Newapproach to pursuits welcome

All together now. If it ain’t broke ...? Right. Don’t fix it. But we defy anyone to make that claim about this country’s police pursuit practices. We’ve endured carnage including 67 fatalities in the nine years to 2018, a total that has grown notoriously since then.

So a new approach for police pursuits, which has become public only because an email to police staff was leaked, is welcome.

The newly clarified rules – not actually changed, we’re assured, just more helpfully communicated – recast how officers are expected to assess risk.

The public will have its own views on this and, in so doing, it’s important not to fixate on blame and content ourselves that as long as the fault resides emphatically with the driver then the police shouldn’t be required to change anything much.

This treats the death or injury of any innocents – more often than not those hurt haven’t been the fleeing driver – as collateral damage of a sort that just can’t be helped, just factored into any penalties later imposed.

Scant comfort for the injured and bereft families. Even then it’s not that simple because the police have themselves been found, too often for anyone to be happy about, to have breached pursuit rules.

Remember, early last year the Independent Police Conduct Authority, in a joint review with the police, found there was a lack of understanding among staff about the risks officers created by initiating a pursuit. It emphatically concluded that safety must take precedence over catching the fleeing driver. That’s nominally been the bottom line anyway. It just comes down to the training and thinking that informs those on-the-spot assessments.

It’s entirely on the cards that clarifying the rules will lead to fewer pursuits, most strikingly of drivers who have been acting suspiciously, or fleeing for no apparent reason – or have been speeding, which is a particularly unhappy thought given that this is something all drivers are constantly encouraged to see as inherently dangerous.

But it comes down to worst-case scenarios. Yes, it’s a galling prospect that, say, a drunk driver being pulled over at a checkpoint can hive off into the distance and potentially a clean getaway. But that’s not necessarily worse than the same character speeding even faster, and now dividing his attention between what’s ahead of him and the police behind him.

We do tend to picture that driver as a hot-headed youth. We probably shouldn’t.

The IPCA review took nearly 200 randomly selected cases and found that the reality was uglier – the median age was 25, nearly half had some previous form as a fleeing driver, and most had serious criminal histories, averaging 16 convictions.

The newly clarified approach is more reliant on follow-up investigations, the success rate of which will become amatter of increasing public interest. National’s police spokesperson, Simeon Brown, calls for the Government to back police with new tools and technology. Who would argue with that? But he also contends that increased penalties are required to create ‘‘a real deterrent’’. Where’s the evidence to suggest this is to the forefront of the thinking of drivers who, in the moment, seem determined to escape penalties rather than minded to pause and evaluate them in a considered way?

Unless they carry such knowledge in their heads, because we all like to keep on top of what the latest maximum penalties are.

It’s entirely on the cards that clarifying the rules will lead to fewer pursuits ...