When Police Pursuits Cost Too Much

The story was big news in the blue-collar burg of Lakeside, though for most Southern Californians, it was just another awful end to another “high-speed police pursuit.”

This was Wednesday. In the countryside east of San Diego, where politicians still ride the precincts on horseback, a California Highway patrolman was ticketing a trucker in an industrial zone.

This was a patrolman with a specialized beat, commercial vehicle enforcement. His “squad car” is a CHP truck. The CHP would later report that, as he glanced up, a couple of teenagers in a pickup roared past him, illegally passing big rigs despite the double yellow line.

On went the lights and siren as the kids blew through two stop signs and a red light.

They were doing about 60 mph in a 40-mph zone as the warehouses gave way to strip malls and then to neighborhoods. It was now 1:35 p.m., dismissal time at Lemon Crest Elementary School. The bell had rung.

Two little girls--9 year olds, fourth-graders, best friends--were trudging along the dirt path, coming up on the playground swings. Up the hill tore the fleeing pickup.

With a sickening jolt, the patrolman realized this was a school zone. He radioed in that he was backing off as the pickup flew past a crowd of screaming schoolkids and went out of control on the curve.

And struck the two little girls.

The force was such that, even with that impact, the truck had enough momentum to burst through a chain-link fence and fly 15 feet into the concrete bed of Los Coches Creek. The 19-year-old driver was uninjured, and the 17-year-old boy with him broke a shoulder.

Not so the children.

Little Christie Turner was dead by Friday; her friend, Adina Gonzalez, likewise suffered massive head injuries. At press time, she was still on life support.

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It has, for some years now, been politically dicey to wax even mildly critical on the law-and-order front. Tough on crime. Those have been our watchwords. Here is what that toughness has come to, car-chase-wise: California now leads the nation in pursuit-related deaths.

Thirty-one people died here last year and countless more were injured in those true-crime races that seem so gripping on TV. A third were bystanders like those two little girls.

None stood a chance at collecting meaningful damages; the tough-on-crime courts have, in recent years, struck down virtually every argument for police liability.

The law-and-order argument is that these pursuits are a “necessary evil” because the majority of those who flee turn out to be hardened criminals. Often invoked are the names of serial killers arrested on routine traffic stops; never mind that, in just about every example, the killer pulled over voluntarily.

And yet the few people with the nerve to wonder whether discretion isn’t the better part of valor note that there are, ahem, problems with those arguments.

Geoffrey P. Alpert, a South Carolina criminologist and national expert on the subject, says, for instance, that upon close inspection, the “felons” who flee usually turn out to be either small-time lowlifes or people whose felonies stemmed from the fact that they ran.

“Most of the people who do this aren’t the really bad guys,” Alpert reports. “Serious criminals try to blend in. The people who run do it for stupid reasons--they’re afraid of the points on their insurance, or police once beat them up, or they don’t want their parents to know they borrowed the car.”

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Authorities noted that the teenage driver who hit those kids in Lakeside had a criminal record. Know what it was for? Shoplifting at an El Cajon Wal-Mart and then scuffling with the guard. For this menace, one family’s child is in a coma, another’s is dead and a CHP officer will carry this tragedy for the rest of his life.

A lot of agencies--including the Orange and Los Angeles County sheriff’s departments--have decided some chases aren’t worth it, at least for misdemeanors and traffic infractions; Alpert says they’ve found that a quarter of the time, they can round the suspect up later with simple police work. Not so the CHP, which has refused to rethink its pursuit policy, even in the face of plummeting crime rates. Even when the price of toughness is the death of someone’s little girl.

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.