Dangerous Police Pursuits on Rise, Analysis Finds

Despite efforts to hold down dangerous vehicle pursuits, the Los Angeles Police Department is chasing more suspects--and injuring and killing more people--than it did three years ago, a record that makes it 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 Foundation of Southern California, 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.

From 1993 through 1995, those 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.”

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?

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 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 beating, 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 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.

During the same period, 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.

“The LAPD’s performance in pursuits has established such an extreme record of death and injury that the department and the Los Angeles Police Commission should begin immediately a complete review of the policies, supervision, training and underlying institutional philosophy that governs pursuit tactics and deployment by the LAPD,” the ACLU report concluded. Those needs are all the more pressing, ACLU officials argued, because new recruits are fast being added to the LAPD ranks, so any deficiencies in police training are likely to persist in coming years.

In contrast to the LAPD’s growth in pursuits, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department engaged in just a handful of chases in recent years. The ACLU report called that agency’s record to the attention of other law enforcement organizations.

According to the numbers supplied by the Highway Patrol, Orange County sheriff’s deputies engaged in only 14 pursuits in the last two years. 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.

“The [Orange County] policy is not perfect and better policies may be crafted in the future,” the report stated. “The ACLU does not endorse the OCSD policy, per se. However, it represents a welcome step in the right direction.”

Deirdre Hill, outgoing president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, said she was surprised to learn that the number of pursuits and injuries was increasing. Last year, the 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.

“I certainly wasn’t aware of these statistics,” Hill said Thursday after The Times shared some of the findings with her. “I’d like to know what they mean.”

ACLU officials said they planned to deliver copies of their report to Hill and the rest of the commission today. “I would encourage the department to look at this report,” Hill said.

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.

“This performance,” the ACLU concluded of the Los Angeles Police Department’s record on chases, “is entirely unacceptable.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Toll of Police Chases

In the past three years, the Los Angeles Police Department has conducted a growing number of vehicle pursuits, and the result has been increases in crashes, injuries and deaths.

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YEAR PURSUITS CRASHES INJURIES DEATHS *1995 816 289 324 8 *1994 791 251 321 8 *1993 739 234 271 4

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Here is a breakdown of the number and percentages of injuries during and after pursuits by the LAPD for 1993 through 1995:

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IN PURSUIT % IN PURSUIT AFTER % AFTER *Officers 30 16.9% 148 83.1% *Suspects 299 52.6% 269 47.4% *Others 165 97.1% 5 2.9%

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SOURCE: Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, using California Highway Patrol data.