On the evening of May 5, a Moorhead, Minnesota, police officer tried to pull over a stolen car that another officer had seen doing more than 70 mph on 20th Street South. The driver took off. The officers let it go. According to the Moorhead Police Department’s own account of that night, the car later cut through a field at the edge of town, drove onto The Meadows Golf Course and rolled into a pond. An officer watched it go in. After a short foot chase, police had the driver, a juvenile runaway they suspect in a string of car thefts and fleeing cases, in custody. Nobody was hurt.
Twelve years earlier, Moorhead officers chased a pickup across the city’s other golf course, and the department ended up investigating its own people. Side by side, the two nights make the case for the call its officers made in May.
Moorhead officers held off twice on May 5
Police said they had been investigating several incidents that week involving two stolen vehicles tied to the same juvenile, who they said had already fled from other agencies. That afternoon, Officer Binyad Brifki found one of them in the 600 block of 12th Avenue South and called for backup before trying a stop. The driver spotted the squad and left. When Brifki found the car again and hit his lights and siren, the driver fled at a high rate of speed, and police said Brifki chose not to pursue because of the public safety risk.
That evening, Officer Cam Schlichting saw the second stolen car being driven recklessly on 20th Street South. Officer Dalton Knapper found it at Center Avenue and 14th Street and tried to pull it over. It ran again. Officers did not pursue, according to police, and instead searched the area with help from the Minnesota State Patrol, the Clay County Sheriff’s Office and the Dilworth Police Department. The pond ended it. The car went to the city impound lot, and the juvenile went to West Central Juvenile Detention on suspicion of fleeing a peace officer in a motor vehicle, possession of stolen property, fleeing on foot, obstructing legal process and reckless driving. Those are booking allegations, not findings, and police did not release the juvenile’s name.
The 2014 chase across Village Green Golf Course
On Tuesday, June 17, 2014, at about 7 p.m., North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation agents told Moorhead police that a 33-year-old Bismarck man wanted on Walsh County, N.D., felony warrants was in town. When officers tried to stop his pickup, he sped off and drove across Village Green Golf Course, which, like The Meadows, is run by the City of Moorhead. Forum News Service reported that three squad cars followed him onto the course while a helicopter tracked him overhead.
Terry Kragero Jr. was on the driving range with his 5-year-old son. “He was coming straight at us,” he told Forum News Service. “I grabbed my son, and we kind of started running back toward the clubhouse.” The pickup veered off, and Kragero estimated it was doing 40 or 50 mph through the course. That night a Moorhead police sergeant said officers had not pursued the truck onto the course. A bystander’s video showed three squad cars chasing it around a water hazard. The department’s spokesman, Lt. Tory Jacobson, said the sergeant may not have had all the information.
Police said the chase was stopped on the course, picked up again on Interstate 94, and stopped a second time for construction workers in Fargo. The Fargo Police Department declined to join. “Under our policy, the parameters of that event did not match the parameters for our officers to engage in the pursuit,” Fargo Lt. Joel Vettel said. The pickup turned up in the West Acres mall parking lot. Three plainclothes BCI agents pursued the man into the mall with guns drawn at some point, according to Vettel, and the mall’s property manager said he slipped out an exit by the food court and hid in a trash bin, where officers found him. Moorhead police said they had no information he was armed.
After a routine review the next day, Moorhead assigned a lieutenant to investigate whether officers had violated policy. “I certainly share the concern that when you have a pursuit that goes out onto a golf course, that’s an extraordinary event,” Jacobson said. Four officers were later disciplined, according to a Bismarck Tribune headline and a Valley News Live headline from the time. The Auto Wire could not open those stories or the city’s original release, which are no longer available, so the type of discipline and the policies cited are unconfirmed. A later Valley News Live headline said local charges in the chase were dropped; which charges, and why, is also unconfirmed.
Moorhead’s own 2014 policy had three reasons to stop
The chase ran straight through factors the department had already written down. Moorhead’s pursuit policy at the time, as quoted by Forum News Service, listed “hazards to uninvolved bystanders or motorists” as a reason to end a chase. It told officers to weigh whether they knew who they were chasing and whether “the need for immediate capture outweighs the risks associated with continuing the pursuit.” And when a helicopter is tracking the car, it told officers to consider whether a ground chase is necessary at all.
All three were true on June 17. Police had a name, from the BCI. They had eyes in the air. And the truck was aimed at a driving range with a father and a 5-year-old on it. The man was wanted on drug and stolen-property warrants, and police said they had no information he was armed. The squad cars following him onto the fairways added the risk and bought nothing the helicopter wasn’t already providing.
State law puts this in writing for every department. Under Minn. Stat. § 626.8458, each agency must have a written pursuit policy and certify every year that it complies with the model policy set by the state Peace Officer Standards and Training Board. New officers need at least seven hours of emergency vehicle and pursuit training before licensing, and officers who may chase need eight more hours every five years. The current model, revised and approved by the POST Board on July 25, 2024, as adopted by the Minnesota Lake Police Department, lists six conditions under which the lead officer and supervisor must consider ending a chase. The sixth describes the 2014 chase: “The suspect is known and could be apprehended later, and delaying apprehension does not create a substantial known risk of injury or death to another.” The same model tells ground units that once an aircraft has the car in sight, the air unit “should assume control over the pursuit.”
Fleeing is a felony whether or not police follow
A no-chase call does not let the driver off. Under Minn. Stat. § 609.487, fleeing a peace officer in a motor vehicle is a felony carrying up to three years and one day in prison and a $5,000 fine. If someone is killed, the maximum rises to 40 years and $80,000. A conviction also requires the court to have the Department of Public Safety revoke the driver’s license. The statute covers fleeing or attempting to flee an officer; it doesn’t depend on the officer giving chase. What the officer does next changes how many people are standing in the path.
Declining to chase also doesn’t mean losing the car. In May, Moorhead police knew which cars they were looking for and whom they suspected was driving, and they had three other agencies helping search. The officer who watched the car enter the pond wasn’t chasing it.
The State Patrol is chasing less and using more tire spikes
The Minnesota State Patrol is moving the same direction. Its public use-of-force and pursuits dashboard shows troopers ran 608 pursuits in 2023, 563 in 2024 and 514 in 2025. In 2025, troopers called off 206 chases on their own judgment and supervisors ordered 56 more stopped. The biggest change is in tire spikes: troopers used stop sticks or another tire-deflation device 61 times in 2024 and 418 times in 2025. The dashboard doesn’t explain the jump, and spikes carry their own risk. A Stop Sticks deployment in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, ended in a crash that took three lives, The Auto Wire reported.
Golf courses keep turning up at the end of these runs. A stolen Dodge Challenger fleeing police in Decatur, Alabama, ended up in a golf course pond last year. A course full of people on a June evening is the worst place in town to have three squad cars behind a pickup doing 40 or 50 mph, which is what Moorhead had in 2014.
Minnesota’s pursuit reports skip the chases officers decline
Minnesota tracks the chases police run. Minn. Stat. § 626.5532 requires a department head to report each pursuit to the commissioner of public safety within 30 days, covering the reason, the distance and time, the outcome, charges, injuries and property damage. The law’s trigger is an officer pursuing. By Moorhead’s account, on May 5 no officer did. The statute asks for no report when an officer declines to chase, so the state’s records capture every pursuit but not the times an officer let a car go and caught the driver anyway. That second number is the one that would show how often the no-chase call works.
When police already know who is behind the wheel and nobody’s life is in danger yet, should Minnesota make letting the car go the default instead of an option?