Police Pursuits

Imagine being a police officer doing your daily routine job. You are in a patrol car on the highway, watching the cars and trucks drive by. You are also looking for speeders to warn them to be more careful and maybe you’ll ticket them. It has been a very boring day for you, since you have only been called on your radio once, and it was for an accident (fender bender). Almost at the end of your shift, a blue car drives by going ninety miles an hour, but you know the speed limit is only fifty-five miles an hour. You pull the patrol car out of the gravel area that you had been sitting in and you start to follow the car. You put your lights on and catch up to them. After a few minutes you pull the person over. You get out of the car and start walking over towards the blue car. You are right about to talk to the driver and he drives off, leaving nothing but dust in your face. Now, the adrenaline is pumping in your body, but what should you do? You could call for backup or follow the blue car. Anything could happen. How far should you actually go? This is the question that will be answered in this paper. I will explain what police pursuit is and some different things officers do during a pursuit. I will also give some statistics about the fatalities that have happened in a police pursuit. I will also illustrate my opinion about how far police pursuits should go.

A true definition of a police pursuit “occurs when a police officer attempts to stop a vehicle and the driver of the car refuses to obey the officer” (Solgen, 1). At this point, the policeman pursues for the purpose of stopping the vehicle or being able to identify the car. The police officer should most likely be in a patrol car, so that the driver is aware that it is an officer. In a pursuit, the speed may vary. ‘High speeds are potentially more dangerous, but even low or moderate speeds can create substantial risks in congested areas”(Nugent, 1).

There has been a lot of statistics that have been recorded on the topic of police pursuits. In the 1998 Pennsylvania Police Pursuit Report, there were a total of 1,900 pursuits. The pursuits have raised from 1, 880 chases in 1997 to twenty more in 1998. Most of the pursuits did not end up in any type of collision. There was also a very small injury rate that was shown in...

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...it. First, the police officer has to agree that they will not discharge a firearm for the only purpose of trying to stop a vehicle. Another restriction is that officers are not allowed to deliberately run into a pursued vehicle with a police car. Also, unmarked police vehicles are not to be used in a police chase. They are only allowed to be used where there is not a patrol car immediately able to be there. With this restriction apprehension is required in the pursuit. The last special restriction that needs to be followed is that no police officer “shall engage in a police pursuit unless they are trained in a course that is approved by the Ontario Police College”(Solgen 4). This restriction started on January 1st in 1991. It started because the Solicitor General for Ontario put together a committee to study the different points to police pursuit driving. The committee examined “policy, law, statistics, training, and radio communications”(Nugent 7). Together, they decided that vehicular police pursuits are too hazardous to do as frequently as they did. So, they put together a course to train police officers and give them some restrictions to what extent they should actually go to.