With so many questionable police shootings dominating the news cycle, it's easy to overlook another police action that's behind the deaths of more than 5000 innocent people since 1979 according to USA Today analysis - high speed chases. Although the Justice Department has urged police to avoid pursuits that endanger pedestrians, many police departments leave it up to individual officers to decide. And yet the number of deaths in 2013, the last year covered by this report, chase-related deaths were greater than 1990, the year in which the Justice Department issued its warning.
The results of allowing police officers to make life and death judgment calls has resulted in thousand of unnecessary deaths and untold losses in property damage. And these numbers probably belie actual casualties and losses since NHSTA records are based upon police reports. The almost complete lack of public accountability has allowed this sort of Dirty Harry/Popeye Doyle mentality to run rampant in police forces across the nation. Clearly we need more oversight and public accountability.
The USA Today story goes into more detail and includes an interview with the author as well as people who have experienced the pain of losing someone to an avoidable police action. I don't want to rehash the story here. I'd recommend reading it using the link above.
However, I would like to point out that this is not news. The alarms have been raised for a number of years now. Not only about the dangers of high speed chases, but also about the shooting deaths of so many unarmed suspects. This story from 2005 suggests that firearms training is inadequate and that there is too much use of "fear as a motivational tool in training" and that training uses "disproportionate lethal force scenarios". We've known about these problems for a number of years now and yet they seem to be growing. You have to wonder if anybody in authority is paying attention.
Compounding the police problem are innumerable cases of police brutality, torture (Chicago's Jon Burge comes to mind), and even black sites used to illegally interrogate suspects/witnesses as documented by The Guardian. All of these stories leave the impression that we are being policed by an army of jack-booted thugs and that due process is just another casualty of a corrupt criminal justice system.
I don't know if we can even begin to enumerate the instances of the use of excessive force that don't rise to the level of brutality. The public has come to expect the worst from the police. That problem seems to be so endemic that situations in which police are seen actually helping members of the public have gone viral lately. And that shouldn't be the case. Fortunately, most police encounters don't end in the death or injury of an innocent person, but even one death is one too many. The situation should concern us all, particularly police officers who take their jobs seriously.
Police work is not for everyone. Unfortunately, it's not always the right people who are drawn to the job for all the right reasons. We need a better screening process - not only when a person is first hired, but continually throughout their employment, particularly if they will be armed and/or in contact with the public. There should be no room for error when it comes to hiring and retaining police officers.
We also need to be able to get rid of bad cops. And it should not be as difficult as it appears to be. The job is too important to allow for union contracts or second-guessing to interfere with getting rid of bad cops. If there is any doubt that an officer might be a threat to public safety, that officer needs to be fired or put on indefinite leave and re-evaluated before returning to work. There can be no tolerance for poor judgment, not following policy, or lying about a situation to protect oneself or a fellow officer. Bad police officers, like bad attorneys and doctors should be barred from holding a position in any law enforcement agency. We cannot allow bad cops to pick up stakes and move elsewhere. Didn't work with pedophile priests and it doesn't work for bad cops.
Finally, I think we need the courts to review all cases in which a death occurs in the course of a police action. This can be like a grand jury to decide whether or not a crime may have been committed. None of us gets off based on the good word of our friends and colleagues and the police shouldn't expect to either. We can't continue to leave these decisions in the hands of the police. They have proven beyond any doubt that they cannot police themselves. This may work for the military, but the police have far more interaction with the public and need to be held accountable to the public.
Let's not go another thirty years gathering shadowy statistics that are begrudgingly given out by the police and dealt with behind closed doors, wondering why we have so many wrongful deaths.