Geoffrey
Alpert, chair, department of
criminology and criminal justice, University of
South Carolina, is a nationally recognized expert on police
violence, pursuit driving and training. He says, "While you cannot
completely restrict police pursuits, they should be reserved for suspects who have
committed violent felonies."
D.
P. Van
Blaricom, Police Practices
Expert, MPA, FBI-NA, Chief of Police (Ret.)
Other
Facts:
The
Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that 400-500 people are
killed every year in chases.
More than 3,000
people have been killed in police chase crashes in the past 10
years, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration and more than 1/3 of the deaths were innocent
bystanders.
Law
enforcement agencies in
some cities
and states have adopted restrictive pursuit policies to
eliminate unwarranted pursuits that often lead to injuries and tragic deaths
of innocent bystanders and the officers themselves. Putting
public safety first are agencies in Baltimore; St. Louis; Orange County,
Florida; Orlando, Florida; Miami, and
Peachtree City, Georgia.
California
leads the nation in the number of innocent bystanders killed in
pursuits.
The National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration Report for 2001:
370 Americans killed
in pursuit-related crashes, more than a third were innocent
bystanders
52 people were killed in California; 24 of
these people were not even in a car being pursued
and some --
especially the children -- in the fleeing cars were just as
innocent.
In 2002 the number grew to 386
deaths.
California is still in the
lead with 50 deaths and 17 of those killed were not in a car
being pursued.
Since reporting of pursuit deaths is
mandatory but not enforced, these figures are underreported.
PursuitWatch reports the national average is closer to
450 deaths
annually.
Injuries -- many of
them permanent -- have escalated into the
thousands.
Also, when innocent bystanders
are killed in pursuits,
law enforcement is often
quoted as saying, "It was not a
chase. We were just 'catching up' or 'backing off.'"
Pursuit Policies
From Geoffrey Alpert's
research:
And finally, the policy standards
applied to the evaluation of a pursuit as well as to the
decision to continue a pursuit needs to include the
following three questions:
If the pursuit were to
result in injury or death, would a reasonable person
understand why the pursuit occurred or was necessary?
Is the need to
immediately catch the suspect more important than the risk
created by the pursuit?
Do the dangers created
by the pursuit exceed the dangers posed by letting the
perpetrator escape?
Jim Phillips of
PursuitWatch.org has analyzed hundreds of pursuit policies and was
recently praised for his efforts in working on policy revisions in the
State of Florida. Here is what Jim said after he reviewed the Chico
(California) Pursuit Policy: "The
policy is so long, tedious, contradictive, vague, and useless. It
is impossible to fix. Trash it and start over."
Pursuit Training
"The
typical police officer is given a 2-5 day school in their basic
academy on driving," PoliceDriving.com
reports. "Maybe 4-8 hours of that was spent on pursuit
training."
Making
News
An
authority on police driver training, Sgt. Travis Yates of Tulsa,
Okla., says that very few police academies provide lengthy training
on pursuit driving. Yates, who has coordinated driver training of
Tulsa police officers for about seven years, runs a Web site called www.policedriving.com.
"You
give some training in the academy, but if a police officer gets in a
pursuit years later, how much training has he had?" said Yates
in a telephone interview Friday.
A
patrol car is a potential weapon, he said, and departments say
"Here are the keys" without the needed training.
"It
puts the officers in a bad position," said Yates. "I think
we're really putting officers at a disadvantage."Link
to entire article.
