In February of 2024, after more than a year of exhaustive research and data mining, San Francisco Chronicle staff Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson‘s police pursuit investigative series was published.
This is by far the most comprehensive national police pursuit series completed since the 2015 USA Today stories.
Jonathan Farris, Chief Advocate for Pursuit For Change, is honored to have had the opportunity to support Jennifer and the SF Chronicle team with their reporting.
We highly encourage you to read the complete articles at the San Francisco Chronicle’s website.
“The federal government is significantly undercounting chase deaths. Reporters discovered 662 people who died from 2017 through 2021 but were missing from fatal pursuit data published by NHTSA.”
To report “Fast and Fatal,” Chronicle reporters spent a year identifying and examining fatal chases, finding that at least 3,336 people died in pursuits in the U.S. over the six years ending in 2022. They discovered that police pursuits frequently go wrong, killing an average of nearly two people a day in recent years.
Bystanders and passengers are killed with shocking frequency, and the vast majority of chases involve drivers suspected not of violent crimes, but low-level violations.
Fast and Fatal, the series
The investigation, relying on thousands of pages of documents and more than 100 body-worn and dash-camera videos, identified numerous failings that contributed to the carnage. Crucially, there’s no binding national standard governing whether and how police should chase suspects, so officers operate under often permissive rules that vary by department. When people needlessly die or are injured, police officers are rarely held accountable.
Here are five main takeaways from the Chronicle’s investigation:
Despite pledges by law enforcement and lawmakers to reduce deaths and injuries from high-speed pursuits, fatalities have soared. Both 2020 and 2021 became the deadliest on record, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The federal government is significantly undercounting the dead. From 2017 through 2021, NHTSA did not include 662 pursuit deaths identified by the Chronicle in its publicly available chase fatality data, including dozens of cases in which officers deliberately rammed cars while chasing them. Our data shows that nearly 700 people died in 2020 and again in 2021, with more than 500 deaths annually from 2017 through 2019.
Officers routinely start deadly chases that begin with a low-level crime — or no crime at all. Innocent people routinely become collateral damage. The Chronicle examined the circumstances that led police to initiate chases that killed nearly 1,900 people and found that more than 1,550 of them died over traffic infractions, nonviolent crimes or no crime at all. Suspects most often fled for relatively mundane reasons: Their license had been suspended, they were on probation, or they said they feared the police. At least 551 people killed in pursuits from 2017 through 2022 were bystanders, reporters found.
Officers are rarely held accountable, and families struggle to find justice. Even when police officers violate department policy or behave recklessly during fatal pursuits, they typically avoid criminal charges and internal discipline. Under California law, families are limited in their ability to sue police departments involved in fatal chases even if they can prove the pursuing officer violated department policy.
Black people are four times as likely as white people to be killed in police pursuits. As with police shootings and other uses of force, chases disproportionately kill Black Americans. This holds true whether the person is a suspect, a passenger in a fleeing vehicle or a bystander. READ MORE
Police chases, glamorized in action films, aired in real time by news helicopters and gamified by “Grand Theft Auto,” have long stirred the American imagination. But pursuits like the one that killed the Nievas siblings now claim nearly two lives a day across the country, and public officials are failing at nearly every level to confront the growing problem, a yearlong Chronicle investigation found.
Operating under often permissive rules that vary by department, and with immunity from serious punishment in most cases, officers routinely launch chases that begin with a low-level crime — or no crime whatsoever — and end with a violent wreck. At least 551 bystanders died in chases over six years, the Chronicle found.
The vast collateral damage has spurred a decades-long push for reform, with law enforcement leaders, regulators and politicians repeatedly promising to reduce the carnage caused by high-speed police pursuits. Yet little has changed — except for the mounting death toll. The federal government, meanwhile, does not even track all the deaths.
The Chronicle spent months doing just that, building a database of fatal pursuits from 2017 through 2022 by filing more than 70 public records requests and examining information from research organizations, local news stories and court records.
Reporters merged this data with records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to find that at least 3,336 people were killed as a result of police pursuits throughout the U.S. from 2017 through 2022. At least 15 of them were officers. More than 52,600 people were injured from 2017 through 2021, according to government estimates.
“These are completely avoidable deaths,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown law professor and former deputy chief in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Police are killing too many people in pursuits for reasons that are entirely unnecessary and it’s ruining lives. Police never have the right to be the judge and executioner.” READ MORE
The federal agency charged with keeping drivers safe is significantly undercounting the number of people killed in police pursuits, skewing the picture of one of the most dangerous law enforcement activities in America.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is widely viewed as the authoritative source for statistics on pursuit-related fatalities. NHTSA’s data is routinely cited in reports by other federal agencies, researchers, media outlets and organizations that make policy recommendations and guide local police departments on when they should initiate chases.
But NHTSA did not record at least 662 people killed in pursuits from 2017 through 2021 in its publicly released count, the Chronicle found in an investigation.
The Chronicle’s analysis sought to include every person killed as a result of a police chase. NHTSA uses a narrower definition, saying it omits cases in which an officer purposely rams a vehicle or, in certain instances, calls off a chase before a crash, among other exclusions. The newspaper, though, also found hundreds of deaths that were missing from the agency’s pursuit data due to gaps in reporting and other unknown reasons.
With additional deaths identified by the Chronicle, the number of people killed in police pursuits is nearly 30% higher than previously known — a total of at least 3,004 individuals over five years. The dead include fleeing drivers, their passengers, bystanders and police officers.
In a statement, NHTSA (commonly pronounced NITS-uh) said its data on fatal police pursuits was not meant to be comprehensive. READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE
First-of-its-kind database: Majority of people killed in police chases aren’t the fleeing drivers
An analysis of police pursuit fatality data shows that most of those killed between 2017 and 2022 were passengers or bystanders.
Car chases are one of the most dangerous activities in American policing. But for decades, the federal government has not tracked all deaths tied to pursuits. So the San Francisco Chronicle counted them.
The Chronicle built a dataset of these deaths using information from three primary sources: the federal government, private research organizations and our own reporting. The resulting figures are still likely undercounts, as not every chase is the subject of a news story or a lawsuit, two sources the Chronicle used to find cases missing from government records.
Reporters spent a year examining a subset of over 2,000 deaths that included additional details about the causes and circumstances of each chase and the people involved. We found that at least 551 people, or more than 25% of those killed, were bystanders. In addition, the vast majority of these pursuits were initiated over traffic violations and nonviolent crimes such as shoplifting, not serious felonies.
Selected statistics are presented here as well as guidance on how to access the Chronicle’s dataset to look for specific cases.
Where police chases killed people
From 2017 through 2022, at least 3,336 people died in police chases. READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE
To build the Chronicle’s national dataset of at least 3,336 people killed in police vehicle pursuits from 2017 through 2022, we used information from three primary sources: the federal government, private research organizations and our reporting.
While no government agency counts every police pursuit death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration comes closest. We used data published by NHTSA via its Fatality Analysis Reporting system (FARS) to produce a list of people killed in police pursuits recorded by the federal agency. Specifically, we drew from the FARS global person, vehicle and accident files, as well as its auxiliary accident file.
In a separate database, we gathered and analyzed information about pursuit deaths from research organizations Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters and IncarcerNation.com, manually reviewing each row entered by researchers to ensure accuracy. READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE
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