Editorial: New police pursuit policy appears to be working

Fatalities resulting from police pursuits have prompted a great deal of public discussion over the past eight years and more yet the number of pursuits has risen by more than 60 per cent in those eight years.

Clearly the discussion has not deterred drivers from attempting to outrun a police patrol that has ordered them to stop, and might even have encouraged them. For the police have agreed pursuits should be abandoned when they become dangerous. If that has allowed more law breakers to get away, it is preferable to causing death and injury out of all proportion to the offence.

But the figures obtained by Newstalk ZB which we published yesterday show the policy adopted by the police has not deterred officers from giving chase when a car fails to stop. A 60 per cent increase in eight years speaks for itself even if it reflects the increase in vehicles on the roads, as Superintendent Steve Greally, the national road policing manager, suggests.

Last year there were 3796 pursuits, of which 626 ended in crashes. That is about one in six. Or to put it the other way, five times out of six the pursued driver has stopped or has been stopped without a collision, or the police have given up the chase.

Under a more cautious policy adopted by the police two years ago, a decision to abandon a pursuit is made by a controller in the communications room, not the officers in the pursuing car - though their assessment of the situation will obviously be influential.

Greally told Newstalk ZB, "It's very pleasing to see [we]are abandoning on our own accord 55 per cent of fleeing driver incidents. So that's a great thing."

That is a high ratio. If 55 per cent of 3796 pursuits last year were abandoned by the police then more than 2000 suspected offenders got away last year. But the high ratio of abandoned pursuits is a reflection of how dangerous they can be, and it suggests the new police policy is working.

In one chase out of six last year the policy did not work. Those 626 crashes killed 12 people and injured 170. This year the toll is shaping up to be worse. Eight people have died in police pursuits with barely half the year gone.

The dead are often very young. A 15-year-old and 12-year-old died when police chased their car near Palmerston North on May 28. A 15-year-old died in the boot of a stolen car chased north of Wellington on May 19.

The dead are also liable to include innocent motorists coming the other way. Early in the morning of Sunday, March 11, Carmen Marie Yanko, 53, was on her way to open her stall in Nelson's Sunday market when a pursued car pulled out from behind a truck on the other side of the road and slammed into her.

That case illustrated how hard the police decision can be. It happened at 5.40am, before dawn, when only the occasional vehicle would have been on the road through the town of Hope. By the time the pursuing police realised the speeding car and the truck obscuring its vision put the approaching car in imminent danger, it was too late.

Police should not be blamed when pursuits end badly. The prime offender is always the driver who defies them. But it is good to discover that five times out of six they are making the right decision.