A Missouri police officer was shot early Thursday and two people have been arrested after two officers confronted a teen allegedly breaking into a vehicle, police said.

One of the officers was hit twice in the lower body and was rushed to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to the Maryland Heights Police Department. The second officer, the wounded officer’s partner, “returned fire,” police said, and Ellis, who was not hit, took off on foot.

Police told Fox News the officers involved were from the Maryland Heights Police Department’s Community Response Unit and were assigned to patrol parking lots and neighborhoods looking for people breaking into vehicles.

In a press conference on Thursday, Maryland Heights Police Chief Bill Carson said, “A lot of communities have had problems with car break-ins, apartment parking lots, hotel parking lots, different locations throughout the municipality. Unfortunately, it seems like we have been getting a lot of guns stolen out of cars, people leaving guns in their cars.”

He added: “So we had a rash of car break-ins. We had officers out on surveillance trying to catch the people who were doing that. So these officers were on a specific assignment to watch the parking lots, to try to catch people that were breaking into cars.”