Vsauce! Kevin here -- and one of the most exciting things in pop culture is murderous
in real life. It’s so deadly that in a 35 year span, police killed more than three times
as many as died in battle in the American Revolution, and over six times the number
of Americans killed in the entire 20 years of war in Afghanistan -- and it’s almost
entirely, easily preventable. It’s bad for us, but the data shows it’s actually horrible
for cops, too.
And a source on the inside told me it’s even worse than the public knows.
It’s ridiculously simple to stop, we know exactly how to do it… and no one cares.
The Grand Theft Auto franchise has sold nearly 400 million copies worldwide -- and some of
the best parts of the open-world crime game are the police chases. You catch a cop’s
attention -- not in a good way -- and try to get away. It’s a really simple concept
that hasn’t changed in the 100+ years since the St. Louis “Skidoodle Cops” went on
a 25mph “high speed” chase over a speeding violation. One cop was thrown from his vehicle
and another skidded and hit a tree. The low speeds and the name “SKIDOODLE” are old-timey
and comical, but this is exactly how it still happens -- a USA Today examination of high
speed chases revealed that about ⅓ of pursuits result in a crash.
And culturally we think this is AWESOME. It’s an exciting high-stakes spectacle for those
who aren’t actually involved. The 8th most successful film franchise of all time is about
car chases -- we’ve spent over $6 billion watching Fast & Furious movies. Steve McQueen’s
“Bullitt” and Popeye Doyle in The French Connection gave us the greatest police chases
in film history. 20 years later the T-1000 is dressed as a cop and chasing Arnold and
the future savior of the human race through the flood channels of Los Angeles, and in
1994 the entire world jumped beyond fiction to watch by the second as OJ Simpson fled
the LAPD in a white Bronco, and every time there’s a car chase today, a million and
a half people watch along with Charlie.
But the math proves that police chases should almost never happen -- and no one seems to
care.
Here’s the data on how police chases start and how they end. A USA Today analysis of
17,000 police-involved chases showed that 62% started as something we’d categorize
as a traffic offense -- about half of those being speeding, DUI, and reckless driving,
and the rest being miscellaneous violations. The chase happens over what’s usually going
to be a fine.
Around a fifth were responses to nonviolent felonies like car theft and burglary and about
a tenth to misdemeanors. Only 8% of car chases were in pursuit of violent felons, and that
was mostly robbery and assault. They aren’t going 70 in a school zone to catch serial
killers.
So police chases generally seem to start for reasons that are not life or death. But they
end with A LOT OF DEATH.
Between 1979 and 2013, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that
there were 11,506 car chase-related deaths in the United States. More than half of those
were suspects: 6,301. But over 5,000 of them were passengers or completely innocent bystanders
who were just crossing the wrong street or on the wrong sidewalk at the wrong time, or
just happened to be driving in the vicinity of the chase.
Those numbers seem bad, but remember… it’s always worse than you think.
A 2015 investigation concluded that the number of car chase fatalities is massively undercounted
-- and it could actually be over 15,000. That’s about a 50% increase.
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I spoke with an anonymous source who was involved in examining police chases at the state level.
He pointed out that there’s usually no mechanism to report the police pursuits that resolve
without incident… meaning that we’ve got a whole lot more car chases than the data
shows.
He estimates that over 90% of police pursuits are initiated by a minor traffic violation.
Data from California suggests he’s right -- they found 89% of 63,500 police chases
started over something that wasn’t a REALLY big deal. And 90 of those started because
a driver was going TOO SLOW. Too slow!
Seriously. It's always worse than they tell us.
Let’s think about the tradeoff -- nearly as many innocent people are injured in car
pursuits as suspects, and the vast majority of those suspects are about to be ticketed
or arrested for a crime that doesn’t present a clear, immediate danger to the community.
And does it make any logical sense that the authority’s response to driving recklessly
is to drive WAY WAY WAY more recklessly and dangerously to stop the reckless driver?
And it’s honestly not just about endangering fleeing suspects and innocent bystanders -- no
one realizes how bad car chases are for the cops themselves.
That huge study also revealed that 139 cops died in chases -- because being the pursuer
is extremely dangerous. Between 2011 and 2020, car crashes -- many the result of police chases
-- were one of the leading causes of death of policemen, ranking only behind shootings
and “job related illnesses” -- making up about 18% of all deaths for cops in the
line of duty.
But here’s the crazy part: suspects are not held responsible for what happens to the
cops. If you’re harmed and it’s someone else’s fault, that’s a tort -- and civil
law makes them liable for damages to you and your life. Ambulance-chasers like Slippin’
Jimmy make a living off of this. But cops can’t do anything about it if they’re
hurt in a car chase. They’re generally subject to what’s called “The Fireman’s Rule”
-- it’s a restriction on the ability of public safety employees to collect damages
on torts in the line of duty, even when a criminal is willingly at fault. So like if
a fireman runs into a burning building to save a child and comes out looking like Fire
Marshall Bill? The arsonist who set the fire can’t be held responsible for damages to
their quality of life -- it’s just part of the job!
Some states like California and Pennsylvania have deviated from The Fireman’s Rule, but
it’s a major consideration if you’re a cop and about to engage in a car pursuit:
you might get catastrophically injured chasing a busted taillight, there’s no recourse,
and there’s no way out -- other than hitting the brakes.
The British Medical Journal concluded the same thing.
In a 2004 examination published in The BMJ’s Injury Prevention, 2,654 fatal crashes involving
3,965 vehicles resulted in 3,146 deaths -- and 1,088 of the dead weren’t even in the fleeing
vehicle. A pattern emerged: crashes were high speed, usually at night, and on local roads
-- and most drivers had prior driving-related convictions.
Okay, so what? So what? That means they’re already in the system. The cops know who they
are, where they live, and what vehicles they drive. Isn’t there a better way to apprehend
them than a chase -- or at least one that doesn’t kill so many innocent people?
And that’s the solution, the solution that’s so obvious and no one seems to care about:
it’s like the Whopper computer says in WarGames, “The only winning move is not to play.”
Every bit of data we have on car chases suggests that the tradeoff we make -- the desire to
mete out justice in real-time -- isn’t worth the horrible consequences for innocent people,
cops, and even the suspects themselves.
The National Institute of Justice’s Restrictive Policies for High-Speed Police Pursuits document
admits that vehicle pursuits are possibly ‘the most dangerous of all ordinary police
activities,’ and that ‘far more police vehicle chases occur each year than police
shootings.’ In 2015, the International Association of Chiefs of Police presented a model policy
that started with a basic suggestion: only start a vehicle pursuit if the fleeing suspect
presents a danger to human life, and skip pursuits for minor violations.
And the IACP also detailed a range of factors, from road configuration to lighting and visibility,
that officers should consider to determine whether a chase would result in a greater
hazard to the community than finding other ways to nab the bad guy.
If it really is a GTA scene with a souped up Camaro and a dude with a machine gun in
the passenger seat… then yeah, you should probably rein them in. But that’s an exception
so rare that Rockstar needed 1,000 people and years to develop a simulated version of
it.
The blame really begins when the cop car’s lights flash and a driver chooses to slam
on the gas to escape consequences -- the police are generally just doing their job. But until
humans miraculously abide by all laws, willingly comply with law enforcement, and don’t freak
out and make really terrible decisions -- it’s simply on the police to not make a bad situation
a lot worse.
Some police departments have quietly restricted police chases -- but with a nationwide increase
in traffic crimes, the pendulum is swinging back to the chase. And hey, some Mind Blow-worthy
tech is being employed, too -- and it really needs to work, because we’re destroying
lives.
75-year-old Dorothy Wright and her 2 grandchildren were killed when an unarmed car thief crashed
into them as he was chased by cops just south of Atlanta. The suspect literally walked away
without being arrested, and the police didn’t catch him for another 6 years. Dorothy and
her grandchildren were just on their way to church.
We are culturally, politically and often personally obsessed with complex societal problems that
are a tangled web of tradeoffs, incentives, hidden costs and intractable human behavior.
The harder it is to solve, the more we seem to be consumed by it. Yet here’s an obvious
problem with an extremely simple solution that benefits everyone… and no one cares.
What does that say about us?
And as always – thanks for watching.