(“What about car chases?” statistically they’re a terrible idea and we should stop doing them in almost all circumstances, so there’s little harm in losing the “tactical” capacity of your traffic enforcement cars)
So maybe just letting people run away from the police because it might be dangerous to chase them doesn’t seem like the right solution. At least find another way to implement the consequence. The alternatives that spring to mind require extensive surveillance, though, so I’m not sure there is a preferable alternative.
License plates exist and cop cars already scan those. Turning a possible arrest into a chase puts the suspect, anyone else in the car with them, the cops, and various uninvolved bystanders at risk of serious injury or death. It is an extreme escalation and should be reserved for extreme situations.
It's absolutely imperative for LEO's to consider safety of other residents when enforcing laws. There are much better ways to identify and detain suspects.
There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are.
If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity.
If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse.
And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.
I'm not a fan of the current system, but I struggle to personally come up with a better one.
Maybe, but what proportion of stops end in an arrest?
A largish proportion of cop traffic enforcement & safety activity ends in a tow, but we don’t expect traffic enforcement cops to drive tow trucks. The traffic safety people can call out the regular cops if they need them.
> if you run and they can't chase, how do you expect arrests to happen?
Recording devices, reports, follow up. Chases are a public menace, especially when they do them over minor offenses, as is the case for the overwhelming majority of chases. Given the danger, I’d much rather anyone who’s not an active danger to life get away than a car chase occur. The evidence is pretty far on the side of “these are net-harmful”. Cops just like them a lot, so we keep doing them (many places do, anyway—some have all but eliminated them)
Risk of added charges, potentially more serious than the original offense, means the majority of folks facing arrest won’t flee, anyway.
- Light bars/electronics/sirens
- Armoring
- Ability to detain suspects
The first is going to be required for every police or sheriff cruiser.
The second will reduce casualties (arguably for both sides) in an armed engagement. Ideally required for any action which could create an armed engagement. Because a minimum of one side is always armed, every encounter can become an armed engagement. Huzzah USA etc. etc.
The third is required if the police officer will ever respond to anything that isn't giving out a parking ticket. Traffic stops can include anything from an armed engagement down to a drunk driver or peaceful execution of an outstanding warrant. Then there's simple responding to calls, which can also include all of the above.
The lack of ability to detain someone means you need (as stated in the article) more officers responding to an engagement.
If it’s known they don’t pursue and aren’t likely to attack you to secure an arrest, the risk for them from the person they’re stopping (traffic on the e.g. highway they’re standing next to is another matter) in an encounter is a ton lower. Why fight them when you can just leave? And rack up another charge, sure, but one a hell of a lot less serious than attacking someone and then still fleeing.
It does mean calling in a regular cop for arrests, but what proportion of stops result in arrests in a day? They also have to call in tow trucks and ambulances and fire trucks.
If this is true and not just an assumption (FWIW, I think you're wrong - human nature is not that logical when in fight or flight brain) it should be possible to come up with numbers to back this up. There are many locations in the US where the default is not to chase.
As a side note, they have to detain someone while waiting. That someone's care is also legally in their hands at that point; it doesn't make a lot of sense from a civilian safety perspective to just set them on the side of the highway.
I totally agree that the majority of folks don't flee and wouldn't flee, but the folks that do, they're the main dangers we want to catch anyway.
I struggle to agree with the concept that raids ate better than chases.
I struggle to think it's fair to people that don't run if they're held responsible but people that run aren't.
There have been some places that have either restricted or loosened restrictions on police chases over the last couple decades, which should give us an excellent data set to see the effects of these policies… unfortunately, police data gathering and sharing is notoriously awful, with the result that most attempts at analyzing the statistics of policing in the US are necessarily full of guesswork.
I also worry that expanding "passive/invisible surveillance (drone tracking and other methods—these are already used)" is a net loss for citizens, however, I struggle on how to quantify that loss compared to the cost of accidents.
These are clearly disanalogous. You can leave a car waiting for a tow truck; it's not going to drive off on its own. But you can't just leave a suspect waiting to be arrested unless they're restrained (in which case, you've already done the hard part of arresting them).
Lots of police departments have adopted a stance that they won't chase you except for certain circumstances (such as if you're presenting an immediate threat to the public).
Instead, they'll track the running suspect, position cars in the path of the vehicle and do ambushes involving spike strips, pit maneuvers, etc. Or, depending on the situation, they may do nothing in the moment and arrest the driver later at their home.
These tactics (outside extraordinary cases) are a solution to a problem the cops created themselves by chasing the fleeing suspect, and turning it into a life-and-death matter. It’s one of those cases where a knee-jerk and kinda authoritarian sense of justice (“they’re running, you can’t run from the cops, they have to go after them!”) is at sharply at odds with public benefit.
A large amount of police work involves things like "go to the scene of the burglary from yesterday, take witness statements and fingerprints" and "go to the place the noise complaint came from, tell them to turn it down" and things like that.
Tasks that need a police car and timely response, but they don't need to be speeding and running red lights. This work is done by officers in kinda basic police cars.
Other officers, with advanced driver training, are called on for tasks that might need high speed pursuit. They get faster cars, like Mitsubishi Evos and Impreza WRXes.
Scenario: ordinary traffic stop. Writes ticket or issues warning. Everything’s fine.
Scenario: I’m driving with a suspended license and may have an outstanding warrant for a missed court date. I elect not to run. Normal cop car called, takes me in. I won’t attack the traffic enforcement officer, because this is all being recorded and that gains me nothing except lost time and more charges, since if…
Scenario: The above is the situation but I elect to flee. No chase occurs, so this doesn’t turn into a prolonged risk to the public. Since I know the traffic enforcers don’t pursue and it’s well-publicized that their car and body cam footage is uploaded constantly, there’s zero reason to engage with or attempt to harm them.
The remaining risks are things that aren’t really mitigated by car upgrades (someone driving off mid-stop, which is risky for the traffic enforcer already standing next to the stopped-person’s car) or the kind of risks also present at, I dunno, the grocery store (someone armed and crazy attacks you for absolutely no conceivable benefit to themselves)
A bonus is that this would make non-traffic-enforcement cops a ton safer, since most of their deaths are from traffic accidents (not intentional attacks with a vehicle, to distinguish the two) and they’d spend way less time driving, or standing on the side of highways. [edit] I got that wrong, vehicle strikes and car crashes are more like ~40% of deaths on the job, not over half. Still, it’s way up the list of risks. Unclear how major injury causes break down.