Gotta Go! The Chase Is On!

Mark Root’s pager sounded and the familiar message on the display sent a jolt of adrenaline shooting through his system.

He rushed to the phone to alert a friend: “We’ve got a runner!”

The two men, one in Riverside and the other in Diamond Bar, flicked on their televisions and soon became transfixed. A stolen MTA bus careened along three freeways, dodging cars and spewing a shower of sparks from disintegrating wheels while a line of police black-and-whites trailed close behind.

“That was spectacular,” Root said later.

The 37-year-old film producer had missed hardly a moment, thanks to a paging service that alerts subscribers whenever a police chase is televised. Root has been known to pull off the freeway to find a television, even one in an electronics store, to ensure that he doesn’t miss a moment of unscripted roadway mayhem.

“I don’t want to sound like a nut,” he said, “but I am when it comes to these things.”

Root can take comfort that he is not alone. The public fascination with television pursuits has made them as much a part of the Southern California scene as surf reports and celebrity divorces.

Southland television stations were the first, more than a decade ago, to broadcast police chases, and today the region remains the nation’s leader in putting law enforcement pursuits on the air.

Police pursuit mania has spread nationwide. Three networks regularly broadcast chase shows and spinoff specials. One such program, a rerun, drew a larger audience than the World Series a few years ago.

All this might create the impression of a region, even a nation, beset by mounting acts of roadway lawlessness, with authorities flailing to keep up. That would be in sharp contrast to reality.

Police say chases are decreasing in most large law enforcement agencies throughout the country, although no one keeps nationwide statistics. In California, chases dropped 32% from 1995 to 2000. Pursuit-related injuries, deaths and collisions are also down, according to statewide records compiled by the California Highway Patrol. Even the Los Angeles Police Department, once the region’s leader in police chases, reported 36% fewer chases from 1995 to 2000.

Police and law enforcement experts attribute the decline to an overall drop in crime, better training and liability-conscious guidelines on when officers can chase a fleeing suspect.

There’s not yet evidence that “runners” are learning from the parade of arrests on their television screens and deciding not to flee. If they checked court files, they would find an additional disincentive: Running tends to turn a misdemeanor or minor offense into multiple felonies, and a short jail term into a multiple-year prison sentence.

But the more authorities rein in freeway chases, the more the spectacles seem to proliferate in the media and in the minds of a receptive public. It’s a trend that troubles many media critics and law enforcement officials, but shows no sign of abating.

Among pursuit fans are the hard-core enthusiasts who get an almost euphoric rush from the chases. The suspense is similar to that of watching a sporting event, they say, except the consequences can be deadly, not only for the suspect, but for police and innocent bystanders.

Most police chases end in an uneventful arrest, and less than half of 1% result in a death. But one in five leads to a collision and many more feature near-misses that keep chase fans coming back for more.

“It’s about adrenaline. It’s about voyeurism,” said Janice Held, a psychotherapist from Redondo Beach who subscribes to Pursuit Watch, the police pursuit paging service. “It’s about immediately being in the loop.”

Held initially hoped the service would keep her from getting caught in traffic jams created by the chases. But now she is hooked on the televised action, which she describes as “adrenaline in a box.”

Held said she has even been tempted to walk out on patients to watch a freeway chase. “Humanistically, we are drawn by drama,” she said.

Appeals Mostly to Young Men

Held is an anomaly in the world of chase fans, most of whom are young men, law enforcement enthusiasts and fans of reality-based TV.

Most are like Eric DeBosque, a 39-year-old artist from Ontario. He is so fascinated by chases that he asks a friend who works at home to videotape chases when he can’t get to a television.

DeBosque tosses off police jargon in describing his favorite incidents--recalling the “PIT maneuver” authorities in San Diego County used to stop one suspect. (That’s PIT as in Pursuit Immobilization Technique, a maneuver in which police try to spin a fleeing car out of control by ramming it from behind.)

“The meat of it is, for me, I just get a big kick out of watching a person getting arrested,” DeBosque said.

Even the military action in Afghanistan did not bump televised chases off the local news shows. In November--during the height of the U.S. search for terrorists in Afghanistan--Los Angeles-area TV stations broke into soap operas, newscasts and network comedies to broadcast 11 pursuits, up from an average of three or four chases per month broadcast in recent years.

“We have had a downpour of pursuits on television,” said Ken Kuwahara, a Los Angeles-area police sergeant who founded Pursuit Watch in January 1999 with only 300 customers. The Internet-based business now has more than 2,000 subscribers, each paying about $5 a month for the service, he said.

Some law enforcement officials say the broadcasts encourage drivers to flee police if they know television cameras are rolling.

“It glorifies this so that young people think, ‘There is my 30 seconds of fame,’ ” said CHP Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick.

Other critics decry the broadcasts as shameful sensationalism, intended to draw high ratings but not to truly enlighten the public.

“Usually, these freeway chases are nothing significant,” said Edwin O. Guthman, a USC professor of journalism and former senior editor at the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. “They don’t rate a paragraph in a newspaper story.”

Even Bob Tur, a longtime TV news helicopter pilot who claims to have invented the televised chase, said he is embarrassed by the growing number of chases on television.

“I made a lot of money doing it but I regret a lot of it,” said Tur, who broadcast the first live police pursuit, of a murder suspect, in 1991.

Local TV news directors defend the televised chases, saying the pursuits are news stories with a potential impact on thousands of viewers, particularly motorists stuck behind or in front of the fleeing driver.

KTLA News Director Jeff Wald said his station broadcast the lengthy police chase involving the stolen bus in December because it created a traffic nightmare for thousands of commuters.

“When you have that many people involved, you have to report it,” he said.

But he conceded that competition between television news stations often influences when a chase is broadcast. “I cannot sit here and argue the journalistic merits of every police pursuit,” Wald said.

Faithful chase fans have helped syndicated television shows, such as “Cops,” “Police Videos” and specials such as “World’s Scariest Police Chases,” continue to find prime-time spots on network schedules.

Fox Television’s “Police Videos,” now in syndication, recently drew about 8.2 million viewers, giving it a ranking of 80th out of about 150 prime-time shows.

“Police Videos” is so popular that the FX Network shows reruns twice a day, every weekday. On Sunday nights, the entire family can curl up in front of the TV to watch three hours of police chase shows on the Learning Channel.

The man credited with pioneering police reality shows, Paul Stojanovich--executive producer of “Police Videos” and “World’s Scariest Police Chases”--said such shows still have great appeal. He has produced more than 50 “Police Video” episodes and six “Chase” specials, including a special for UPN called “Getaway,” which showed officers attempting to capture top racetrack and stunt drivers.

Stojanovich said he is meeting with Fox executives about buying more shows. “We are still set to go,” he said.

The decline in chases statewide doesn’t worry Stojanovich, whose company, Pursuit Productions of Los Angeles, collects chase footage, mostly from video cameras mounted in police cars.

“There is such a huge archive of law enforcement footage that it would take a long time to run out,” he said. And production costs in such “reality” programs are minimal.

For those chase fanatics who can’t get enough live pursuits on TV, video game developers recently released several fast-paced games, including “Need for Speed 3: Hot Pursuit” and “Driver.” These games give players the vicarious thrill of being behind the wheel of a speeding car with police in hot pursuit.

Last summer, a computerized version of the show “World’s Scariest Police Chases” was among the top 20 best-selling video games. It is promoted with the motto “All the Speed. All the Insanity. All the Action.”

Pursuits Are on Decline Statewide

But in the real streets, the insanity and action is on a decline.

Pursuits statewide dropped from 7,817 in 1995 to 5,334 in 2000, according to CHP records. In that same period, collisions resulting from pursuits dropped 42%, fatalities declined 45% and injuries fell by 30%, according to the records.

Police agencies have reevaluated their criteria for launching high-speed pursuits because of a flood of lawsuits and a mounting death toll of suspects, police and bystanders.

In California, pursuits were blamed for 143 deaths and 5,626 injuries from 1995 to 2000.

Some police agencies, such as the Santa Monica Police Department and Orange County Sheriff’s Department, prohibit officers from starting a pursuit for minor traffic violations. The International Assn. of Chiefs of Police recommended five years ago that officers consider weather and road conditions, motorist and pedestrian traffic, and the seriousness of the offense before launching a pursuit.

Much of the caution grew out of a 1992 chase by the U.S. Border Patrol that ended when a truck suspected of carrying illegal immigrants struck a sedan outside a high school in Temecula, killing six people.

In response, California lawmakers adopted a bill the following year that required every law enforcement officer in the state to receive high-speed-pursuit training.

“Any time you put a focus on a topic, you see a change,” CHP Commissioner Helmick said.

Since an American Civil Liberties Union report in 1996 highlighted the increasing death toll resulting from LAPD chases, the number of pursuits by the department has dropped steadily.

“I think the LAPD woke up to the fact that its officers were incurring a large number of injuries that could be avoided,” said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the ACLU of Southern California.

LAPD officials say the department’s pursuit policy did not change in response to the ACLU report. Patrol officers still have the discretion to chase any motorist who attempts to flee. But before officers can step on the gas, the policy requires that the risks to bystanders and the seriousness of the suspect’s offense be considered.

That public safety imperative was repeated often during a recent training session with a class of police recruits at the LAPD Emergency Vehicle Operations Center in Granada Hills.

On a Sunday morning, LAPD Sgt. Ronald Moen spent more than four hours explaining the department’s pursuit policy to a group of 21 recruits.

Moen, who manages the training facility, said the courts have granted police immunity from civil liability for deaths and injuries caused during a chase. But he said officers can be fired for engaging in a pursuit that needlessly risks the lives of innocent bystanders.

“Drive in a manner that is reasonable and prudent,” Moen repeatedly told the recruits. “Don’t be afraid to terminate a pursuit.”