Last year, a Houston Chronicle investigation highlighted an uptick in police chases across the city.
Reporters looked at data from 2018 through 2022 and found cases surged by 47% during that period. The pursuits resulted in 27 deaths and 700 people were injured.
These numbers caught the attention of the Houston police chief, who announced new department policies to tamp down on police chases just weeks after the report was published.
It has now been about a year since the policy change. Andrea Ball, investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle, looked at the numbers again to see how the new rules are affecting the number of police chases.
“The new policy forbade officers from going after drivers for minor traffic violations and misdemeanors. They couldn’t chase for a simple traffic violation like blowing through a stop sign or a red light,” Ball said.
“Now, they could try to pull them over, but if that driver drove away, the police could not chase them simply for that. They did also make exceptions for suspects in ongoing investigations and cars that were missing or stolen. But essentially what they did was take out a big chunk of pursuits that police were engaging in.”
There has been a drop in police chases in the last year since the new policy went into effect, but Ball said that so far the policy hasn’t put a dent in the number of people killed in police chases.
“In fact, over the last 11 months, 11 people were killed,” she said. “During the same time period as last year, four people died. And what we take away from that is while the overall numbers are going down, these chases are inherently dangerous.
You’ve got people going really fast, oftentimes in small neighborhoods or bad road conditions. And sometimes it speeds up to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. And it’s not easy to stop your car and it’s not easy to predict what traffic might get in your way. And so when these accidents hit, they can hit hard.”
A typical example of a police chase gone wrong, Ball said, is what happened in 2022 with a man named Carl Wiley.
“He was going to open up his own food truck and things were looking really great for him,” Ball said. “One night, [he] went to a grocery store and picked up some salmon to make dinner for his girlfriend. On the way home, he was hit by a driver that was being chased by the police over this alleged parking violation and an open container of alcohol. So the car hit Mr. Wiley and smashed right into him and he died.”
Ball said the Houston Police department is happy with the reduction in chases and plans to keep the policy in place.
“They understand that it could be frustrating for officers who want to pursue, as they have been taught, people who are allegedly breaking the law. It’s difficult for them to watch those people go when they call off chases,” Ball said. “But they also say it’s really important for officers to restrain themselves from going too fast in unpredictable situations for reasons that may not merit.
So they definitely are happy that they’re going down. They continue to weigh the balance between risk versus reward, if you will.”
