Innocent bystanders must be a priority

Police Minister Stuart Nash got it spot-on in the immediate aftermath of the triple fatality crash near Nelson on Sunday morning when he said it was a tragedy both for the families of those who died, and the officers involved.

Leaving aside that two of the three people killed were in a car whose driver had chosen to flee rather than stop when asked to by police, there are not only three people dead as a result of the incident, leaving behind grieving families, but there are police officers who will now have to come to terms with the fact that those three people died in a smash that happened while they were pursuing that vehicle.

Unsurprisingly, the focus since the tragedy has shifted quickly onto the guidelines around police pursuits. Police Tasman district commander Mike Johnson was understandably quick to point to the ‘‘very stringent procedures’’ governing when police pursued a vehicle.

On Saturday officers in Taranaki were involved in a pursuit in which it is alleged a driver deliberately tried to run an officer over while trying to make his escape.

Officers had been forced to abandon their pursuit the previous day because of the dangerous driving involved.

However, as a police statement on Sunday pointed out, such incidents are ‘‘fast-moving, unpredictable and high pressure situations that require quick judgments’’, so the time available to put those procedures into practice is severely constrained.

Nash has already asked for an update on progress in a joint investigation between the New Zealand Police and the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA), which investigates pursuits notified to it, usually those involving death or serious injury. A report is due in late 2018.

That review was started in July, though news of it seems only to have been made public in November, after a month in which three people had died in two separate pursuits in Auckland. A joint statement from the agencies at the time said there was an average of 300 pursuits a month.

Few would question that when a pursuit goes as horribly wrong as this one did, the ultimate responsibility rests with those who chose not to comply with a police directive, but as Matthew-Wilson said in October, such drivers are often running on adrenaline when the time comes to make the call.

The biggest losers when pursuits go bad are the innocent bystanders.

The ongoing joint investigation must make their wellbeing top priority in any revised pursuit policy.