Why doesn’t Texas law regulate police chases? State lawmakers, experts explain

From KERA News:

Police chases, at their worst, are deadly. They tend to damage property. They can leave communities grieving. Most states — including Texas — have no idea how many chases happen within their own state beyond how highway troopers engage.

Despite their prominence in policing and the risk they pose, there are no laws dictating how most Texas law enforcement agencies should carry out chases.

In his 12 years as a state representative, Houston Democrat Gene Wu said he hasn’t heard much discussion among his colleagues seeking to address that.

“The way I perceive it is that most cities have good policies on chases because it affects their bottom line,” Wu said. “When those chases go wrong and it kills innocent people, they pay, and they pay a lot. So, I think from my perspective — I won’t speak for everyone — but the perspective is that it seems like something that the cities would take care of themselves to protect themselves.”

KERA News spoke to Wu and other state lawmakers in Austin last month as the clock ran out to file bills in the Texas Legislature. They, along with outside experts, offered some insight into what drives the lawmaking process in Texas and whether police chases – which killed nearly 100 people in Texas in 2022 – will ever be regulated statewide.

Wu and others said it could happen — it’s just a matter of figuring out how and why.

“If we could do something simple without ruining law enforcement, without making the public less safe, if we could make small changes that could save, I don’t know, half the people out of the 100, we should, right?” Wu said. “Because if it’s easy, it’s cheap and it saves people’s lives, we should absolutely do that.”

What Texas law currently says about police pursuits

The major existing police pursuit laws that apply statewide are the broad guidelines that govern troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety. They say troopers have a duty to drive safely, may be granted exceptions to traffic laws in emergency situations and can park their vehicles on medians.

Other statutes indirectly address what law enforcement can and cannot do during pursuits. The Texas Transportation Code states anyone driving an emergency vehicle is not immune from the duty to drive “with appropriate regard for the safety of all persons” nor “the consequences of reckless disregard for the safety of others.”

As for criminal consequences associated with pursuits, evading arrest with a motor vehicle is, at minimum, a class A misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in state jail or up to $4,000 in fines. But if someone gets killed during a chase, the suspect could face a second-degree felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines.

The Texas Police Chiefs Association, although not a state agency, has issued guidance on how police should engage in and report chases, including template language for pursuit policies that departments can model their own policies after.

State guidelines on law enforcement’s use of force also apply to pursuits, said George Eichenberg, a criminal justice professor and interim head of the Department of Criminal Justice at Tarleton State University.

Those guidelines are also broad, stating officers must use the minimum amount of force necessary to make an arrest. The appropriate use of force in pursuits is usually decided on a case-by-case basis through lawsuits filed by those affected, Eichenberg said.

In turn, the outcomes of those lawsuits play a crucial role in shaping departmental policies around pursuits — if they’re not barred by qualified immunity. This reinforces what seems to be the status quo at the Capitol: decisions about pursuits are best left up to local governments who deal with the immediate consequences of chases.

“A lot of what could be delegated to the Legislature has been handled, I think, at the local level, by policies, by training,” Eichenberg said. “And a lot of that is the result of civil liability. And most professional executives today, they want to stay ahead of liability.”

Possible legislation and roadblocks

School vouchers, property taxes, immigration and other hot topics throughout Texas legislative sessions are usually longstanding issues that generate a lot of public discussion long before laws pass. Then committees hear hours of testimony from the people the legislation could affect, and all involved try to maintain the momentum needed to get laws approved — or not — in both chambers and signed by the governor.

There simply hasn’t been much if any of this organized advocacy from those affected by police chases, Wu said.

“The way things get changed around here is families that are upset, they form organizations, they build networks, and they grow those organizations, and they come up here and advocate and say, ‘hey, there’s a lot of people here who want change,’” Wu said.

Seemingly the only bill this session that directly addresses police chases is SB 3004 from Sen. Cesar Blanco, D-El Paso. The bill would require DPS to adopt a border pursuit policy similar to the United States Customs and Border Protection’s emergency driving and pursuit guidelines from 2023.

The Biden administration had revised an older CBP pursuit policy to emphasize the need to weigh the government interest in pursuing a suspect against the potential risk to the public, a philosophy many law enforcement agencies across the country have adopted over the past decade. Trump administration officials reinstated the 2021 policy earlier this year, but it still requires officers to keep public safety interests in mind.

Blanco did not respond to a list of questions from KERA News about the bill, but last year he called for border vehicle pursuit reforms following a series of crashes during DPS pursuits in El Paso.

Texas and other big states might be too geographically diverse for a one-size-fits-all approach to pursuits, said Jillian Snider, criminal justice and civil liberties policy director at the R Street Institute. Police officers aren’t trained the same way from department to department either, which would complicate the creation of statewide pursuit rules, she said.

States like Connecticut that do pass pursuit legislation keep it broad for a reason, she said.

“To be able to tell every agency, ‘this is the policy that you need to operate within,’ it’s just impractical because each agency has their own needs,” Snider said.

Even the state’s highest court has weighed in on how the laws that govern police chases could change. The Texas Supreme Court ruled last year that the cities of Austin and Houston were protected by governmental immunity after officers from each city crashed into uninvolved drivers during two separate chases.

Though the ruling was a loss for those drivers, Justice Evan Young suggested lawmakers could put some sort of system in place offering further recourse for uninvolved people injured during emergency responses.

Rep. Rhetta Bowers, D-Garland, said that while any victim or family would want compensation in such a situation, it should be handled case by case in a way that doesn’t automatically assume any ill intent by officers.

She’s seen firsthand the potential for unpredictable danger in chases, she said, right in North Texas.

“There I was walking out of a store right at the onset of a police chase,” Bowers said. “Those moments are sometimes and most times out of their control.”

Former sheriff and freshman Texas Rep. AJ Louderback, R-Victoria, said he doesn’t see any need for change in how cities and counties handle chases. He also said despite Texas not gathering data on chases statewide as others do, he feels departments collect enough of their own data on pursuits.

“We’re right where we need to be. Each chase is a separate entity. Each chase is handled on its own,” Louderback said. “There’s so many factors here that come into a chase that it’s very subjective.”

If lawmakers ever turn their attention to police chases, Eichenberg added, they’ll be facing what he said is a lack of comprehensive academic research and data on the issue. But crime and law enforcement issues that prompt calls for reform fall in and out of fashion with time, and police chases might not be any different.

“Some things happen, the public and the politicians express their dissatisfaction, and there’s a lot of recommendations made for reform,” Eichenberg said. “And pretty much everybody greets those with a lot of enthusiasm, and in a few years, you find we’ve kind of gone back to the way we were doing it.”

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