser/AP
“A lot of cliques, getting into it with each other, basically over real senseless things,” he says. “It can range from somebody stepped on a shoe, to a guy swerving in the street, somebody got wet with a water gun and didn’t want to get wet with a water gun. … Anything could spark at any given time.”
“These shootings are often over jealousies at school,” agrees Columbia University’s Sudhir Venkatesh. “Fighting over a girlfriend or fighting over something that someone might have said on a street corner.”
Venkatesh is the author of the best-selling book Gang Leader for a Day, in which he ran with the Black Kings gang and analyzed their business model. He says large gangs that grew rich and treacherous selling drugs were scattered when many gangbangers were jailed — or killed by each other.
Ironically, he says, “gangs for a long time had an interest in keeping the neighborhood safe because if you didn’t have violence, you have a thriving drug market. No police were around, you weren’t getting arrested.”
Now, though, there’s “just the basic thrill for a lot of these young people of having a gun,” Venkatesh says. “Of being able to act like a man, as it were.”
Why Children Join Gangs
Dusk is about an hour away in Englewood. The thump and swish of kids shooting baskets hangs in the air. The heat still hovers near 100, and little boys in thin shorts and tattered T-shirts seem to work the ball toward a broad-shouldered, bare-chested young man who ducks his head when asked if anyone is in a gang. Others have said he is. There are little girls in the street, too, watching the basketball game and laughing.
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The kids give different reasons for why someone would join a gang: to get respect, to “be known,” to be safer. Why would so many children still join after seeing that gangs do not actually make them safer or live longer?
“In a 13-year-old mind, there is no negative as far as, ‘This can lead me to jail or a funeral home,’ ” says CeaseFire employee Dave Rivers. “In their mind, ‘This can lead to prosperity, this can lead me to not being hungry when my mother can’t afford food.’ “
There’s a young man down this street who’s about to turn 16. He’s a good student at nearby Paul Robeson High School and says that gangs have tried to drag him in. He’s been able to stay free, so far.
“Some people do it for popularity because being in a gang does get you a lot of ‘cool’ points,” he says.
He says there’s supposedly a war going on in the neighborhood between the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples. He says they’re fighting for power.
“But other than that, I don’t know power over what — over territory. I don’t actually see how they can be fighting over that one,” he says. “On this block is BD’s and the next block is GD’s, so … that’s stupid. That’s crazy. They’re fighting over blocks.”
Closed Projects, A Flood Of Violence
Neighborhoods like Englewood have been beset with crime and joblessness for decades. The jump in the murder rate may partly be what military intelligence experts sometimes call “blowback” — actions that have unintended consequences.
The sprawling Chicago Public Housing skyscraper projects — Robert Taylor Projects and Cabrini-Green — built in a burst of 1960’s enthusiasm, were torn down over the past decade. They had become high-rise hothouses for drugs, gangs and crime.
Englewood, like many Chicago neighborhoods, has been beset with crime and joblessness for decades.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
But Sandra Hobbs of Englewood, who has two sons, a daughter and two grandchildren at home in her apartment, says that when the projects came down, crime and gangs gushed into neighborhoods.
“They were killing each other and breaking into people’s homes, and when they tore that down, that filtered right on into the Englewood community,” she says. “I’ve never seen so many killings, but when they took down [those] projects, it just went chaotic.”
Mike Shields, a Chicago patrolman who is president of the Fraternal Order of Police, believes another reason may be that the police successfully rounded up many street gang leaders in recent years.
“Now, some of those gangs are out there without a true hierarchy or a leader,” he says, “and each corner is their own turf, and they’re fighting over different corners, and people are getting killed over who is controlling what dope spot on some of these corners in Chicago.”
Gang Members Outnumber Police
Police could protect world leaders at the NATO summit meeting where President Obama invited them to talk about security in Afghanistan earlier this year. But Shields says it’s harder to safeguard the people who live in the South Side neighborhoods that are the president’s home turf.
“We were a well-oiled machine during that event. Every other night, though, we are outgunned, we are out-staffed,” he says. “They know. The gangbangers themselves know there are more gangbangers out there than there are Chicago police officers.”
Chicago’s city government is tearing down hundreds of abandoned buildings this summer to prevent them from being used to sell drugs or store weapons. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has pledged to hire another 500 police officers, despite a city budget deficit of $600 million.
But police say it’s hard to deter crime with patrols when so many of the murders seem random, wild altercations.
Alderman Rod Sawyer, whose 6th Ward includes part of Englewood, says he believes more police might help chase away gangs. So would more jobs and better housing.
Officials say this abandoned house was a haven for drug dealers and gang members, shortly before it was demolished in July.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AP
“Just like when you turn off the light, roaches come,” he says. “When it’s bright and vibrant and clean, they don’t want to have anything to do with it because they can’t eat, they can’t survive there.”
Continuing The American Dream
Sawyer doesn’t hold the police or City Hall solely responsible.
“I want to make sure that our neighbors understand that we have to stand up, we have to positively loiter,” he says. “We have to be outside, watering our grass, walking our dogs, playing with our children at night in order for us to continue the American dream.”
Despite the shooting and sirens, Hobbs sits in her window each night in Englewood. She barks, “What are you doing?” at young men who walk by. She commands her two sons to get home. If they don’t, she rolls into the streets in her wheelchair to look. She was a member of the Insane Gangsters herself when she was 14.
“Gangs like girls, and we was the girls. That’s was what it was about,” Hobbs says.
But someone in the gang threw her off of a balcony. It was an act of savagery that crippled her for life — but saved her from gang life.
“I don’t sit on that pity pot and worry about what took place back then. I worry about what’s taking place now and how to keep my kids from getting into the ruck of things that I got myself into,” she says. “And that’s how come I stay close-knit with my boys. I wanna know everything.”
As dusk settles, Hobbs plans to hunker down with her sons for the evening.
“I’m [going to] triple lock my door here; I’m [going to] lock that door here, triple lock the door in the back and lock my other door,” she says. “And me and my kids are gonna get into bed, we’re gonna look at TV. … We play video games.”
