Wow. My family has to deal with a much more serious situation and the police refuse to get involved at all.
My brother’s daughter stole his car and also took over her mother’s house along with her fellow drug addict boyfriend and friends. She also stole a debit card and checks- draining a few grand plus over drafting multiple relative’s bank accounts. Police wouldn’t do anything, and when my father and brother tried to report the car stolen the police said since she had been allowed to use the car with permission previously they considered it her car. In addition, she and her friends including the one with multiple drug arrests and an OD could not be removed from the house without a formal eviction.
Normally I would not call the police for ANYTHING, partially because of fear of overreaction, the use of too much force like in the OP. But my recent experiences with my local police show they don’t even want to get involved or can’t. I’m pretty sure if I called about my kid taking my car they would laugh at me.
Given how thuggish the police have become, I wouldn’t call the cops on my theoretical children unless I was so estranged from them that I didn’t care if they were killed.
That was my answer even before I opened this thread, and saw that was exactly what happened.
I’ve lived in Ames several times including recently, though not at the moment, and I have several family members that live there. I also am a former police dispatcher, though not for Ames.
Honestly, I’ve never found Ames police to be particularly aggressive. Generally, the kind of cops who are ‘looking for action’ in central Iowa are on Des Moines PD (and by no means are all DSM PD cops that way). Cops in the suburbs and outlying communities are generally not really looking for trouble and are more community-focused. It does vary from city to city though.
One thing, do we even know for sure that all the cops would definitely be aware the suspect was the kid of the person who stole the car --once a pursuit starts, it gets messy. I don’t know enough about the details here. Did they just check the plates, see it was stolen and the guy took off when they tried to pull him over, or did they get a call and go looking for the car right then? In the former case, they might not know as much about the situation either.
Even if they did know, once someone starts a chase, they are creating a major danger and are treated accordingly. A vehicle has just as much capacity for lethal force as a handgun. If the guy was attempting to flee in the vehicle again after nearly hitting pedestrians, as the article seems to indicate, he’s already someone who has shown he’ll kill someone in order to escape. Getting shot at shouldn’t be unexpected in that situation. I mean, hell, he was right on campus in a central area, not out in the boonies. There’s a ton of students walking around that whole area that time of day. He could have decided to turn into a crowd and mow down dozens – then wouldn’t we be asking why the cops didn’t fire?