Priorities in police pursuits

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 of which the 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. 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 late this year.

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 pursuits in Auckland. A joint statement from the agencies at the time said there was an average of 300 pursuits a month.

In late October, after a man and woman died and three others were seriously injured when a car being pursued by police hit a tree in the Auckland suburb of Morningside, road safety campaigner Clive Matthew-Wilson said police had to stop ‘‘this cowboy posse attitude that we must pursue at all costs’’ because it was costing multiple lives, many of them ‘‘completely innocent people’’, like the third person killed on Sunday.

He told RNZ some Australian states had restricted police pursuits, with a resultant significant drop in the death toll, citing the example of Queensland, which he said had seen no pursuit deaths in six years as a result.

In a statement at the time, Assistant Commissioner Road Policing Sandra Venables said it was ‘‘up to the driver to take more responsibility and make better decisions’’, a position she has maintained since Sunday’s tragedy.

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. Retrospectively pointing to their lack of responsibility, especially when someone ‘‘completely innocent’’ has died, seems somewhat tone deaf.

The biggest losers when pursuits go bad are the innocent bystanders caught up, and their families. The ongoing joint investigation must make their wellbeing top priority in any revised pursuit policy.