O.C. Sheriff’s Pursuit Policy Lauded as a Model in Study

The Orange County sheriff’s vehicle pursuit policy, which imposes strict guidelines on when an officer may initiate a chase, was lauded Thursday as a model for other major Southern California law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department.

Orange County sheriff’s deputies logged only eight vehicle pursuits in 1995, compared to 816 by the LAPD, which is chasing more suspects--and injuring and killing more people--than it did three years ago, according to a study by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. That record makes the LAPD far and away the region’s leader in that category.

Moreover, the Riverside Sheriff’s Department, two of whose deputies are under fire for their handling of an April 1 incident in which they beat illegal immigrants after a long chase, inflicts a higher percentage of injuries on suspects at the end of pursuits than any other large Southern California law enforcement agency. Twenty-seven people, two-thirds of the suspects hurt in chases involving the Riverside Sheriff’s Department, were injured after the pursuits ended, according to new statistics.

Those findings are contained in an exhaustive, groundbreaking study performed by the ACLU, which analyzed data provided by the California Highway Patrol. The data revealed that a dozen of Southern California’s law enforcement agencies engage in nearly 2,000 vehicle pursuits a year and that the number of chases is steadily climbing. Growing along with it is a toll of carnage, raising questions about police policies and officer training.

The study analyzed 12 law enforcement agencies--the sheriff’s departments from Riverside, San Bernardino, Kern, Orange and Los Angeles counties, as well as the police departments of Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Riverside, Anaheim, Santa Ana, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

“We are going to be urging that LAPD and other departments with high pursuit rates look at the Orange County sheriff’s policy and consider adopting it, or something like it,” said Allan Parachini, spokesman for the ACLU.

“The Orange County sheriff’s policy is not perfect. There are plenty of grounds to criticize,” he said. “But it’s far better than anything we’ve seen.”

From 1993 to 1995, the agencies conducted 5,766 pursuits, an average of one chase every 4 hours and 30 minutes. All told, those pursuits resulted in 47 deaths, 363 injuries to officers, 1,240 injuries to suspects and 314 injuries to others.

In its report, titled “Not Just Isolated Incidents: The Epidemic of Police Pursuits in Southern California,” the ACLU stopped short of calling for a ban on police pursuits and acknowledged that “pursuits may sometimes be justified by the urgent need to apprehend individuals who have committed serious violent crimes, who have taken hostages and fled or who clearly pose an immediate risk of doing violent harm to themselves, police officers or other members of the public.”

But the organization charged that pursuit rates at the 12 police agencies it studied “are extraordinarily high and show that hundreds of people . . . were killed or injured in or after pursuits during the three-year period in question.”

Police pursuits have been a controversial topic in academic and legal circles for years. The 1991 beating of Rodney G. King, which was addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, occurred after a high-speed chase, and the April incident involving Riverside deputies revived some of the national outrage about the conduct of police officers at the conclusion of chases.

In both those cases, suspects were injured after the pursuits were over. Some experts have theorized that officers are more prone to excessive force at the end of pursuits because the chases are tense and fast-moving, with the threat of danger to suspects, police and bystanders.

In addition, suspects who flee in their cars also may be more prone to resist at the conclusion of a chase, raising the chances of physical confrontation with police.

The ACLU launched its study in the wake of the Riverside deputy incident, but the organization’s conclusions focus most attention on the LAPD, not the Riverside department.

According to the ACLU report, which will be released today, the LAPD has steadily increased its number of vehicle pursuits since 1993, and it initiates chases for vehicle code violations rather than for serious felonies, raising the question of whether many of those chases are warranted. In 1995, 12.6% of LAPD’s chases were initiated for serious felonies.

By contrast, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department engaged in 14 pursuits in 1994 and 1995.

The report also addressed the number of pursuits by the Santa Ana and Anaheim police departments, but did not examine the agencies’ chase policies. In Santa Ana, officers were involved in 38 pursuits in the past two years and in Anaheim, authorities reported 99 pursuits over the same period.

Unlike the LAPD, Orange County Sheriff’s Department policy bars deputies from chasing a suspect if the only infraction observed by the deputies is a traffic violation.

Orange County deputies are required to meet at least one of eight conditions before initiating a chase, including a reasonable cause to believe that a vehicle occupant is a known felon or that the suspect, if allowed to flee, would present a danger to human life.

“The ACLU does not endorse the OCSD policy, per se. However, it represents a welcome step in the right direction,” the report states.

While authorities at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department acknowledged that the guidelines are effective in their jurisdiction, they warned that the same guidelines may not work in Los Angeles, where circumstances are different.

For example, Orange County deputies often use helicopters instead of car pursuits, said Lt. Tom Garner, the agency’s spokesman. In Los Angeles, where there are more high-tension wires and telephone poles, the use of helicopters may not be as practical an alternative, he said.

“The logistics of Orange County are different from the logistics in Riverside, which are different from the logistics in Los Angeles,” Garner said. “I don’t know if comparing policies with other departments is the best way of analyzing.” ACLU officials said they are not trying to impose a uniform policy on all agencies and realize that each department has issues specific to their jurisdictions.

“Clearly, each department should devise their own policy based on their own circumstances,” Parachini said. “Also as clearly, there is room to improve. There are obvious areas that need to be addressed, for example, restricting the pursuit itself and putting an emphasis on controlling the situation at the conclusion of the pursuit.”

The pursuit policy at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department was devised and revised over a period of about 15 to 20 years, Garner said.

“It’s based on the premise that when we get into a pursuit, we have taken everything and everyone involved into consideration,” Garner said. “The general guiding issue is safety. And that means for the officer, the other parties involved and the innocent bystanders.

“And frankly, prior to this [study], we were not aware that ours was that different from the others.”

LAPD officials have yet to see the ACLU’s study and declined to comment on it. But some speculated that chases might be increasing for a number of reasons unrelated to the Police Department. “Three strikes” legislation may be making suspects more inclined to run rather than submit to arrest, and a general disregard for law enforcement may be encouraging suspects to fight rather than give up, some police officers said.

Still, the fact that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recorded a modest drop in the number of pursuits at the same time that the LAPD noted a slight increase seemed to undermine those explanations. Why, skeptics asked, would suspects in adjoining geographic areas with virtually identical criminal laws behave differently when confronted by police?

During the period reviewed by the ACLU, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has seen a slight decline in the number of suspects it chases, from 573 in 1993 to 500 last year. Crashes also have dropped.

At the LAPD, more of the chases result in crashes, and about half the injuries to suspects occur after the chases have ended, the data produced by the ACLU and Highway Patrol showed. Even more striking are the injuries to officers, 83% of whom suffered their injuries after pursuits were over, many of them probably suffered in fights with suspects. Over three years, that came to a total of 148 LAPD officers injured.

What’s more, the LAPD is disproportionately responsible for chases that end in death or injury: Although the department accounts for 37% of the region’s police officers, chases involving the department resulted in 47% of the region’s deaths and for 50% of all injuries to officers.

Last year, the Los Angeles Police Commission reviewed LAPD pursuit policies after the low-speed pursuit of O.J. Simpson.

Among other things, the commission at that time received assurances that the department was trying to limit the number of cars engaged in pursuits and trying to hold down the number of chases, especially in instances where the danger to the community or others seemed high.

But the ACLU study showed that despite those measures, pursuits continue to rise and so does the fallout.

Of particular focus in the ACLU report is the question of when officers should be allowed to pursue suspects--whether any offense or only serious crimes should justify a chase. In analyzing the pursuits that resulted in the death of suspects or others--no police officers were killed in any of the chases reviewed as part of the study--the ACLU found that every one of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department chases was in pursuit of a suspect wanted for violating the state penal code.

Most of the LAPD’s fatal chases, by contrast, were of suspects wanted for violating the vehicle code, generally less serious offenses. A total of 10 people have died in connection with Sheriff’s Department chases in the last three years; 20 have died in the LAPD pursuits.