Page 1263 - Week 04 - Thursday, 8 May 2014
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From my experience, there is a common view in a community that police should pursue suspects, because it is what the police are supposed to do; they cannot just let criminals get away. The reality is more complex than this.
The first important fact is that the vast majority of police pursuits are initiated in response to minor offences. I think this is another fact of which the broader community is not generally aware. The most prevalent type of offence committed prior to a fatal pursuit is traffic related—that is, an offence such as speeding, dangerous driving or registration and roadworthy offences. So the question becomes: is this an acceptable threshold to initiate a police pursuit given the risk of death and injury it creates for those involved and the broader community? Is the community willing to bear that risk in order to detain someone who might have committed a traffic offence? After traffic offences, the next most prevalent offence committed prior to a fatal pursuit was motor vehicle theft, followed by drink-driving offences.
Overall, available data in Australia shows that 141 of the 160 offences that resulted in a fatal pursuit were related to the improper or unsafe operation of a motor vehicle. New South Wales statistics show that only 11 per cent of police pursuits were to pursue a fleeing criminal from a crime scene. I do not know the ACT statistics on how many pursuits are the result of minor or more serious offences. The likelihood is that it is similar to the general trends. This is, of course, information that the committee could investigate.
A view that is growing in popularity in relation to police pursuits is that it is not worth risking death and injury in order to arrest a person who has committed a minor offence. To illustrate the point, I will read a quote from a Canadian police officer recounting an actual case involving pursuit of a stolen car which resulted in the death of the suspect. I think this quite vividly illustrates the dilemma. He said:
… let’s face it, you’re driving around a big bullet, and it can kill … To take a human life over a $40 000 vehicle? It’s wrong for him to be there, it’s wrong for him to be in the stolen vehicle, it was wrong for him not to stop when he was initially instructed to stop, but it cost him his life and it wasn’t worth it. We lost in the situation, everyone came out as losers. The members who were involved are all scarred for life, the family certainly has a significant loss in their life, the vehicle we were trying to save—that was a write-off, so what did we gain from it—nothing.
Another common assumption is that if a suspect flees from police they must have committed a serious offence. However, the evidence shows this to be untrue. Qualitative studies from the United States National Institute of Justice found that most people fled because they were scared of the consequences of minor offences.
Long-term evidence from the USA also shows that introducing restrictive pursuits policies does not have a negative effect such as an increase in crime. For example, the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida introduced a policy in 1992 limiting pursuits to violent felons only. The review five years later found that the policy had significant public safety benefits, including an 82 per cent decrease in pursuit-related injuries. The reduced level of pursuits and injuries remained stable following the introduction of the policy without an increase in the crime rate or the number of suspects attempting to flee from police.
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