Police should chase only violent felons in Pa., experts urge
To chase, or not to chase? That’s a call police officers make on the road when a motorist refuses to stop for their emergency lights and sirens.
The decision can carry life-altering consequences. When police chases end in crashes, they can hurt or kill officers, suspects and innocent bystanders. They also are costly to police departments to repair vehicles and pay out lawsuits and for residents who have to pay that tab and more if they get hit in a crash.
There are plenty of Pennsylvania examples of police chases that ended badly.
Two people suspected of stealing items from unlocked vehicles died last week in Franklin County after they fled from state police into farm fields, where they went over an embankment and plunged into a body of water. The driver turned out to be a 16-year-old boy.
Three people died this year in Dauphin County after state police chased the driver over a stop sign violation.
Across the country, the mounting toll from police pursuits prompted Congress to ask several national policing organizations to investigate and prepare recommendations for local agencies.
Those experts concluded in a report published in September that police should only start a chase if someone is believed to have committed a violent crime or if there is reason to believe they will commit a violent crime. Officers should not chase drivers for minor offenses, including traffic violations, according to the report.
The violations simply don’t justify the risks, according to the report published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Police Executive Research Forum and the Office of Community-Oriented Policing Service. The study found no increased risk of crime if officers chased fewer drivers.
“The safety of fleeing suspects, their passengers, pursuing officers, and uninvolved bystanders are too important to risk on a regular basis,” according to Hugh Clements Jr., the director of the office of community-oriented policing services.
Although police chases are sometimes necessary to apprehend a suspect in a timely manner, high-speed chases are not — nor should they be — a routine part of law enforcement work, Clements Jr. said.
But that appears to be what many Pennsylvania police departments are doing, according to annual data gathered by Pennsylvania State Police. A state law requires that the agency collect the data.
In fact, police start the majority of chases in Pennsylvania, or 53% of them, for traffic offenses. Only 12.5% were started for felony crimes.
If Pennsylvania agencies adopted the national recommendations, there could be more than 1,400 fewer chases each year.
Last year, Pennsylvania police agencies pursued 2,718 drivers who fled from them while their emergency lights and sirens were activated, according to state police. That’s an average of almost seven and a half chases a day.
More than a third of those pursuits ended in crashes, and 57% resulted in an arrest, according to state police counts.
Nine people died in Pennsylvania as a result of pursuit-related crashes in 2022. Two of them were bystanders with no involvement in the chase, while the rest were fleeing drivers.
Derry Township police Chief Garth Warner told PennLive that most police agencies in south-central Pennsylvania have pursuit policies as part of their accreditations. That means they have written guidelines dictating, usually in broad terms, when officers can initiate a chase.
“Motor vehicle pursuits are a fluid and dynamic situation and each one evolves rapidly,” Warner said. “No officer wants to be involved in a motor vehicle pursuit, they just want the person to pull over and stop their potentially dangerous actions.”
These chases cost more than lives and limbs. Police chases in Pennsylvania caused more than $5 million of damage in 2022, according to state police data, and uninvolved bystanders suffered the most damage at $2.48 million. Those being chased suffered $2.1 million and police suffered $1.1 million, according to statewide data gathered by state police.
Police chases in Pennsylvania injured 311 people last year, according to state police data. Of those, 214 people were the drivers being chased, while 49 were officers and 48 were innocent bystanders.
State police have a broad pursuit policy that allows them to chase drivers anywhere in the state for minor offenses, like failing to pull over for a traffic stop.
Because state troopers have statewide jurisdiction, they are allowed to chase in cities such as Harrisburg — where local police have more restrictive chase policies to reduce injuries and save lives.
That can defeat the priorities of local leaders when outside agencies are allowed to chase in circumstances beyond what they have decided for their residents.
State police spokesperson Lt. Adam Reed said troopers are asked to weigh the risk of injury against the “duty to apprehend.”
“Members are trained to consider the seriousness of the offense versus the risk posed to the public,” Reed said.
Troopers chased a higher percentage of drivers for minor violations and a lower number for felony charges than the state average: 60% of their chases were for traffic violations and just 9% for felonies, according to state police’s 2022 pursuit report.
Of the nine people killed in Pennsylvania during police pursuits, six died in chases by troopers.
A state police cruiser attempted to pull over Eric Carl, 37, for running a stop sign in Harrisburg.
When the troopers ran the vehicle’s license plate, they discovered Carl — to whom the vehicle was registered — had a warrant for his arrest on strangulation charges related to domestic violence. That’s when troopers initiated a traffic stop, Chardo said — not knowing for sure Carl was in the vehicle.
But as state troopers pulled up behind Carl, he hit the gas and began speeding away.
Carl did not pull over when the troopers activated their sirens, so they chased him out of Harrisburg into Lower Paxton Township — with Carl reaching speeds of 135 mph, the state troopers said.
Carl eventually crashed into a , killing himself and his two passengers: Carly Taylor-Robinson, 26, and Darun Alexander, 33.
Chardo said state police were not chasing at Carl’s speed and that they held back during the chase. Police later said they discovered Carl had methamphetamines in his system, but the amount was not revealed.
Chardo said it would have been reckless not to chase the driver.
“Here, the cause of the death was the driver using drugs and driving at an extraordinary speed fleeing the police.” Chardo said. “There was no indication of police doing anything wrong.”
But experts say officers should consider whether the driver would be behaving the same way if officers were not chasing the driver and whether there were other, safer, ways to arrest a suspect
In the chase with Carl, police nor Chardo would say whether any officer had made any attempt to arrest Carl on the warrant before officers say they witnessed a traffic violation that day. While it’s unclear, it raises the question: If no one was looking for him for that warrant before that day, was the only way to arrest him through a high-speed chase?
Chases are dangerous for officers, too. In June, state troopers raced at 92 mph on a stretch of Carlisle Pike with a 45 mph limit to try to catch three men fleeing Carlisle with $4,000 of stolen merchandise from a Home Depot store.
On their way to join the chase, state troopers Kaleb Reitz and Clay Forcey crashed their unmarked vehicle — with sirens activated — into a tractor-trailer truck performing a U-turn on Carlisle Pike.
Reitz suffered extensive bone fractures and wounds on his face, while Forcey suffered a significant fracture at the top of his spine. The driver of the truck, Donald Haney, has been charged with aggravated assault by a vehicle and failure to yield to first responders.
The fleeing driver and his co-defendants in that case, Julien Fleury, Latrell White and Terrence Caton, caught third-degree felony charges involving retail theft, fleeing from police and recklessly endangering another person.
Under the recommendations in the national report, the officers should not have pursued Carl nor try to join the chase for the retail thefts. In such cases, the policing experts suggested officers could either use aerial means to trail the suspects in each case, or to document their license plates and wait for them to stop and exit the vehicles.
According to Pennsylvania State Police data: 20% of all people who flee from police eventually voluntarily end the chase by pulling over.
Around 75% of all drivers fleeing police said they slow down when they feel safe — that is, free of police show of authority by emergency lights or sirens for approximately two blocks in town, between 2 to 2.5 miles on the highway, and 2.5 miles on a freeway, according to the national report.
A 2021 study found no evidence that suggested reducing the likelihood of pursuits increases crime, according to the report.
The report recommends that police assume responsibility for a vehicle chase’s risk to people and property at the time of initiating that chase.
Under Pennsylvania law, police departments can keep their policies secret. Harrisburg police have shared their specific guidelines with PennLive, but other departments, including state police, refused.
Warner, the police chief of Derry Township, said the primary onus for these pursuits should fall directly on the shoulders of the person starting the pursuit — which is the person who flees law enforcement.
“If we keep saying these pursuits are dangerous, then why wouldn’t we hold a person responsible for taking the initial step in the commission of the crime of fleeing or attempting to elude police officer under the vehicle code?” Warner said.
Fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer is a second-degree misdemeanor, and at sentencing could yield a $500 fine and suspension of one’s driver’s license.
When the fleeing motorist is driving under the influence, crosses state lines or endangers the public by engaging in a high-speed chase, the charge scales up to a third-degree felony — and that could yield seven years in prison.
Local police departments are responsible for setting their own chase policies, according to Chardo. While the Pennsylvania Chiefs of Police Association can set requirements through their accreditation process, that process now simply requires departments to have a policy in place.
According to Chardo, an urban police department such as Harrisburg’s has different needs with its population-dense neighborhoods than agencies like the state police, which often patrol highways.
In 2018, after the deaths of three innocent bystanders, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr. took a leadership role in producing a model police pursuit policy for municipalities in his county.
That policy said a vehicle pursuit is only justified when the necessity for immediate apprehension outweighs the level of danger created by the pursuit. It gave officers the discretion to pursue suspects for forcible felonies and encourages officers to use the safest way possible to arrest suspects.
“If they do not follow the standard, there will be ramifications,” Zappala told reporters at the time, adding if someone were killed, officers “better expect you’re going in front of at the very least an investigating grand jury to take a look at whether or not you’ve created a crime.”
Sean McCormack, the Cumberland County district attorney, said law enforcement agencies should periodically review their policies and should not be afraid to make changes and adjustments where appropriate.
“We will certainly review the recommendations put forth by the Police Executive Research Forum concerning vehicle pursuits, as well as other studies and reports on this topic, to determine if we should make adjustments to our policies in Cumberland County,” McCormack said.
“You can get a suspect another day, but you can’t get a life back,” Police Executive Research Forum Executive Director Chuck Wexler said in the report.