Mother who lost son begs police: Just stop
Not a day goes by that Donna Yates doesn’t think of her son who was killed in a police pursuit.
His grave is over the fence from her family home at Parapara in the Far North and at night she can see lights illuminate his resting place.
Nearly eight years ago, in April 2011, 22-year-old Luke John Bowman Yates, father of one, drove away from a police breath-testing checkpoint near Taipa at 3.30am.
Two officers from the Traffic Alcohol Group, in two separate cars, chased the fleeing driver.
The closest following officer reached a speed of 167km/h and instead of stopping, Yates continued driving and crashed into a power pole 2.3km along the road.
As the Independent Police Complaints Authority is about to release its fifth review in nearly 20 years into the problem of fleeing drivers, the Northland mother has spoken out about what she thinks the police response should be in similar situations.
“Just stop,” she said.
“Use all the technology you have like cameras to identify the drivers and then just stop.”
She said police could have found her son at home the next day as they had the car’s registration number. But instead, officers turned up to tell her her son had been killed in a crash.
“Where is the justice in chasing them? I don’t think there is a need for it . . . the more you chase the more it escalates and puts everyone at risk.”
The death of Luke caused the family pain and grief. Yates said every time another fatal pursuit was reported in the media, she felt sad and angry. “With police pursuits more often than not it’s not a good outcome. For my family it was the worst outcome.” An IPCA investigation into the death later revealed the two officers involved did not follow pursuit policy. The report also raised concerns over what appeared to be a lack of knowledge of the fleeing-driver policy among members of the Northland Traffic Alcohol Group.
The authority said Officer A should have abandoned the pursuit once it became clear there was a great distance between them.
Officer B, as the senior officer, should have notified police communications of the pursuit.
The authority found despite those failures, police were justified in trying to apprehend the fleeing Yates.
However, the officers involved were given remedial training.
Toxicology results showed Yates was under the blood-alcohol limit but had THC — a compound in cannabis — in his blood, indicating he had smoked cannabis before driving.
At the time he was also not legally allowed to drive manual vehicles.
Police statistics show Northland tops the number of pursuits per month with 8.67 per 100,000 people, followed by Bay of Plenty with 7.81 and Counties/Manukau 7.67.
Northland police would not comment prior to today’s report being released.