LAPD chases end in too many crashes

Police officers are not physicians. But when they swear to protect and to serve the rest of us, it's almost like that part of the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm.

If something — some tactic taken — that professionals at any level are doing in the scope of their work causes real harm about 25% of the time, it's very much time to reconsider whether that tactic ought to be reconsidered.

And such is the situation faced by the Los Angeles Police Department now that the Police Commission received last month the results of a study that show essentially one in four police vehicle chases involving LAPD squad cars ends up in a collision in which someone is injured or killed. One in four!

Those are appalling odds every time a squad car goes Code 3.

The study looked at 4,203 LAPD vehicle pursuits over the last five years, of which a quarter (1,032) ended up in injury crashes.

Speaking for those who the cops have promised to protect, it's appalling that about half of those injuries occurred to people — whether motorists, pedestrians or cyclists — who weren't at all involved in the chase, so-called innocent bystanders, a group among whom 496 were injured and nine killed. Whereas slightly fewer — 462 — of the suspects being chased were injured, five of them fatally. Not that officers got off scot-free — 60 were injured; none have died.

Every officer-involved pursuit is different. Surely there are times when even the quickest of calculations to hit the gas and flick on the lights and sirens is the correct one in the interest of public safety, although the situation will never be totally in the officers' control. And the department has been aware of the injury issue for decades now and says it is making policy adjustments.

But policing experts say that the LAPD's pursuit policy is “permissive,” relatively. In Philadelphia, Phoenix and Dallas, for instance, the police departments no longer chase anyone suspected of misdemeanors. The LAPD should consider that, too. Some good news: Drivers in a chase must now report their speed by radio to the station. Going 95 on Broadway? Maybe pull over. And we like a proposed hightech fix: a sticky GPS machine launched at a fleeing vehicle so police can see where it's gone, far from harm's way.