So, you’re a police officer and you see a Nissan truck zoom through a stop sign at 40 mph. You give chase, but the car speeds up and drives even more erratically. Do you:
(a) View this as a sign that this maniac driver must be stopped?
or
(b) Stop the chase. The guy is driving dangerously!
Lawsuit after lawsuit posit that police act inappropriately by not stopping the chase — even though that effectively creates a policy that rewards, and thus encourages, miscreants who put other drivers at risk by trying to escape the police. Simply put, policy (b) is the policy that will guarantee that drivers try to drive dangerously to force police to peel off, while policy (a) encourages all but the most wildly irrational to pull over.
In California on March 16, 2003, Joseph Boldt, allegedly under the influence of meth, sped up in his stolen vehicle after running the stop sign, and Sergeant Mark Farber followed. Boldt decided to try to escape by going southbound in the northbound lanes of I-280, at speeds of up to 110 mph, causing three other accidents before smashing into an innocent driver, Girish Wadhwani, critically injuring him. Boldt’s passenger, Bobby Luke Kleinheinz, also wanted on an arrest warrant at the time, wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and was killed; the wheelchair-bound Boldt faces second-degree murder charges, though his trial has been postponed at least a couple of times because of crash-related health problems. Kleinheinz’s family is, of course, suing the police, rather than Boldt. The Association of Bay Area Governments paid Wadhwani $3.15 million for his broken bones. “Millbrae officials said they believed Farber acted appropriately but agreed to the settlement for fear of losing an even larger award during a civil trial.” (Ryan Kim, “$3.15 million settlement in high-speed crash”, San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 26; AP, Mar. 26; Amy Yarbrough, “Man awarded $3.15 million in damages after police chase”, San Mateo County Times, Mar. 19; “Crash trial postponed”, SF Examiner, Sep. 14; Ethan Fletcher, “Chase case heads for trial”, San Francisco Independent, Jul. 23; Michelle Durand, “Fatal wrong-way driver begins murder trial today”, San Mateo Daily Journal, Jun. 8; Michelle Durand, “Murder trial delayed for fatal wrong way driver”, Dec. 24, 2003; WPIX-5, Mar. 19, 2003; previous OL posts on high-speed chases: Mar. 15 & Sep. 21, 2003)(& letter to the editor, Apr. 12).
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