POLICE CHASES CAN CROSS LETHAL LINE
Bystanders, minorities and officers themselves fall victim
Twelve seconds. One police chase. Two deaths.
A police car and a motorcycle raced toward Eric Larson as he drove home from his pizza delivery job on a summer evening in 2018.
The 24-year-old father planned to marry in the spring. Half a mile away, a police officer chased the motorcyclist after the driver turned right at a red light without coming to a stop.
The cop hit 82 mph, his patrol car video showed, more than twice the posted speed limit. The motorcycle flew even faster down the dark and winding suburban road.
Twelve seconds after the chase started, the motorcyclist smashed into the driver’s side of the Hyundai Elantra Larson drove.
The motorcyclist died at the scene. Larson suffered for weeks in a hospital before succumbing to his injuries.
The pursuit started over a $189 traffic ticket.
New Jersey police pursuits killed
at least 63 people in the past decade and injured more than 2,500. Nearly half the people injured were bystanders or cops.
New Jersey ranks second in the nation behind Louisiana for the percentage of African Americans killed during police pursuits since 2009, an Asbury Park Press and USA TODAY Network-New Jersey investigation found. New Jersey leads the nation over the past 20 years.
Newark police car chases killed black residents at a higher rate than any other city in the country, according to the past decade of federal fatal crash data. Thirteen people were killed in Newark pursuits; nine were not in the car police were chasing. One was a 3-year-old boy. All were black.
Most chases in the past two years didn’t result in a suspect’s arrest. When fleeing drivers are caught, they’re most frequently charged with drug possession. People fleeing the police are rarely robbers or wanted killers, the network found after reviewing more than 66,000 state arrest records on people fleeing from police.
New Jersey’s written policy has acknowledged for decades that most chases start with traffic violations. The rules say cops aren’t allowed to chase cars for motor vehicle offenses unless an officer feels the vehicle “is being operated so as to pose an immediate threat to the safety of another person.”
That one-sentence exception allows police to engage in dangerous, highspeed chases that can start after even the smallest traffic infraction, such as an illegal right on red. Traffic violations prompted at least 23 fatal pursuits, law enforcement records show.
“I think that it is ridiculous that police are allowed to chase people for violations that are trivial in the grand scheme of things,” said Taylor Bromberg, the fiance of Larson, who was killed in Jackson Township, New Jersey, by the motorcycle fleeing police.
More harm than good?
The network reviewed more than 5,000 pages of police chase summary reports to compile 10 years of data on the state’s 466 municipal police departments.
The network analyzed more than 4 million state court arrest records, 1.3 million fatal crash records from the federal government and state data on police pursuits. The network conducted dozens of interviews that included law enforcement experts, police, lawmakers and people affected by the aftermath of police chases.
State Sen. Ron Rice, D-Essex, whose district includes Newark, called for a legislative hearing to investigate police pursuits after he reviewed the network’s findings.
“It appears to me there’s a lot more harm done than good right now,” Rice said.
In its investigation, the network found:
❚ There are few arrests. Arrests after police car chases dropped over the past decade, police pursuit summary reports show. More than half the police chases in the past two years didn’t end with an arrest. The police summary reports don’t say why a chase ended.
❚ Police chases seldom catch violent criminals. When a suspect was caught, one in five were charged with a single count of eluding – the legal term for fleeing the police. Two out of three eluders were not charged with a crime the FBI tracks as violent, such as murder, aggravated assault, robbery or rape. The remaining third were most often charged with assault on police officers, but most of those charges were dismissed in court. Out of 66,816 people accused of eluding police in the past four decades, 174 faced both a murder charge and an eluding charge. Seven were charged with murder before being accused of fleeing the cops. More people were killed in pursuits in that time – federal data shows at least 201 dead in New Jersey.
❚ New Jersey leads the nation for racial disparity in deaths. African Americans are 15% of New Jersey’s population, yet they accounted for 65% of the people killed in police pursuits since 2009 in cases in which race was known, according to federal crash data. New Jersey is trailed by Georgia, Delaware and Maryland, states with a much higher percentage of black residents. The network found that since 1999, when the federal data started recording race in crashes, New Jersey has the largest disparity of any state in the nation for the
death of black residents during police chases. Newark has a larger pursuit death racial disparity than Atlanta, Birmingham, Alabama, Cleveland or Detroit, cities with higher violent crime rates and a larger percentage of black residents.
❚ Records are flawed. Pursuits killed scores of people in New Jersey and injured at least 2,568 since 2009, according to government records. The network found the counts of police chase casualties differ among local, state and federal records.
❚ Police pursuits are a problem in all states. People die in police pursuits more than once a day on average across the nation, federal crash data shows. Victims include 361 children since 2009. Thirty were 3 or younger. Most states have a higher rate of pursuit deaths per 100,000 residents than New Jersey.
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his office needed time to review the data presented by the network.
“I have not shied away from enforcing the pursuit policy,” he said.
At a news conference Dec. 4, he announced a series of police accountability changes, some of which address problems highlighted by the network.
Police pursuits have “been something that law enforcement struggled with for a long time – you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t,” said Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose. “But you take into consideration an officer that follows the guidelines, and the officers that do the job, it’s the behavior of the person that they’re pursuing that’s creating that type of environment.”
The standard forms New Jersey police use to track pursuits don’t record the race of a suspect, which makes it difficult to know whether there’s a racial disparity in the pursuits that don’t end with a death.
“Members of the Newark Police Division do not arrest for race,” Ambrose said in an emailed statement. “We make arrests to equally protect the citizens of Newark, without consideration of the race of the perpetrator.”
The president of the state’s largest police union declined to comment on pursuits.
When he was Milwaukee police chief, Edward Flynn saw a spike in police chase deaths. In 2010, he limited the reasons his officers could chase.
“All the data indicates that it’s never worth it, almost never,” said Flynn, a former Jersey City officer with law enforcement experience in several states. “When it comes to the issue of when police pursuits are appropriate, and for how long and at what level of risk, our moral obligation is to limit that potential for a bad outcome”
Innocent people are killed
A father was killed in front of his daughter, whom he was visiting at college in South Orange, New Jersey, in 2009 by a man chased after his vehicle ran a red light.
A delivery driver for the Trentonian
newspaper and a student from the College of New Jersey were killed in 2010 after a cop in Ewing chased the student for speeding and driving recklessly.
An emergency medical technician and patient were fatally injured in Newark in 2012 when their ambulance was struck by a suspect fleeing police after officers spotted him driving erratically.
A 19-year-old passenger was killed in Bernards Township in Somerset County in 2015 after he was thrown from a car in a crash. Police had chased the car because the vehicle’s registration was suspended.
Pursuits hurt cops
Susan Reeves’ husband was her backup.
The first time she chased a car as a Millville police officer, Patrolman Chris Reeves joined her. His car took the lead as she fell back to call out street names on the radio.
They were wedded by law enforcement. They married shortly before they went into the police academy and Chris’ soon-to-be sergeant signed as a witness on their marriage certificate.
She was more willing to chase cars. She figures she went on about a dozen pursuits.
“He always used to yell at me: ‘Be careful,’ ” Susan said. “‘What is wrong with you? Be careful.’ ... He was always preaching to me.
“And here he is, the careful one, and he gets in an accident.”
At least 553 New Jersey cops were injured in pursuits in the past 10 years, records show.
Chris Reeves is the only one who died.
He responded to help chase a drunken driver in July 2012.
The fleeing car was speeding about 72 mph when it crashed into the driver’s side of Reeves’ patrol vehicle, fatally injuring him.
The crash took two good cops off the road.
Susan Reeves went back to work after she grieved, but she couldn’t keep going. She worried about her son.
“I did stay on for a few years,” she said, “but I got involved in some incidents where I was almost hurt. … I realized that I would leave him an orphan and that maybe my heart wasn’t in it anymore.”
She left the department in 2015, about three years after Chris’ death. She stays home, being a mom.
“Pursuits just are not worth it,” she said. “They’re dangerous. They’re dangerous to everyone around them. They’re dangerous to the officers.”
Unless the fleeing suspect is an immediate threat to someone’s life, cops should avoid a car chase, Susan concluded.
“Listen, warrants ain’t worth it. Traffic violations ain’t worth it. You’ll get the guy again. Let it go,” she said. “We need to change the way our policing is done.”
Gaps in department policy
New Jersey is among a handful of states with rules for police pursuits, and its guidelines are the most detailed, according to a 50-state review by undergraduate researchers from the College of New Jersey working in cooperation with the USA TODAY Network. Authorities in two states didn’t confirm the student’s findings.
The New Jersey guidelines obligate a cop to consider 10 factors before racing after a fleeing suspect – such as the chances of success, whether the suspect is known and can be captured later, how much risk is involved and the officer’s driving skills.
Once the chase is on, cops are supposed to radio in details such as the reason for the chase, the direction, speed and information about the fleeing vehicle.
“Supervisors play a huge role in pursuits,” said Joseph Blaettler, former Union City deputy chief. “And that’s part of the reason why cops, as soon as they get into a pursuit, they have to call it out. The supervisor has to monitor the pursuit.”
That doesn’t always happen. Jackson Patrolman Cherrick Daniels, involved in the pursuit that ended in the death of motorcyclist Anthony Griffin and pizza delivery driver Eric Larson, didn’t call in the pursuit until after the crash, his police report shows. A supervisor didn’t have a chance to weigh whether the chase was a good idea. Daniels declined to comment.
When a police car crashes in a pursuit, New Jersey’s policy calls for departments to review whether the collision could have been prevented and make a copy of that report available to their county prosecutor’s office.
None of the 21 prosecutors offices produced these records in response to a network request, saying they couldn’t be easily located and in one case denying access to a report as a confidential internal affairs record. Police cars were involved in more than 1,300 crashes since 2009, records from each town show.
Police internal investigations are closely guarded secrets in New Jersey, which makes it difficult to know whether a department took action against a cop involved in a chase.
This year, the state attorney general was tasked with investigating policeinvolved deaths, and his office announced an investigation related to a police pursuit in August. A spokesman for the office said in December the investigation is ongoing.
‘It can happen to anybody’
Eleven of New Jersey’s 63 fatal police chases this decade involved motorcycles.
When Assemblyman Gordon Johnson, D-Bergen, did traffic enforcement in the mid-1980s as an officer in Englewood, he avoided pursuing fleeing motorcyclists.
“I would never chase motorcycles,” he said, “because one of two things: If the guy on the motorcycle is good, you’re not going to catch him. If he’s not good, he’s probably going to kill himself.”
As a former cop and Bergen County sheriff, Johnson has taken an interest in police accountability issues raised by the network.
“Maybe it’s time that we look at these pursuit policies in New Jersey,” he said. “It may be time to address that and tighten them up a little bit.”
Taylor Bromberg, 26, had her name chiseled into granite next to Larson’s on his gravestone.
Bromberg visited her fiance’s grave in the fall, wrangling her two daughters. She struggled to get the 2- and 5-yearold to put their shoes on to leave.
“This is a perfect example of what gets left behind,” she said, fumbling with the tiny Velcro footwear. “There is no help. It’s just me.”
She wants people to know what happened to Larson. It wasn’t a regular car crash, she said.
“It can happen to any person,” she said. “It’s just a matter of when.”