A suspected drunk driver barreled a car toward bystanders and police officers responding to a late-night disturbance in Green Bay, Wisconsin, injuring four cops and triggering a chase that ended with a PIT maneuver.
Green Bay police officers arrived at a food truck around 2:15 a.m. Saturday to handle a disturbance already in progress. As they worked to take people into custody, a car accelerated toward the crowd of bystanders and officers on scene. One officer opened fire on the vehicle. The driver fled, and a short pursuit followed before officers executed a PIT maneuver, a technique where a patrol car nudges a fleeing vehicle's rear quarter panel to spin it to a stop, and brought the chase to an end.
The driver was taken into custody without further incident on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated, Wisconsin's equivalent of a DUI charge. Police have not publicly identified the suspect.
Four Green Bay Police Department officers sustained injuries during the incident. Their injuries were described as not life-threatening. No injuries were reported from the gunfire.
Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis held a news conference after the incident and offered a detail that complicates the initial picture. A couple of the four officers' injuries occurred before the vehicle drove into the crowd, the New York Post reported, while officers were still trying to take people into custody during the original disturbance at the food truck.
Davis also said the department did not yet know whether the driver was connected to the disturbance that brought officers to the scene in the first place. That question remains unanswered, and it matters. If the driver had no connection to the original call, officers were dealing with two separate threats in the same location at the same time: a volatile crowd and an oncoming vehicle.
The Brown County Sheriff's Office will assist Green Bay police in investigating the officer-involved shooting, a standard step when a law enforcement officer discharges a weapon.
The sequence unfolded in minutes. Officers were already hands-on with subjects from the food truck disturbance when the car came at them. One officer fired. The suspect ran. A short chase followed. Then the PIT maneuver ended it.
Police have not disclosed how many shots were fired, whether the vehicle or the suspect was struck by gunfire, or how many people were inside the car at the time. The suspect's identity, age, and criminal history, if any, have not been released. Whether the OWI charge has been formally filed remains unclear.
What is clear: four officers went to work Saturday and came home injured because someone allegedly got behind the wheel drunk and aimed a vehicle at a crowd. The officers on scene had seconds to react, and they stopped the threat without a fatality.
When law enforcement puts itself between a reckless driver and a crowd of bystanders, the least the rest of us can do is notice.
