Police Agencies Unite on Pursuit Policies

Law enforcement agencies in Ventura County for the first time have adopted uniform policies covering vehicle pursuits that cross city-county boundaries and involve officers from more than one department.

The policies also spell out in greater detail when an officer has the authority to start and end a pursuit, or use his or her car to ram a suspect’s vehicle.

“Before, we did not have a formal agreement between the agencies,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Bruce McDowell, a member of the countywide task force that studied the issue. “This is a totally new policy.”

McDowell said the task force was formed early last year after two California appellate court decisions found that cities with vaguely worded policies could be held liable if a suspect injured someone while being chased by police.

“Most pursuit policies of agencies in Southern California were pretty much the same, and they were all fairly vague,” said Ventura Police Lt. Pat Miller, who also served on the task force. “Those two cases, and some high-publicity crashes at the end of pursuits, made it real clear that we had to do something different.”

On Wednesday night, Port Hueneme became the last jurisdiction in Ventura County to adopt a revised pursuit policy modeled on that developed by the task force.

Other agencies involved in the task force were Santa Paula, Simi Valley, Ventura, Oxnard, the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney’s office. The task force drew on the statewide policy used by the California Highway Patrol.

Port Hueneme Police Chief John Hopkins said the most significant changes focus on pursuits involving multiple agencies. Under the new guidelines, officers joining another department’s chase will switch to the first department’s radio frequency. The first department will be in charge of the chase and suspect unless it requests that another jurisdiction take over.

All the officers involved should then be able to communicate with each other directly rather than filter information back through dispatchers and watch commanders.

In the past, McDowell said, a communications gap sometimes caused confusion.

“There was no real agreement as to who was in charge of the pursuit and who was going to organize the response,” he said.

Port Hueneme’s policy now lists several specific conditions when a pursuit should be discontinued, such as when the only known violation is a misdemeanor or traffic offense. Other factors to be considered are speed, traffic volume, weather conditions, the length of the pursuit and the likelihood of catching the suspect at another time.

The Sheriff’s Department adopted its new policy in December, and copies have been distributed to deputies. But it will probably take some time for the changes to become habit, McDowell said.

“It’s not something they do every day,” he said. “Under the stress of the moment, it’s easy to revert back to old training.”

According to statistics cited by Hopkins in a report to the Port Hueneme City Council, in the first half of 1993, about 25% of pursuits involving state and local agencies resulted in collisions.

Santa Paula Police Cmdr. Mark Hanson believes that the county’s new policies could reduce such risks.

“It gives the officers more cause to think,” he said. “Probably what you’ll see now is more of the less serious pursuits discontinued earlier.”