I won’t deny that in some cases police find nasty people who have the dumb luck to be pulled over. But when you way the benefit of their immediate capture against the risk of severely injuring or killing innocents, I don’t think it adds up.
It’s demonstrated that police engaged in high-speed pursuit get their adrenaline up and don’t think clearly-- which is why Rodney King was beaten, 120 bullets were fired at an SUV in Compton last month, etc… (see Blink by Malcolm Gladwell). It takes training to deal calmly with that kind of situation. But until police get the training needed not to over-react, it’s better for everyone if high speed chases don’t happen, and police rely on their radio instead to get a cop in front of the fleeing perp.
And if it’s too expensive to have enough police on the street for that kind of coverage, it’s gotta be too damn expensive to pay the insurance bills for everyone who gets sideswiped by a cop.
Alright…somebody else gets it. If you can only extract cancer out of the patient without any ill-effects…like doctors, that is the similarity some of you expect with police trying to catch criminals in a public setting…that is not always going to be the case.
…I don’t know if you Barbarian wrote this or quoted another doper, but this is as shortsighted as it gets. And besides that, they would have been more likely being ran over by the 17 year old who is leading the chase, not the other 6 units chasing him…but what makes you think that police chases are the only way to kill people when you have elderlyfolks that are quite capable of killing innocent bystanders as well, and without the “help” of the police?
On another topic, using license plates for ticketing instead of pulling over the vehicle is a stupid idea. There are folks out there who intentionally use other plates instead of the right ones. A long time ago, I was hit-and-runned by a guy who had stolen plates. Other folks use the temp registration papers taped to their window and have no plate. A license plate does not definitively identify the driver of the vehicle. That’s why cops should attempt to pull cars over to ascertain the true identity of the driver instead of guessing that the owner of that plate is the actually driver.
Well here, see, is the ‘innocent’ person fleeing the police who runs over other innocent people because the police made him do it.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. If you panic when you’re about to get pulled over, and the police cause you to RUN AWAY, you have no business behind the fecking wheel in the first place. You’re taught as a driver how to handle it, and if you’ve been exposed to the news or media at ALL, you know what happens when you run from the police, what’s more, I don’t know of a drivers ed course that says “hey, when you see the flashing lights, gun it, and run like hell”
I think that’s part of the Rodney King driving school. They reinforce that with movies showing that the police have no business hasslin’ people and stoppin’ them for stuff when they should be out catching “real” criminals. :rolleyes:
Ignoring the minor point that failure to stop for a police officer is a crime
Yeticus I wrote that based on what buttonjockey and jimpatro said earlier in the thread, but I never for a second believed that high speed chases are the only way of causing death and destruction on the road, so don’t go sticking words in my mouth.
buttonjockey, I think MOST people have no business being behind the wheel of a car. I wasn’t kidding when I wrote than 10 percent of the people on the road in Vancouver BC don’t have a license-- several years ago there was a huge fraud case where literally thousands of immigrants from Hong Kong paid people to take their driving exam, and that kind of shit is still going on today.
Fuck, the last time I went to the DMV, when I got my motorcycle license two years ago, the woman in front of me was complaining that it’d been six months and she still didn’t have a proper license, only a flimsy piece of paper. She had to have it explained to her that she received said piece of paper for passing her written exam, which did not give her the right to drive a car without a licensed driver in the passenger seat. This woman thought she could get a driver’s license without ever sitting in a car!
With idiots like that on the road, not to mention 13-year-old joyriding car thieves, cops should expect people they pull over to do dumbass things. If one of the dumbass things a driver should do is stomp on the gas, compounding the situation with a high speed chase does not help.
Do you know of some situation where a high-speed chase ended with the chased driver eventually pulling over peacefully? Please find me some statistics proving said point-of-view and I’ll shut up. Fact is that far too often high-speed chases end in someone crashing a vehicle and causing injury, so how the fuck is that a good thing?
To this, I call bullshit given the complete absence of driver training in wide swathes of North America. The last time I took driver’s ed was when I motorcycle license-- no mention of being pulled over. When I got my car license at age 16, dealing with cops got a 10 minute mention – tops!
I have seen quite a few chases end when about 4 or more police vehicles and a helicopter with “Night Sun” shines on his car for a few minutes; it gives the suspect enough time to realize that he ain’t gonna get away and subsequently gives up.
Your demand for statistics (some relative, some conjecture): 1 - Dated national statistics as part of proposed legislation back in 1999. 2 - Drive to Stay Alive website pertaining to LA police car chases. 3 - Stats for Harris County, TX, 1997-2001. 4 - Car chase myths. 5 - TV coverage of car chases.
Your second question:
Not as high as you thought and it is decreasing…but then again, you’re probably gonna tell me that even one injury or fatality is far too high, huh? Let the cops do their job and let them figure out how to do it safer for everyone concerned, and not regulate the police into “official bystanders”. That would be truely dangerous to the civilian population.