It's so bad that the local TV stations have their own choppers and a dedicated on-screen UI tailored for the chases with GPS-based tracking and speed.
If you're lucky you can catch one of the many YouTube live streams. Here's one from....two days ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/uGiJU-FlpdE
Nicely contrasts with all the news about the omnipresent license plate scanners - it's just pointless, don't take the risk, arrest them at your leisure.
So unless there's an immediate danger, there is no reason for chasing people and create dangerous situations. You can just follow them around from the severance cameras and catch them once they are no longer on the move. Even if you don't have disability for one reason or another, it still doesn't make much sense to engage in high-speed driving around people minding their own business.
"Once this baby hits 88mph, we're home free!"
Air support is used to coordinate with law enforcement up ahead to deploy spikes to end the chase.
You are just repeating empty political talking points that simply don't work in the real world.
> They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry? PIT maneuvers are extraordinarily dangerous, especially at high speeds.
If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.
>Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry?
I've heard cops say something similar on body cam footage.
But well, it's America, having the risk of a stray cop bullet hitting you because just like car chases, shootous are inevitable, makes it safer!
I'm not sure that the cops pursuing people at those speeds is doing anything besides making the situation more dangerous. Police in the US are grossly undertrained, I wouldn't trust them to actually be competent at what is very technical and difficult driving.
One would think that basic firearm safety would be the bare minimum, since we pay them to carry a gun. However, I have had to vacate a shooting range 3 times due to police showing up and being unsafe with firearms. I have had this happen in 3 different ranges, where off-duty cops have shown up and proceeded to ignore basic safety rules like not flagging people with guns. I'm not dumb enough to try to give a cop a safety lecture, so I've always packed up my stuff and left. However, if they aren't even given enough training to not figure out to point their guns downrange instead of at the firing line, they aren't trained well enough to trust with something technical and difficult like a pit maneuver.
One of these times was at a CA range, they were socal cops. Training standards for police in the US are woefully low, most cops aren't able to hit the broad side of a barn given ideal circumstances. They agitate about how dangerous their job is, but they don't train like it is. They fire a few rounds a year and have absolutely horrendous marksmanship standards. Don't get fooled, your average cop has roughly zero idea on firearms safety or even how to use the darn things.
They would not even try to reach those speed if they weren't chased. A criminal who thinks he escaped the police will try to not attract attention. They would just follow the normal flow of the traffic and you can follow their path thanks to the millions of cameras and the helicopter mentionned earlier. We are not in the 70's anymore.
You can follow them from a distance they can't spot you so you can lock the road if they turn back and dispatch police force form in various exit points of an highway without starting an high speed chase.
High speed chase is about cops endangering the public for the thrill and adrenaline really. They do that because they like it, not because they need it to arrest criminals.
I never thought of my Olds Silhouette minivan as a high performance car. Neat.
The rubbery panels were great. I was at school pickup and another parent backed into it. They crushed the front fender to the firewall. Then they pulled up and it popped out.
They were freaked out but it was fine. And it's just a car.
Hitting a car going 100mph with a magnetic dart that and getting it to hit on a metal part, not a window or trim, and specially a steel panel, is not easy at all.
It would be nice if someone else with knowledge would chime in here. If this damages cars, then I want to know, so I can stop doing it in the future.
You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable.
I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
Assuming this is true, it seems like something has gone badly wrong somewhere in this process.
Why can't cars have paint that survives being "leaned on"
I don't even know what a 5 stage detail means but I can safely say you are overreacting. A car is just a tool and a rando putting a fridge magnet or leaning against your car once in a while is just completely negligible compared to the amount of shit a paint is exposed to when driving it. Sand and dirt do not ask for your permission either.
Some people will get snide about anyone who cares about their car’s paint, but as someone who once bought a car I had to save a long time for and spent a lot of time with car care products I would be very sad if I saw you drop a magnet on to it and then pull it off without a second thought. Please don’t.
What metal parts of a car aren’t painted? Or more broadly: coated.
Jotun would like a word with you.
Seems like everyone here is assuming you used a 40lb neodymium magnet you dropped in the dirt first.
I like to assume the best in people.
How is anyone driving at that speeds in LA traffic?
Seriously? It's from people not wanting to be arrested and go to jail. If they get away, perfect. If they don't, well, they were going to jail anyways. Now they have a cool story to tell while in jail. These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign. These are people doing dirt, know it, and are willing to try something to avoid getting caught. It's really not complicated
(assuming they do in fact have more per capita/car...)
UK has stuff like [0] which contains a whole bunch of "is it worth it?" considerations. Also if a chase causes a death, the officer(s) can be prosecuted[1] - I suspect the nonsense of "qualified immunity" means there's no risk to a US officer for initiating a chase that ends in death.
[0] https://www.college.police.uk/app/roads-policing/police-purs...
[1] e.g https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58889155
After this case [0] the standing orders are that it's basically never worth it, you risk a prosecution no matter what the circumstances.
[0] https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/garda-charged-aft...
Off the top of my head: 1) US cops are more likely to harass, maim, kill you than most other places (whether you've crimed or not); 2) US legal system seems a little hinky when it comes to certain people; 3) "three strikes" (not sure if that's countrywide or state-level? pretty sure it's still around tho'?) can mean life for three trivial crimes; 4) car-centric country - lots of them and everywhere is designed for cars[0].
[0] Imagine a car chase around London[1] or some other wackily streeted city.
[1] No, the godawful nonsense Hollywood comes up with does not count.
It's basically a list of violent crimes, the only one that seems out of pocket is selling PCP, meth, or cocaine to childre, which is bad but could arguably be less bad than the others on the list
It takes a lot to earn strikes in California.
But not all states are California.
> No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
William James Rummel begs to differ[0] - fraudulent use of a credit card ($80), forged check ($28.36), failure to return payment for non-performed work ($120.75) and voila, life sentence (albeit later reduced to time served on procedural grounds.)
[0] also references "Graham v. West Virginia, a 1912 case which involved an individual convicted of three separate counts of horse thievery total[l]ing $235" which ended up in a life sentence.
In summary, some states may have sensible 3 strike laws, some may not.
Look, I know I'm old and it feels like it but 1980 is absolutely not one hundred years ago.
> I would love to see more comprehensive stats to answer this question
Have some more recent California examples (between 1994 when they created the law and 2012 when it was loosened): "[...] given life sentences for offenses including stealing one dollar in loose change from a parked car, possessing less than a gram of narcotics, and attempting to break into a soup kitchen."[0]
[0] https://law.stanford.edu/three-strikes-project/three-strikes...
If someone is convicted three times of stealing in a year, even if it's like 1$, clearly something is not working here between this person and the system. It's a pipe dream but it would be nice if we could have some kind of board you could refer cases like that to with the mission statement of "figure out exactlt what is going on here" with powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.
Alas.
Yep, it's definitely a "this person needs some kind of help" signifier.
I can see the logic of "three top-line serious felonies" -> much more severe punishment (even though, I believe, more severe punishment doesn't actually tend to reduce recidivism but I guess if you get life without parole, that's not a huge issue) - if someone commits three distinct murders[0], obviously there's a problem with letting them loose in polite society.
> powers to take actions that involved things other than prisons.
I think various places have tried things like that and (IIRC) they tend to work out well - people get reintegrated into society, they don't reoffend, etc. - but all it takes is one agitator (right wing paper or politician looking for cheap points) to bring up the "soft on crime" angle and it all goes out the window.
[0] obvs. without justification - if they've killed in self-defence three times, that's different than three unprovoked straight out murders, but you'd still want some kind of "look, maybe don't go places where you end up in fights etc." conversation.
My point is you're just pulling out a few incidents, and not even very many at that. I would like to see real stats on the subject, but it seems you're working under the "plural of anecdote is data" theory.
The person I responded to said "so why do americans have more high speed chases?" Last I checked, "americans" covered more than just California.
> IMO we shouldn't base our law enforcement on what Texas was doing 50 years ago
Indeed not! California's Three Strikes law isn't all that great though[0].
"Project clients have been given life sentences for offenses including stealing one dollar in loose change from a parked car, possessing less than a gram of narcotics, and attempting to break into a soup kitchen."
I'd say two of those were even sillier than the Texas example.
But to its credit, California did vote to reform it in 2021 and people have been released since.
[0] https://law.stanford.edu/three-strikes-project/three-strikes...
The latter is often a result of the former. People self-medicating to escape misery.
I think it fits a narrative to explain addictions away as something that happens to someone as a victim of their circumstances, but personal choices are a real input.
Can't we just blame GTA?
In a city with large population, it only takes a few people willing to commit crimes to make the news.
Although if you watched "Last Week Tonight" recently (S12 E28, 2025-11-02), Mr Oliver's long segment is about police chases and IIRC he covered more than a couple of cases where people were, in fact, being pulled over / chased for trivial matters which then lead to crashes, deaths, etc.
The police officers don't know why you are running away and can reasonably expect that there is something wrong other than an unbuckled seat belt -> a kidnapped person, tons of drugs in the trunk, a wanted murderer driving, etc.
Well at least in my country where chases are rare. I understand in US it is difficult since people are more eager to run away.
Right, people are dumb. You can't just throw your hands in the air and declare a problem unsolvable because people are dumb and keep acting against their best interest; you acknowledge that fact and change tact accordingly. If it turns out that trying to pull people over for minor infractions causes 1% of those incidents to turn into violent chases then you should stop pulling people over for minor infractions and figure out a safer way to ticket them. At the very least you shouldn't chase after them in your car and add another dangerous vehicle to the road. It reflects a mindset of "get and punish the bad guys" being prioritized over "improve safety of your community," which pretty much sums up the culture problem with American police and criminal justice in general.
That's the thing: normal people don't. Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
What about people who are convinced that police may kill them for mild violation as they saw that multiple times on the news and social media? The reaction to flee may be justified at the moment as it is life or death anyway, even if only in their heads.
There are a lot of "normal" people around who will act abnormally in a high stress situation.
People will confess to crimes they didn't commit if the police are persuasive enough, that's why such evidence is illegal.
Yes.
> People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.
Also yes. But both of those points apply to the (US) cops and they frequently fail on both points (the first amply demonstrated by how many police chases end up in crashes and/or deaths; the second by any one of thousands of videos showing where the cops needlessly escalate traffic stops.)
I beg you to watch the John Oliver segment where he gives several counter-examples to this narrative.
That would indeed be dumb, but once somebody dumb has decided to do that they're guilty of something much more serious and the car chase is completely justified.
john oliver did a whole thing on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw
Except that the person trying to get away knows that too, so if all they're doing is buying themselves a bigger fine, why are they doing it?
The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work.
Except it's almost never that. The answer is that people are stupid and impulsive.
You also have the problem that if you steal a car and then run from the police the result is that they don't pursue you and send a ticket to the person you stole it from, that makes it a lot easier to steal a car, and then the percentage goes up.
There is generally no crime for owning a vehicle used in a crime. The violation belongs to the _driver_ and to no one else. Burden of proof can be extreme in US courts.
A hoodie is enough to defeat the drone surveillance, and regardless of what facial recognition technology you use, a jury still has to buy the output of that system.
For drones with less than a 6 foot wingspan that don't require a runway you've got maybe 30 minutes of flight time at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. So unless you know where they're going already you're not going to be able to effectively deploy it in the time necessary to capture them and you can't loiter long enough to track them with infrared.
The helicopter is an insurance policy. When you have a bunch of marked units doing twice the speed limit on a long enough chase they're going to hit something. Those crashes are devastating and lead to eye watering settlement amounts. The helicopter can safely chase most vehicles at almost any speed and the risk of them crashing with any civilian or even civilian property is effectively zero.
thing is, in Germany and many other European countries there's a mandate to register your place of residence with the authorities in a timely manner (i.e. 2 weeks after moving in).
Americans and Brits don't have that, so "mail them a fine" is most likely going to result in the letter not arriving where it should.
There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell.
Seems like a vicious cycle, fed by the terrible news media.
It's not only dense but the scale is far larger than most European cities. Only Asian and South American cities outclass the insanity that is LA. Until you've been there it's hard to appreciate the scope of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles#Urban_area...
This isn't a size measuring contest. I think Europeans forget how _young_ America is. That's the only unique part of this country. Give us a few thousand years and we'll be on par.
Looking at the population of greater Melbourne has you looking at suburbs like Werribee, Frankston, Boronia, etc., which everyone would consider as a part of Melbourne (suburbs, outer, but very much a part of the core).
On the flip side, the "Seattle Metropolitan Area" consists of:
Mt Rainier. Bainbridge Island. Glacier Peak in Mt Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. Mt Vernon. Olympia. North Bend.
No Western Washingtonian is calling any of those locations "a suburb of Seattle".
I recognize my little city is not like LA (which I’ve visited twice) - the types of crimes, the types of criminals and the prevalence of weapons are far different, although we also have our share of gun violence and murder. But we have also not militarized our police, and there’s very much a police culture of service to the community. Here, when a cop uses their weapon, it’s seen as a failure. This was a situation handled properly, and it made me proud.
Case in point: during the Uvalde school shooting incident in 2022, when a shooter (Salvador Ramos) went on a killing spree inside the school, then hundreds of cops gathered outside with brand new body armor (gifted to them just months ago) and armed with automatic guns, but they never dared to go inside to tackle the shooter. Not only that, those cowardly cops actively prevented parents and state patrol officers from going in to rescue their kids. The cowardly cops were led by a cowardly police chief, who later gave excuses for the delayed response to the deadly situation and his mishandling of the police force, by claiming to have forgotten his walkie talkie!
Ultimately one of the border patrol officers and some US deputy marshalls (who had travelled 70 miles to reach the scene after getting an alert) managed to sneak in to the back, break the locked door, and used a tactical shield to corner and finally kill the shooter, thus ending his bloodbath (19 children and 2 teachers were tragically killed).
And if you think arming cowardly showoff cops with guns and armor is useless and potentially dangerous, you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!
That's how lax and evil the gun laws and resulting shootouts in USA are.
USA has more mass shootings and more school shootings than any other place in the world.
No wonder they facilitate and glorify high-speed car chases. It is all a thrillride for these adrenaline junkies high on power.
That does not appear to be true. The investagiom reporting shows that the shooter bought the guns after he turned 18 - the legal age to purchase them (long guns, aka rifles - different from pistols) in the state of Texas.
Buying things on credit seems like a reasonable way to do business in general - are you suggesting that all deadly weapons should be sold for cash to increase the difficulty of legally acquiring them and so lowering the frequency of mass shootings?
In Texas, there is no minimum age for purchasing ammunition beyond federal limits, no requirement for an ammunition seller to keep a record of the purchaser, and no specific license to buy or sell ammunition, according to the Giffords Law Center.
https://www.kxan.com/investigations/uvalde-shooter-had-1600-...
Salvador Ramos, the Uvalde school shooter, legally purchased two AR platform rifles Ramos got his guns legally through Oasis Outback, a Uvalde sporting goods store and federal firearms licensee, according to published reports. He also purchased hundreds of rounds of ammunition, on his 18th birthday.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/25/us/uvalde-texas-school-sh...
I know the USA has a bad habit of buying things on credit, but firearms & ammo should never be allowed to be purchased on credit. Let it be purchased only after a verification and license from police, and only via debit card or bank transaction with proper legal paper trail, not credit or cash. And any firearm and ammo purchase should be ratified with local police, so they know if someone is making a suspicious purchase.
The funniest part of the story is that they didn't commit any crime and were let go.
Story here (in German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/braunschweig-junge-ma...
Like 99% of high speed chases only end when the culprit crashes their car, and often that's into someone else's car risking harm to innocent civilians.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...
This is not a fact. What is a fact is that many police departments stopped reporting crimes, so there are fewer crimes being reported, not that there are fewer crimes being committed.
https://www.aol.com/thousands-police-depts-stop-reporting-00...
There are myriad reasons why, but stemming the upward trend of reported violence makes politicians look better and we all know how honest politicians are.
In the EU if you get caught doing a crime, yeah you will get charged and punished, maybe take a billy club to the leg during an arrest, but nothing too extreme and you go to jail for a bit, maybe pay some fines, but you live and learn. In the US there is a good chance you get shot right away, if you aren't shot the cops will likely beat you and abuse you doing the arrest, the prosecutor and court will try and dump a decade+ long sentence on you even if there was no violence involved and the material value is only a few days worth of work, and the prison is a horrible environment by designed that often fucks people up mentally.
Harsh punishment for crimes is rarely a very good deterrent against crime, it just makes people who were desperate enough to resort to crime more desperate and determined to escape capture. If I had a decent bank account I could probably get most charges lowered to something acceptable in the US, but most people committing low level crimes usually don't have lawyer money and will have their life ruined with a ridiculous sentence.
We are seeing the result of a combination of factors including aversion to consequences and the inability to empathize with those they put at risk.
Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage
causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment,
and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame.
“Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they
recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of
notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles
County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release.
"There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many
[suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole
thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s
office.(This is why we want to abolish them)
Let's say for argument's sake, that it was relatively well known that you could just drive away rapidly from a police encounter and successfully escape. Do you think that would affect the number of people who made that decision to do that?
I can see both sides of this, but I'm curious what yours is.
Did you know that (pre covid) about half of all police deaths were due to car crashes? Even from a view point which completely ignores non-cops: chases are a terrible plan.
Same for me, but I live in America.
The specific location matters a lot. The LA area is more population dense and bigger than might be obvious.
To put it in perspective, the GDP of the LA area is about 1/4 as much as the GDP of your entire country.
That's underselling it a bit, IMO. You can look at an aerial map and observe that it's pretty big, but experiencing it in person ... it's enormous. It just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes ...
And then there's all the GDP that arises from the population itself: construction, healthcare, education, real estate.
If you take away the entertainment industry, it becomes a different place, but there's a lot of economic activity and most of it isn't film and tv and music production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa...
LA is absolutely not “dense” by any European standard though.
https://www.comparea.org/r122576+r396479
Don't know how the math works out exactly, but if they don't have the workforce to cover their patrol area with squad cars, there's probably an argument to be made for covering gaps with areal support. Given that Chicago struggles with workforce shortages, I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you had to cover 4x the area with half the tax base.
Relevant German song concerning this mentality:
Foyer des Arts - Hubschraubereinsatz (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pAr1IMiP6A
Here is some video of the song that also shows the lyrics:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U3mncVE1TQ0
Unsurprisingly, the comments are mostly making fun of them for wasting tax money on hunting down some guys with spray bottles.
Also, according to the tracker, there's only one airborne in LA right now, and it is a pretty large city. It's close to 100x bigger than a 200k city.