Finalist: Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson of the San Francisco Chronicle

By Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson 

The pursuit began in silence.

From behind the wheel, the Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy flicked on his emergency lights, but not his siren, as he pulled behind a white Honda Accord on a busy road. He would later say he initiated a stop because the driver changed lanes and made a U-turn without signaling.

The driver spotted the flashing lights just before 10 p.m. on April 26, 2021, and accelerated. The cars hurtled north along the Lawrence Expressway in West San Jose.

Less than a mile down the road, the Accord blasted through a red light and, at 97 mph, broadsided a Toyota Camry as it approached from the opposite direction and turned left onto Mitty Way.

The driver of that car, Philip Nievas, and his sister, Precious, were less than half a mile from their home as they returned from work at a molecular diagnostics company, where Precious had helped her brother land a job.

The force of the collision catapulted the Camry about 200 feet into a concrete wall, crushing its roof and passenger side. Philip and Precious died from severe blunt force injuries, including skull, rib and pelvis fractures. They were 22 and 25 years old.

“All for a misdemeanor,” said an officer who arrived soon after, lingering by the mangled heap as he waited for the coroner to collect the bodies trapped within.

Police chases, glamorized in action films, aired in real time by news helicopters and gamified by “Grand Theft Auto,” have long stirred the American imagination. But pursuits like the one that killed the Nievas siblings now claim nearly two lives a day across the country, and public officials are failing at nearly every level to confront the growing problem, a yearlong Chronicle investigation found.

Operating under often permissive rules that vary by department, and with immunity from serious punishment in most cases, officers routinely launch chases that begin with a low-level crime — or no crime whatsoever — and end with a violent wreck. At least 551 bystanders died in chases over six years, the Chronicle found.

The vast collateral damage has spurred a decades-long push for reform, with law enforcement leaders, regulators and politicians repeatedly promising to reduce the carnage caused by high-speed police pursuits. Yet little has changed — except for the mounting death toll. The federal government, meanwhile, does not even track all the deaths.

The Chronicle spent months doing just that, building a database of fatal pursuits from 2017 through 2022 by filing more than 70 public records requests and examining information from research organizations, local news stories and court records.

Reporters merged this data with records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to find that at least 3,336 people were killed as a result of police pursuits throughout the U.S. from 2017 through 2022. At least 15 of them were officers. More than 52,600 people were injured from 2017 through 2021, according to government estimates.

"These are completely avoidable deaths,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown law professor and former deputy chief in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Police are killing too many people in pursuits for reasons that are entirely unnecessary and it’s ruining lives. Police never have the right to be the judge and executioner.”

Thousands of pages of court documents and law enforcement records, 112 body-camera and dash-camera videos, and the database compiled by the Chronicle provide a panoramic look at how police have set in motion pursuits that killed people in every state.

Reporters interviewed more than 100 people affected by police chases, as well as criminologists, police officers, attorneys and government officials. And they examined more than 2,000 of these deaths in detail.

Among the findings:

• Fatal pursuits have soared despite pledges to curtail them. The years 2020 and 2021 were the two deadliest on record, according to NHTSA (commonly pronounced NITS-uh). At least 1,377 people died in police chases over that period, the Chronicle found.
• The federal government is significantly undercounting chase deaths. Reporters discovered 662 people who died from 2017 through 2021 but were missing from fatal pursuit data published by NHTSA. While the agency said it excludes cases in which an officer purposely rams a vehicle, for example, the Chronicle also found hundreds of deaths that appeared to be absent from its pursuit data due to reporting gaps and other unknown reasons.
• Most lethal pursuits started with low-level offenses, particularly traffic infractions: a broken tail light or a driver playing loud music, failing to fully stop at a stop sign or neglecting to wear a seat belt. In many cases, these chases were prohibited by agency policy.
• No binding national standard governs whether and how police should chase suspects, and many officers in fatal pursuits work for departments with loose “discretionary” policies that leave it to police to decide whether to initiate a chase.
• Even when they hurt people who aren’t a threat to anyone, officers are rarely held accountable. They are shielded by qualified immunity, a sweeping legal doctrine. The Supreme Court has never ruled against a police officer sued for excessive force in a deadly car chase. Lower-level courts seldom have, either. In criminal court, prosecutors don’t often charge officers over mishandled pursuits that take lives; far fewer are convicted.
• Taxpayers bear the brunt when pursuits hurt people: Local governments and insurers have paid at least $82 million in settlements and judgments in lawsuits concerning injuries or deaths caused by police pursuits since 2017, the Chronicle found. This is likely a significant undercount, given that some local governments refused to release key data — or said they didn’t track it.
• Black and Latino people die in pursuits at rates disproportionate to their share of the population. According to the Chronicle's data, police chases kill four times as many Black people per capita as white people, while Latinos die at a rate 50% higher than whites.

To John Urquhart, the former sheriff of King County, Wash., the growing toll of police chases demands a firm response. Almost a decade ago, after a chase that reached 90 mph on a two-lane road, he barred his deputies from pursuing people suspected of some property crimes. That chase ended when a suspected shoplifter veered into oncoming traffic and died in a crash, while injuring three others.

“Police should not be allowed to pursue for traffic violations, stolen cars, vandalism, shoplifting, because it’s too dangerous,” Urquhart said. “It’s like firing a 4,000-pound bullet down the street and killing someone.”

To be sure, it’s illegal to flee a police stop, and all of these deaths could have been prevented if drivers simply pulled over when officers flashed their lights. Many police officers and leaders who are wary of strict chase policies warn that suspects may not only get away but be emboldened in the future. A person who eludes police in a stolen car may never be identified.

Even critics working to limit chases agree that police need latitude to pursue people who pose an immediate and serious threat to public safety. Across the country, most officers are allowed to, for example, pursue a murder suspect at high speed.

Still, research suggests that when law enforcement agencies restrict the circumstances under which officers can chase people, pursuits and injuries fall. After Milwaukee adopted one of the nation’s stricter policies in March 2010 by limiting chases to people involved in a violent felony, pursuits declined by nearly 60% the following year.

Yet many pursuit policies offer such wide leeway that police can justify chasing almost anyone. These policies often change only after a tragedy — and may remain controversial after that.

In San Francisco, the city’s Police Commission is reviewing pursuit policies from around the country, a response to a chase of a carjacker last year that ended when the suspect plowed into a Potrero Hill bus stop, killing a 58-year-old man and injuring three others.

San Francisco allows officers to pursue only people suspected of violent felonies, unless they have a “reasonable belief that the individual needs to be immediately apprehended because of the risk that individual poses to public safety.” The city’s vehicle pursuit policy has not been updated since 2013.

Mayor London Breed, under pressure to cut property crime in the city, put an ordinance on the March ballot that could give officers more leeway, allowing them to pursue suspected thieves and burglars in some cases. If Proposition E passes, it would override the city's current policy.

“As recent tragedies have highlighted, vehicle pursuits can be a matter of life and death,” said Max Carter-Oberstone, the commission’s vice president. “Any change to our chase policy must be the product of a careful review of the evidence. The mayor’s contrary approach could get innocent people killed.”

Breed told the Chronicle that the looser rules would not endanger lives, because officers would likely use their power in limited circumstances. “We want to have the flexibility to pursue when the opportunity presents itself, especially when crimes occur in the middle of the night in San Francisco,” she said.

In April 2023, two years after Precious and Philip Nievas died, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office quietly adopted a stricter pursuit policy. It limits chases to motorists suspected of committing a felony, certain misdemeanors involving violence or the possession of a deadly weapon, or driving while intoxicated.

After the crash, Al Nievas, Precious’ and Philip’s father, sued Santa Clara County, accusing Deputy Ryan Vesey of initiating a reckless and negligent pursuit that killed his children. Vesey violated the police agency’s chase policy when he failed to activate his siren, according to the suit, which seeks damages of $10 million. A jury trial is scheduled for Sept. 9.

Vesey faced no criminal charges. It’s not clear if the sheriff’s office disciplined him; the agency declined the Chronicle’s public records request for documents describing any training or disciplinary actions tied to the chase, citing the confidentiality of police personnel records. Vesey did not respond to a voice mail, and the sheriff’s office declined to make him available for an interview.

Last April, a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge sentenced the driver who fled, Roberto Garcia, to just over 14 years in state prison after he pleaded no contest to several felonies, including two counts of vehicular manslaughter, willful flight from police causing death and carrying a concealed firearm in the car. Garcia broke his back in the crash.

In the civil lawsuit, the county objected to the release of materials involving the crash. Nevertheless, the Chronicle obtained footage and other documents.

Standing by the gnarled wreck that night, Vesey told investigators from the San Jose Police Department that he began the chase after Garcia changed lanes and made a U-turn without signaling. In fact, Vesey’s dash camera, as described in court documents filed by Al Nievas’ attorney, showed Garcia using his turn signal.

Four months later, Vesey acknowledged that Garcia used his turn signal before the U-turn, according to a supplemental report. Vesey offered a different account: He tried to pull Garcia over for speeding. Garcia, he said, was driving about 60 mph — 10 miles over the speed limit. On that stretch of the Lawrence Expressway, traffic studies show most drivers travel 48 to 57 mph.

“It never should have happened,” said Patrick Nievas, one of Precious’ and Philip’s younger brothers. “Two innocent lives are gone.”

As night fell over Evansville, Ind., in November 2017, a detective spotted a white Chevrolet Malibu at a gas station with a license plate that belonged to a Cadillac. Another officer issued a stop request.

As a third officer pulled up and walked toward the tail lights, the Chevy’s driver, Frederick McFarland, sped away.

“They’re going!” the officer told dispatch.

For nearly three minutes, the ensuing chase tore through more than two dozen intersections, past parked cars lining narrow streets in a dense neighborhood on the city’s overwhelmingly Black south side.

At first, McFarland turned after each block. But then, on a straightaway, he gunned it. Seconds later, he blew through a stop sign and struck Janae Carter at 74 mph as she drove to the store to buy baby wipes. Her Chrysler PT Cruiser slammed into a tree.

“Let me see your hands!” officer Trendon Amuzie shouted, his gun drawn on Carter’s car, body-camera footage shows. Unconscious, Carter and Terence Barker, her boyfriend in the passenger seat, didn’t answer. Nor did their two children.

“Oh, there’s a kid,” Amuzie said as he walked over to the wreck and peered into the back seat. It was clearly not the vehicle he was chasing. “This is not the car? Oh, dammit!”

Carter regained consciousness. “What happened?” she asked. “Are my kids OK?” Her nose was broken. Blood oozed from a gash near her eye. “Where are my kids?”

Moments earlier, an officer used a pocket knife to free Carter’s 2-year-old daughter, Princess, from her car seat. She was rushed to a hospital, where she died.

Police found Princess’s 7-month-old brother, Prince, in a green-and-white striped onesie by a rear tire.  He was dead.

Barker spent nearly a month in the hospital with severe brain and liver injuries before doctors removed him from life support the day after Christmas. Only Carter survived.

A basic tenet of American policing called proportionality requires officers to use only the level of force necessary to confront a threat. Yet in the vast majority of deadly police chases reviewed in depth by the Chronicle, including the one in Evansville, officers appeared to violate this principle.

Of the 1,877 people killed in these cases, 1,562 of them died in pursuits initiated over traffic infractions, nonviolent crimes or no crime at all. Just 1 out of 15 people killed in these cases were drivers chased over a suspected violent crime.

The public often perceives that anyone fleeing police must be desperate to avoid consequences for a serious crime. Instead, according to police records, videos, court depositions and interviews, people most often fled for relatively mundane reasons: Their license had been suspended, they were on probation or they feared the police.

In Evansville, where Janae Carter lost her family, the pursuit policy states that “the primary mission of the department … is to protect life and safeguard the property of citizens.” But the policy leaves it to officers to balance the need to catch a suspect with public safety. It does not ascribe specific weight to any of 19 listed factors that officers should consider, ranging from the presence of children to suspects running red lights and stop signs.

Soon after the wreck, police changed the crash report, claiming that Carter failed to properly strap Prince into his car seat before he was ejected from the car. When Carter brought a wrongful death lawsuit against the city in 2019, attorneys continued to assert this theory in an effort to shield Evansville from legal liability.

Experts hired by Carter’s attorneys to reconstruct the crash said the car seats were attached. They found blood on the children’s seats and stretch marks on their seat belts, making it clear they both were wearing them when the crash occurred.

“It was victim-blaming,” said Carolyn Ely, one of Carter’s attorneys. “The ultimate injustice is that you don’t have your family anymore. The insult to injury is putting it out there saying maybe it’s Janae’s fault for not restraining her kids properly.”

After city officials settled the lawsuit in 2022, the Evansville Police Department released a statement confirming the children were buckled in their car seats, which were attached.

A spokesperson for the Evansville Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The night of the crash, Carter learned from a doctor at the hospital that she was pregnant. She named her daughter, born nearly seven months later, Myracle. “It’s truly changed my life,” Carter said in an interview, recalling the crash. “It took my kids and my possible husband. We just tell her that her dad is in heaven with her sister and brother.”

In 2020, a judge sentenced McFarland, the driver who fled, to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to four counts of resisting law enforcement. Prosecutors never charged him with a crime related to having a license plate that belonged to another vehicle, yet the children “died over a license plate,” said Carter’s mother, Sara Johnson.

Amuzie, the Evansville police officer who initiated the chase, declined an interview. He faced no criminal charges.

Federal officials have understood for decades that pursuits are among the most lethal parts of policing. Studies published in 1990 and 1997 by the National Institute of Justice recommended that police departments limit chases to suspected violent felons. “For anyone other than a violent felon, the balance weighs against the high-speed chase,” the researchers wrote in their first report.

But lawmakers and government officials have failed to impose effective and lasting reforms to limit the bloodshed. In the absence of national standards, the adoption of stricter and more specific pursuit policies remains haphazard, with the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. setting chase policies that vary wildly.

Major cities tend to restrict police chases: Chicago expressly prohibits police from pursuing people for theft or traffic offenses. Atlanta limits chases to suspects in murders and certain violent felonies. So does New Orleans.

Yet 80 miles away, in Baton Rouge, La., police can pursue for any offense, even traffic violations where they normally would not make an arrest. The overwhelming majority of state and local police agencies in the U.S. are small, with fewer than 50 staffers, and most of them don’t clearly specify when officers can chase suspects.

“Until this changes I fear we’ll continue to see tragic consequences,” warned Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in a letter last year to his members. He urged that “officers must be trained, and the agency’s expectations clearly and repeatedly conveyed, before the adrenaline of an encounter kicks in.”

In an interview, Wexler said pursuits should be limited to drivers suspected of violent crimes. Officers should not pursue people who commit less serious offenses like shoplifting, he said, or who are spotted in a stolen car. “There are too many needless tragedies for crimes that really don’t merit the high risk,” he said.

In September, the organization solidified its stance in a report produced with state and local law enforcement officials. Funded by the Justice Department, the report recommended that police limit pursuits to people who have committed a violent crime and pose an imminent threat to others. But the guidelines were not mandatory.

A few years ago, another influential organization, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, considered national pursuit standards but couldn’t reach a consensus. Rather than hold its members to specific guidelines, the organization published a 2019 report that offered agencies recommendations to consider, such as encouraging officers to weigh risks, including the presence of children.

The international Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies allows the 1,400 public safety agencies it contracts with to determine how they’ll comply with its pursuit policy standards. It does not say policies should limit chases to people suspected of a violent crime.

Congress last passed legislation to address pursuits more than 20 years ago, after a drunken driver fleeing police ran a stop sign and killed former North Dakota Rep. Byron Dorgan’s mother in Bismarck. In 2004, Dorgan, a Democrat who was by then a senator, negotiated an amendment to a transportation bill that provided $1 million a year to train police officers on pursuits.

More than a dozen criminologists and law enforcement officials developed the curriculum with advice on when to get involved in pursuits and how to write policies. Many of the trainers encouraged local agencies to chase only people suspected of violent crimes. Then the funding ran out.

Today, there is no government-mandated national lesson plan on pursuit training. Some officers practice by driving around a track at 120 mph, while others weave around cones at 25 mph in a parking lot. Many sit in a classroom.

In California, recruits undergo a minimum of 40 hours of driving training, which covers a range of techniques, such as parking and backing up, in addition to pursuits. Veteran officers must meet a requirement for ongoing driving training — at least four hours every two years — that can entail anything from a mock pursuit on a track to parallel parking.

More lawmakers and police leaders could tackle the rising death toll tied to pursuits, similar to the way they’ve sought to dictate use of deadly force. But they’ve decided not to.

The federal government has not provided consistent funding to states for training on how to make decisions during pursuits, such as when to call them off. The Justice Department has not required reforms around pursuit standards. State-level bodies that oversee training for law enforcement, which in some states includes attorneys general, do not provide routine training led by independent experts.

And for decades, NHTSA has not tracked all pursuit deaths, even though it is widely viewed as the authoritative source for this information and is routinely cited in reports by other federal agencies, researchers, journalists and police policy organizations.

In a statement, a NHTSA spokesperson said the agency had not sought to publish comprehensive data on fatal police pursuits, but instead provided “a nationwide census of unintentional crashes resulting in fatal injuries, which includes some police pursuits and excludes others.”

Chuck Deakins, a former police officer from Southern California, travels the country training police departments to use pursuit simulators that help officers develop on-the-fly judgment. He encounters police administrators and policymakers who minimize pursuit training, believing instead that officers will learn on the job. “Everybody drives, why do I have to do training on it?” he recalled one police chief asking.

But proper training, Deakins said, prepares officers to manage the rush of adrenaline and tunnel vision that make them forget to look at their speedometer or read the conditions. Complicating matters, some agencies have shifted culturally to what police trainers call a “warrior mentality,” hardening their determination to catch suspects, law enforcement experts said.

“Police officers have a hypermasculine, combative thing about letting people escape,” said John P. Gross, a clinical assistant professor and director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School who studies police use of force. “If you create the space for officers to make their own judgment, are they going to pursue? Yes.”

Even when police officers flout policy and people die, they often avoid both criminal charges and internal discipline.

Drawing on court documents, police records and interviews, the Chronicle identified 140 officers who appeared to have broken the law or were accused of violating the policies of their own agencies in a fatal chase. Officers kept their lights and sirens off, switched off their dash cameras or drove recklessly. A handful lied.

Just six have been convicted of criminal charges.

Another five face pending charges.

And a local prosecutor is reviewing the cases of two others.

Seventeen of these officers were accused of failing to render medical aid to people injured in crashes. At least six sped away from crash scenes.

The Chronicle obtained disciplinary information for 74 of these officers via public records requests. Sixteen were fired. Six resigned. Thirty-two received some form of discipline less severe than termination, such as paid or unpaid leave, a written reprimand or remedial training. Twenty were not disciplined.

Late one night in July 2017, Alexus Gray finished babysitting and hopped in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s blue BMW sport utility vehicle to head to his sister’s house in Louisville, Ky. Two officers parked in different cruisers saw the boyfriend, Isaiah Basham, run a red light. They started chasing him.

The officers did not immediately communicate with a commanding officer, even as they accelerated to more than 90 mph. Just over a mile into the chase, the SUV crashed into a tree and caught fire.

“Help me!” screamed Gray, who was trapped under the vehicle, the fire roaring around her, according to body-camera footage. Basham could be heard moaning. Then the car exploded.

“Oh, shit,” officer David Moss shouted as he struggled to find a working fire extinguisher. Gray’s right eyelid melted shut from the heat while her left eye remained open, according to a medical examiner’s report, indicating that she was burned alive.

Gray, an aspiring veterinarian who hoped to attend Auburn University, was 16. Basham was 18.

Gazing at the tarps covering their bodies that night, Moss learned their ages. He and other officers also made small talk, according to body-camera footage. “Hope I didn't ruin your-all's lunch,” one said. “Did you-all get to eat the lasagna?”

Late one night in July 2017, Alexus Gray finished babysitting and hopped in the passenger seat of her boyfriend’s blue BMW sport utility vehicle to head to his sister’s house in Louisville, Ky. Two officers parked in different cruisers saw the boyfriend, Isaiah Basham, run a red light. They started chasing him.

The officers did not immediately communicate with a commanding officer, even as they accelerated to more than 90 mph. Just over a mile into the chase, the SUV crashed into a tree and caught fire.

“Help me!” screamed Gray, who was trapped under the vehicle, the fire roaring around her, according to body-camera footage. Basham could be heard moaning. Then the car exploded.

“Oh, shit,” officer David Moss shouted as he struggled to find a working fire extinguisher. Gray’s right eyelid melted shut from the heat while her left eye remained open, according to a medical examiner’s report, indicating that she was burned alive.

Gray, an aspiring veterinarian who hoped to attend Auburn University, was 16. Basham was 18.

Gazing at the tarps covering their bodies that night, Moss learned their ages. He and other officers also made small talk, according to body-camera footage. “Hope I didn't ruin your-all's lunch,” one said. “Did you-all get to eat the lasagna?”

A year later, Steve Conrad, then the chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department, sent letters of reprimand to the officers involved in the pursuit, Moss and Lacey Ezell, for failing to switch on their body cameras before the encounter. “It is clear you have violated this policy,” he wrote.

He did not, however, discipline the officers for chasing the teens over a traffic violation, even though the department’s policy generally only allows officers to pursue suspects who they reasonably believe have committed a violent felony. Gray’s family settled a wrongful death lawsuit against the officers in 2019 for $1 million, paid by the city.

Later that year, Ezell won the Governor’s Impaired Driving Enforcement Award. “We appreciate her keeping the roads safe for our families … #OfcEzellUpAllNight #ShesOurRoadAngel,” the department posted on Facebook.

The award felt “like a knife in the back,” Aliyah Gray, 22, one of Alexus’ sisters, said in an interview. “It’s disgusting. I don’t feel like the officers faced true consequences here. It still hurts.”

A spokesperson for the Louisville Metro Police Department declined to comment, as did Moss. Ezell, who has since left the department, did not respond to an interview request.

While families like the Grays may receive settlements in wrongful death or civil rights cases, police officers rarely contribute to lawsuit payouts, the Chronicle found. This held true for officers who were accused of violating their agencies’ pursuit policies, fired for allegedly lying to a superior or charged with a felony related to their involvement in a pursuit. Instead, taxpayers are on the hook.

Local governments and insurers paid at least $82 million in settlements and judgments involving police pursuits that injured or killed more than 60 people since the start of 2017, according to the Chronicle’s analysis. Among the victims: a retired police officer and a 22-year-old woman struck by a Florida trooper.

Police officers who engage in reckless fatal pursuits can theoretically be held accountable through criminal courts. But district attorneys rarely charge officers with crimes, the Chronicle found.

"It is not a politically viable thing to advocate for the criminal charging of an officer,” said Mark Fine, a personal injury attorney in New Mexico who has handled police pursuit cases. He said voters and jury members tend to have sympathy for uniformed police in such situations.

Even when prosecutors take the rare step of criminally charging officers for pursuits that maim or kill, some remain on the force.

“I’ll chase that fucker,” Honolulu police officer Jake Bartolome said in September 2021 before he and officers Joshua Nahulu and Erik Smith, each in separate cars, began pursuing a white Honda Civic that they sought to pull over in response to a noise complaint at an early-morning beach party.

In violation of their department’s policy, the officers did not notify dispatch they were pursuing the car, nor did they activate their emergency lights or sirens, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by families.

The chase lasted four minutes as the cars roared over speed bumps at 80 to 108 mph on a highway with a 25- to 35-mph speed limit. An officer driving an unmarked SUV bumped the Honda, witnesses told police, causing it to careen off the road and crash in a field, injuring an adult and five teenagers, including a passenger who was initially paralyzed, another whose eye was split open and the driver, who suffered permanent brain damage. Instead of providing medical aid, the officers drove away, GPS trackers in their cars revealed.

After returning to the scene of the crash, they pretended not to know what caused it and then falsified police reports, prosecutors said. The three officers pleaded not guilty last March to felony charges related to the chase and its aftermath. Even so, they remained on the force on desk duty through early February, when they were finally fired. They now await a criminal trial scheduled for this June. Nahulu and Bartolome declined interviews through their criminal attorneys; Smith’s attorney did not return a request for comment.

In Detroit, two officers, Stephen Heid and Ronald Cadez, flipped on their lights, but not their siren, as they pursued Jerry Bradford Jr., 19, for speeding on the city’s east side one evening in October 2017.

Bradford struck another car, injuring a passenger, before smashing into a tree and dying. Then-Detroit Police Chief James Craig said just after the crash that there appeared to be no initial reason to stop the car.

The officers pleaded no contest to willful neglect of duty and were each sentenced to one year of probation, which included taking an “officer needs assistance” class and doing five days of community service. They remain on the job. When reached by phone, Heid hung up. Cadez declined to comment through a department spokesperson.

In nearly a dozen cases examined by the Chronicle, an officer hit and killed someone in a pursuit, but another driver or a passenger was criminally charged for the person’s death.

Early one evening in March 2021, Kansas State Trooper Justin Dobler spotted a white Mercury Grand Marquis with a cracked windshield, an equipment violation that carries a $45 fine. Dobler pulled a U-turn and flipped on his lights and siren. A chase ensued through the streets of North Topeka, with the driver slowing down at stop signs and using his turn signal.

Suspecting the car might be a Ford Crown Victoria on a “hot sheet” of stolen vehicles, Dobler radioed dispatch to relay the car’s license plate number. He then tried to nudge the back fender of the car — a maneuver intended to make a fleeing vehicle spin out and stop — to no avail.

As the Mercury Grand Marquis’s driver, Jeremy Cline, largely stayed within the 35-mph speed limit, Dobler received information from another officer and dispatch that his hunch was wrong: The car wasn’t stolen.

Instead of calling off the chase, Dobler rammed the car’s fender again until finally, on his third try, the car spun and slammed into a telephone pole, according to Dobler’s dash-camera footage, which was described in court documents. Sitting in the passenger seat was Cline’s girlfriend, Anita Benz. She died four days later from blunt force head and pelvic injuries.

Prosecutors charged Cline with felony murder for Benz’s death, among other offenses.

In March 2023, however, a Kansas appellate court affirmed a district court’s ruling that Dobler’s actions were an unreasonable use of excessive force that violated the Fourth Amendment. The trooper’s actions “caused the car crash and directly led to Benz's death,” the appeals court concluded. The justices threw out all the evidence of the crash gathered against Cline after Dobler forced him off the road.

In January, the prosecution dismissed all charges after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Cline was set free from jail.

“He shouldn’t have fled, but he didn’t kill her,” said Reid Nelson, one of Cline’s attorneys. “The officer's actions directly resulted in the passenger’s death. If prosecutors are really looking for wrongdoers, I think it was the officer whose actions should have been charged.”

Dobler had allegedly violated the state patrol’s policies at least twice before the pursuit that killed Benz, documents show. A few months before the crash, Dobler’s superiors wrote him up after concluding he shut off his lights and siren during a high-speed chase and told dispatch he’d abandoned the pursuit when he had not.

Seven months before that, in April 2020, Dobler collided with another vehicle during a pursuit. His superiors sent him a letter of reprimand for failing “to drive with due regard for safety of the public.”

In Benz’s case, Dobler violated a department directive to chase violent felons only in Topeka. Dobler's "entire pursuit should have been avoided (and) should not have occurred,” Capt. Joseph Witham of the Kansas Highway Patrol testified. “He was chasing, ultimately, a windshield violation.”

Dobler continued working for four months after the crash until the Kansas Highway Patrol’s command staff decided his pursuit violated the agency’s policy and fired him in July 2021. The following month, Dobler appealed to the state’s Civil Service Board, which overturned his firing and reinstated him to his job.

He joined the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Kansas for two years before leaving law enforcement in October 2023 to become a heating and cooling service technician.

“I don’t want anyone to think this was easy on me,” Dobler said in an interview. “Someone’s life was lost. That’s never an easy thing to deal with. Simplicity wise, I wish none of it would have happened.”

Families who seek accountability for loved ones killed in police pursuits must contend with deeply rooted obstacles, which grow even steeper if the person killed is an innocent bystander.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on March 12, 2021, Michael Clugston awoke and grabbed his car keys. As his wife slept, the 39-year-old machinist headed to his overnight shift at a manufacturing company. Michael was 10 miles from work when a Dodge Ram, pursued by Garden Grove (Orange County) police officer Travis Hadden, T-boned his car at nearly 100 mph, according to a lawsuit later filed by his family.

Michael’s car rolled down the city street, breaking his ribs and causing his brain to hemorrhage. Authorities rushed him to a hospital, where doctors soon pronounced him dead. Sal Fernandez and Joseph Mendoza, the two men Hadden had been chasing, also died after their car crashed through a wall and plunged into a swimming pool.

Michael’s widow, Stefanie Clugston, sued Hadden and his department in federal court, arguing that the officer’s actions had violated her husband’s civil rights by “recklessly” placing him in harm’s way. Hadden had chosen to chase Fernandez and Mendoza as they sped around a private, otherwise-empty parking lot. The situation hadn’t been dangerous until Hadden’s actions made it so, Stefanie’s attorneys argued.

Hadden also wasn’t supervised during his pursuit, the lawsuit alleged — a violation of his department’s chase policy.

Attorneys for Hadden and the city argued they shouldn’t be held liable for the death. And the judge agreed, dismissing Stefanie’s case. In his decision, he wrote that Hadden’s actions couldn’t have violated Michael’s civil rights because she couldn’t prove the officer intended to kill him.

But even if the judge had agreed that Stefanie had grounds for a civil rights case against Hadden, she would have had to overcome another challenge families often face: qualified immunity.

This doctrine has existed in its current form since 1982, when the Supreme Court ruled that public officials could be sued for civil rights violations only if their conduct “violate(d) clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”

Some proponents of qualified immunity argue that it allows officers to make quick decisions to protect the public and avoid financial punishment for making mistakes. The International Association of Chiefs of Police calls qualified immunity “a foundational protection for the policing profession.”

But in recent years, a bipartisan chorus of politicians and legal experts, including conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, began calling for reforms to qualified immunity. Rather than provide a necessary shield for well-intentioned law enforcement, some said, qualified immunity made it essentially impossible for people to sue police officers, even those who abuse their power.

To show an officer’s conduct violates a “clearly established” civil right, a court must have previously found that an officer violated someone’s rights in a past case with “substantially similar facts,” a precedent that the Supreme Court and lower courts have since interpreted to mean the case has to be virtually identical to a previous one.

In 2021, an appeals court granted two police officers qualified immunity after they allegedly tased a man who had doused himself in gasoline, setting him ablaze. The court based its ruling in part on the fact that attorneys hadn’t cited any previous cases involving a combination of a suicidal person, “flammable material,” the threat of arson and an electric shock weapon.

“To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior — no matter how palpably unreasonable — as long as they were the first to behave badly,” Don Willett, who former President Donald Trump appointed as a judge for the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in a 2018 concurrence.

Yet, reform efforts have proved elusive. In 2020 and 2021, responding to Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, the U.S. House of Representatives twice passed a bill that sought to end qualified immunity for police officers. On both occasions, the bill died in the Senate. Republican lawmakers said they worried it would weaken officer protections and hamper police recruitment efforts.

The Supreme Court hasn’t sided with any victim of a fatal police chase since it created qualified immunity, building up a body of case law that makes it even harder for families to sue. The court has ruled, among other things, that because pursuits involve split-second decisions, a police officer can’t violate an individual’s civil rights during them unless an attorney can prove the officer deliberately set out to harm that person.

Many courts have since interpreted these rulings to mean that bystanders killed in police pursuits can’t sue an officer for violating their civil rights, said Patrick Jacoimo, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm.

“If police intentionally cause a fleeing car thief to crash and die by running him off the road, his family can sue,” Jacoimo said. “But if, in the process, police accidentally hit and kill a 3-year-old, the child’s family cannot.”

These legal hurdles figured prominently in an August 2020 pursuit in Little Rock, Ark.

Late one Friday afternoon, officer Devon Colclough decided to chase Timothy Dockery Jr., after he allegedly tried to cash a suspicious check at a bank.

The two cars sped through red lights, over lane dividers and into oncoming traffic before zooming past an elementary school.

Colclough’s patrol vehicle registered speeds of up to 90 mph moments before Dockery’s Malibu lost control on a turn, smashing into a Honda Accord, which hit a Chevy Equinox.

Colclough and her partner run toward the Malibu, gripping their guns. “Get out of the car!” Colclough yells. She and her partner yell at the motionless man inside for over a minute.

She runs over to the first car, a Chevy Equinox. “Are you OK?” she asks. The occupant sounds hurt, but conscious.

Then she runs to a Honda Accord. “Are you OK?” There is no reply. “Oh, god,” Colclough says, raising her palms to her forehead.

Firefighters drove the occupants of the Accord, Kalob Franke and his grandfather, Ken Franke, to a nearby hospital. Kalob sustained a head injury and a broken arm, hip and femur, while Ken suffered a heavy brain bleed, a broken sternum and fractures to his ribs and hip. Kalob eventually woke up, but Ken, who arrived at the hospital conscious, slowly slipped away. Six days after the crash, his family took him off life support.

Ken’s widow, Sherry Franke, sued Colclough and her department in federal court, arguing that Colclough’s actions had violated her husband’s and grandson’s civil rights. Colclough’s pursuit was not only reckless but unnecessary, attorneys argued. Dockery wasn’t violent, nor did he have a weapon. Plus, the bank had security cameras authorities could have used in an effort to safely track him down later.

But a judge dismissed Sherry’s case after city attorneys said qualified immunity as well as the intent-to-harm standard protected Colclough, as she hadn’t intended to injure or kill the Frankes. To date, the family has received only the state’s minimum liability insurance claim: $25,000 per person, for a total of $50,000. Their attorneys collected 40% of that, Sherry said.

Colclough, who is still with the department, did not respond to a request for an interview. In internal documents, one supervisor called the pursuit “a teaching moment” for the then-rookie officer.

Most evenings, Sherry molds her pillows into the shape Ken used to make under their comforter, she said in an interview. That way, if she wakes up in the middle of the night, she can tell herself the crash was just a nightmare.

In the case of Michael Clugston in Garden Grove, attorneys knew that because he was an innocent bystander, it would be next to impossible for them to argue that officer Hadden had meant to kill him. So they didn’t try. Instead, they said the court should consider whether Hadden exhibited “deliberate or reckless indifference to life,” a standard the Supreme Court has previously applied to prison guards and other officials who have time to consider their actions.

District Court Judge James Selna rejected their argument. In his dismissal, he wrote that the intent-to-harm standard “applies to all high-speed police chases” whether officers have time to consider their actions or not.

Stefanie Clugston’s attorneys are now suing in state court, but face immense obstacles there, too.

Under California law, families are limited in their ability to sue a police department involved in a fatal chase even if they can prove the pursuing officer violated department policy, thanks to a provision in the state’s vehicle code passed in 2005. It states that if a police department has a pursuit policy that meets certain criteria, and if officers are trained on it, the agency is immune from liability. Police departments are essentially held harmless for the decisions their officers make behind the wheel.

Ironically, a rash of deaths involving pursuits prompted the provision. Lawmakers intended to protect bystanders, but settled for bill language that watered down stronger provisions they had initially drafted.

Former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, and the late state Sen. Sam Aanestad, R-Grass Valley, had proposed separate bills in 2003 and 2004 that would have made it easier for families to sue state and local governments involved in reckless pursuits. But stiff opposition from law enforcement buried both bills.

“Despite the limitations, it was better to get the law on the books and hope that, over time, a new legislature and governor would be able to overcome the extreme opposition we faced to strengthen the law," Romero said in an interview.

As of January, Hadden still worked for the Garden Grove Police Department. City representatives denied the Chronicle’s request for records related to the chase and Hadden’s disciplinary files, citing an ongoing investigation. They also declined to comment on the incident, and Hadden did not respond to interview requests.

On the day Michael died, police officers came to Stefanie’s door at 10 a.m. At first, she thought they had the wrong person. But then an officer asked: Did Michael have a tattoo of a four-leaf clover with the word “Faith” above it?

Faith is their daughter’s name. “I couldn’t breathe,” Stefanie said. “I just thought it was like a bad dream, and that I was going to wake up.”

In her darkest moments, she blames herself for what happened. After she lost her job early in the pandemic, Michael took extra shifts to cover their bills. He was on his way to one of those shifts when the car hit him.

But then she reminds herself: Hadden’s actions led to the crash, not hers.

“This is going to be with me until the day I die,” she said. “I just want somebody to take responsibility for it.”

Credits                                                                                                                                             

Reporting and data analysis by Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson. Video analysis and editing by Guy Wathen. Visuals by Stephen Lam, Jon Cherry and Liz Sanders. Editing by Jesse Marx, Dan Kopf, Demian Bulwa and Lisa Gartner. Visuals editing by Nicole Frugé. Video production and annotations by Daymond Gascon. Icons by John Blanchard. Design by Danielle Mollette-Parks. Design and development by Alex K. Fong and Sophie D'Amato. Additional development by Danielle Rindler/Hearst DevHub and Janie Haseman/Hearst DevHub. Copy editing by Michael Mayer.
 

By Susie Neilson and Jennifer Gollan

The federal agency charged with keeping drivers safe is significantly undercounting the number of people killed in police pursuits, skewing the picture of one of the most dangerous law enforcement activities in America.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is widely viewed as the authoritative source for statistics on pursuit-related fatalities. NHTSA’s data is routinely cited in reports by other federal agencies, researchers, media outlets and organizations that make policy recommendations and guide local police departments on when they should initiate chases.

But NHTSA did not record at least 662 people killed in pursuits from 2017 through 2021 in its publicly released count, the Chronicle found in an investigation.

The Chronicle’s analysis sought to include every person killed as a result of a police chase. NHTSA uses a narrower definition, saying it omits cases in which an officer purposely rams a vehicle or, in certain instances, calls off a chase before a crash, among other exclusions. The newspaper, though, also found hundreds of deaths that were missing from the agency’s pursuit data due to gaps in reporting and other unknown reasons.

With additional deaths identified by the Chronicle, the number of people killed in police pursuits is nearly 30% higher than previously known — a total of at least 3,004 individuals over five years. The dead include fleeing drivers, their passengers, bystanders and police officers.

In a statement, NHTSA (commonly pronounced NITS-uh) said its data on fatal police pursuits was not meant to be comprehensive. The agency said it instead provided “a nationwide census of unintentional crashes resulting in fatal injuries, which includes some police pursuits and excludes others.”

By not collecting comprehensive figures, experts said, the federal government is not only understating the consequences of police chases but missing an opportunity to help lawmakers and law enforcement leaders identify police agencies with higher fatality rates and shape effective responses.

“Pursuits are really dangerous,” said Alexis Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Miami who left his post last year as the director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. “We need to have accurate, credible, reliable data. There should be no reason why we don’t have this right now in the United States.”

He said the government needs to accurately track police pursuits for the same reason it collects health data — to understand the breadth of the problem, develop better training for police and launch prevention efforts to save lives. “When you don’t have accurate, reliable and transparent data,” he said, “then people are left wandering — and worse, speculating about what is and isn’t happening.”

The Chronicle’s dataset — the fullest accounting yet of police pursuit deaths — shows that nearly 700 people died in 2020 and again in 2021. By comparison, NHTSA reported 545 and 525 deaths involving pursuits in those respective years, record highs for the agency, despite the undercount.

The Chronicle compiled its dataset of 662 deaths excluded from the NHTSA pursuit count by cross-referencing the agency’s records with information the newspaper amassed from researchers, news articles and public records — matching names and faces to lives the government has overlooked.

From 2017 through 2021, NHTSA reported a total of 2,342 police-pursuit related deaths.

Over that period, Chronicle reporters identified 662 additional deaths involving police chases that the agency did not include in its fatal pursuit data.

To find additional deaths, reporters scoured news articles, police reports, court records and obituaries, and compared the data we gathered to NHTSA’s using a matching function to eliminate duplicates.

NHTSA omits some pursuit cases by design. The agency’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, tracks only what it calls “unintentional crashes” on “active roadways” where people die within 30 days. Chases in which officers deliberately ram fleeing vehicles are excluded, as are certain fatal crashes in driveways or parking lots.

In other cases, NHTSA includes fatal crashes in its data but does not code them as “pursuit-involved,” such as certain cases that occur shortly after an officer calls off a pursuit.

In 42 cases, police officers or departments initially denied a pursuit occurred, though witnesses or other evidence of a chase emerged later.

In 354 cases, it’s unclear why they were missing from the NHTSA count of pursuit deaths. It’s possible some of these deaths were deliberately excluded for one of the reasons above, but news reports did not provide enough detail for us to determine that.

The undercount of pursuit fatalities is another example of a broader federal failure to accurately track deaths that occur during police encounters. In 2022, the Washington Post reported that FBI data included just one-third of fatal police shootings documented by reporters from 2015 through 2021. A University of Washington study published in 2021 found that federal data missed more than half of all deaths attributed to police actions over a 39-year period.

While NHTSA lacks the authority to require states to provide data on unintentional crashes, all of them participate. NHTSA relies on police crash reports for pursuit data. But what officers report varies, said an agency researcher. (NHTSA allowed the Chronicle to speak with the researcher on the condition that they not be identified by name.)

California requires law enforcement agencies to report information on fatal chases to the California Highway Patrol, which compiles the data and submits it to NHTSA. Regardless, the Chronicle found dozens of deaths in the state that did not appear in the federal agency’s pursuit data. In fact, California’s death toll from 2017 through 2021 was 36% higher when these additional cases were counted.

“I think they all need to be included to get a good picture because it is a pursuit and it is a pursuit-related death,” Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina and a leading authority on police pursuits, said in an interview. “You’re getting an undercount of the problem.”

Deaths resulting from “legal interventions” and other use-of-force killings are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but that agency does not count bystander deaths when documenting pursuit cases. While the CDC’s data on police killings is more complete than some other federal databases, it doesn’t actively collaborate with NHTSA on pursuit deaths.

In response to the Chronicle’s questions, a NHTSA spokesperson said in an email that the agency’s data “has intensive quality control processes and procedures” and offered to review and add, if appropriate, any cases to its database.

After reporters provided the agency with a sample of 10 fatal crashes from its analysis, officials acknowledged multiple incidents had been omitted in error and said they would update their pursuit data. According to NHTSA, three were incorrectly coded and should have been counted as pursuit-involved crashes, three were “correctly” excluded from its pursuit count, and one was not submitted to the agency.

In the remaining three cases, NHTSA said, police crash reports were unavailable, preventing officials from providing an explanation.

The Chronicle’s investigation follows a recent report by a government-appointed working group that urged law enforcement agencies to start collecting information on a wider array of policing activities, including vehicle pursuits, to “promote accountability.”

The group, which included several of the nation’s top criminal justice experts, set out to examine policing data under an executive order that President Joe Biden signed in 2022 following a Minneapolis officer’s murder of George Floyd.

Police chases are “a hidden use of deadly force,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization. “This could significantly change the way we understand police violence and deal with the problem of excessive police force.”

Among those missing from NHTSA’s official count is 12-year-old Le’Den Boykins.

After midnight on Sept. 10, 2021, a trooper from the Georgia State Patrol conducted a traffic stop of the SUV he was riding in in Paulding County. When the trooper walked up to the vehicle and ordered its driver, Charlie Moore, to hand over his license and step out, Moore refused.

Moore’s 14-year-old son sat in the front seat, and his friend, Le’Den, sat in the back. Three deputies from the Paulding County Sheriff's Office arrived for backup. “Open the door!” the trooper demanded, according to dash-camera video. A deputy shattered Moore’s driver’s-side window with a baton. Moore took off. The officers raced back to their cars and gave chase.

On a 911 call from the SUV, one of the boys reported, “They pulled us over for no reason and then they broke the glass.” Moore then got on the phone and pleaded to talk with a supervisor: “Y’all got to help me. … I’m afraid for my life. … I got my kids with me.” (According to the 911 call, a supervisor was dispatched to the area of the chase.)

After passing two cars driving in the opposite direction, the trooper nudged the back of Moore’s SUV. It careened off the road and flipped over, killing Le’Den. “PIT successful, PIT successful!” the trooper said into his radio, referring to a Precision Immobilization Technique, which forces vehicles to spin out.

In May, a judge sentenced Moore to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to charges including first-degree vehicular homicide in connection with Le’Den’s death and aggravated assault on an officer.

“It’s outrageous that he’s not included in the federal statistics,” said Anthony Boykins, Le’Den’s father, recalling his son as a gifted basketball player who cut the grass for his mother. “But it’s outrageous that a 12-year-old boy was killed by law enforcement to give a guy a speeding ticket, not for a violent crime or anything. And no one has anything to say about it.”

In an interview, a NHTSA researcher said officials excluded Le’Den’s death because it involved “deliberate intent” by law enforcement.

Most of the deaths missing from NHTSA’s pursuit data, however, did not appear to involve “deliberate intent” as defined in guidelines used by the agency. Some stemmed from pursuits in which officers didn’t initially disclose their involvement.

In one instance, in March 2021, Little Rock police chased a 12-year-old driver who took her stepfather’s GMC Terrain. The SUV veered off the road, killing a passenger, 14-year-old Zayne Ortiz. The department did not publicly disclose that Ortiz had died in what its internal investigation called an “unauthorized pursuit” until a blogger reported it in July 2022.

A state commission last year stripped one of the officers involved in the chase of his police powers. When news of the pursuit got out, the department promised to do better.

“We acknowledge there was a lack of information provided for this incident and will ensure going forward incidents of this magnitude are shared (in a) timely manner,” department officials said in a statement at the time.

When asked whether the department reported the pursuit to state officials for inclusion in  NHTSA’s chase data, a Little Rock Police Department spokesperson said he had “no idea.” The police report did not indicate that it was a pursuit, according to NHTSA.  “We are reliant on what we were told via official state records,” the NHTSA researcher told the Chronicle. “I suspect that there was something more there.”

Cindy Ortiz, Zayne’s mother, said it took more than a year for the Police Department to acknowledge her son had been killed in a chase. “I was really mad, because they lied to me,” she said, adding that in a recent dream about Zayne, “He told me he wanted people to know what happened to him.”

Over the years, researchers and government officials have questioned whether NHTSA is providing a comprehensive national picture of fatal crashes.

The agency’s death count stretches back nearly 50 years, when it created FARS as a means of collecting and analyzing fatalities on the nation’s roadways. The data helps the agency scrutinize traffic hazards and evaluate highway safety programs and vehicle standards. But almost from the start, officials expressed overarching concerns about its quality: “FARS often contains incomplete data, thereby limiting its use,” a 1979 report said.

The agency acknowledged deficiencies in a 1993 newsletter: “We won’t be able to record all pursuits resulting in fatalities.” Officers did not properly report certain cases, while others did not fit the agency’s definition of a reportable crash.

In July 2002, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin said, “The lack of a mandatory reporting system hampers attempts by NHTSA to track pursuit fatalities and results in the collection of as little as one half of the actual data.” Yet the problem persisted more than a decade later, when NHTSA did not log at least 101 pursuit-related deaths in 2013, USA Today reported.

Lawmakers have called on federal officials to fix gaps in data collection. In 2018, the House Appropriations Committee urged the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a federal statistical agency, to develop a data collection process to accurately track injuries and deaths from police pursuits, in addition to improving officer training and employing new technology to reduce deaths. These recommendations yielded no significant results.

In response to questions from the Chronicle, a Bureau of Justice Statistics spokesperson said in an email that agency officials, after reviewing the House recommendations, decided that police should submit pursuit deaths and injuries through the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, which the FBI uses to collect and disseminate crime and arrest data.

But the NIBRS data contains only a subset of deaths associated with pursuits, including officer deaths during traffic stops and chases and, separately, deaths of suspects fleeing police. For civilian deaths, NIBRS counts only people who were “justifiably” killed by police for committing a serious crime while they were fleeing officers, and it does not include data on bystanders injured or killed.

Moreover, participation is voluntary. About one-third of the nation’s law enforcement agencies failed to report crime data to NIBRS for 2022. That year, NIBRS counted just one civilian death caused by “other dangerous weapons,” the category that includes vehicles.

Asked whether the FBI plans to change the way it collects fatal police pursuit data, an agency spokesperson said in an email that “the Uniform Crime Reporting Program continuously works to enhance the data collection in efforts to capture the most up-to-date statistics.”

The Bureau of Justice Statistics does collect some data on the deaths of people in custody or during the process of arrest, including people who die while fleeing police in cars. But here, too, the data is incomplete.

NHTSA’s undercount concerns Farhang Heydari, an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt University Law School, who believes the agency has strayed from its core function, traffic safety, in favor of criminal law enforcement.

In an article published in January in the Stanford Law Review, Heydari reported that the agency has funded training for nearly 900 agencies across the United States through a program called Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety. In practice, Heydari found, the program has led agencies to substantially increase traffic stops, in part as a pretext to find people who may be involved in criminal behavior — a tactic that some cities, including San Francisco, have recently limited.

People who flee traffic stops rarely “have a body in the trunk,” Heydari said in an interview. More often, they have a suspended license or an immigration violation. “The problem with NHTSA teaching cops that every traffic stop can lead to finding Timothy McVeigh or a murderer,” he said, “is that it will amp them up and make them more likely to pursue.”

“NHTSA’s job is traffic safety,” he said. “Instead, they keep veering out of their lane and advising on crime-fighting, and it’s having all these harmful consequences, including pursuits that kill people that probably never should have started in the first place.”

Congress could mandate the comprehensive collection of fatal police pursuit data. States could require law enforcement agencies to report the information to the federal government as well. And the Bureau of Justice Statistics could establish standards for each police agency to collect data on chases, creating a national platform.

“BJS is a statistical agency that collects crime and justice data,” Piquero, the agency’s former director, said. “It would make logical sense that the bureau be the people who collect such data. They could collect it in partnership with the FBI.”

Federal agencies already collect reams of data about Americans, including what they eat and how much they spend.

The government tracks these metrics “for the same reasons that we should be tracking our pursuit statistics,” Alpert, the University of South Carolina criminologist, said. “Because if there’s a problem, they can address it.”

Credits

Reporting and data analysis by Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson. Video analysis and editing by Guy Wathen. Visuals by Brittany Greeson. Editing by Jesse Marx, Dan Kopf, Demian Bulwa and Lisa Gartner. Visuals editing by Nicole Frugé. Data visualization and development, and design and development by Nami Sumida. Design and development by Alex K. Fong and Sophie D'Amato. Additional development by Danielle Rindler/Hearst DevHub and Janie Haseman/Hearst DevHub. Copy editing by Michael Mayer.

By Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson 

An SUV flipped over the median on an interstate in upstate New York, ejecting an 11-year-old girl from the back seat. The vehicle landed on her, crushing her.

A motorcycle hurtled off a country road in eastern Iowa, throwing its 31-year-old rider into a cornfield.

A pickup spun off a roadway in northern Georgia into the path of an ATV, slamming into it with such force that it knocked the rider, Dustin Thomas, out of one of his sneakers. The father of four, described by his family as a “country boy at heart,” landed 50 feet away.

Thomas’ obituary called his passing a “tragic accident” — but the collisions that led to all of these deaths were intentional. In each case, police officers took aggressive action in an effort to end a chase.

Since 2017, at least 87 people across the country have been killed after police officers rammed vehicles they were pursuing, often at extremely high speeds, a Chronicle investigation found.

Nearly half of those who died — 37 people, including seven children — were not the fleeing drivers. Instead, they were passengers or bystanders. In Tifton, Ga., a grandmother was killed when a fleeing car deliberately struck by police careened into her front yard.

The Chronicle’s tally marks the fullest accounting yet of the death toll from what are known as precision immobilization techniques, or PIT maneuvers, which many police agencies across the country use to disable fleeing vehicles. Ten people died over the first half of this year alone, the highest tally over that period of any year in the Chronicle’s dataset.

Adopted from stock car racing, the PIT maneuver — or “PITting,” as officers often refer to it — involves striking a vehicle’s rear fender, causing its back wheels to lose traction and spin out. The Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia first introduced the technique in the 1980s.

While most major police departments across the U.S. limit the maneuver to speeds no higher than 35 to 45 mph, many other agencies impose few restrictions on PITs. In these places, officers make use of them liberally, the Chronicle found.

The newspaper reviewed police reports, court records and news articles to identify the approximate speeds at which police deployed PITs that led to the deaths of 37 people since 2017. Officers initiated PITs at speeds of at least 90 mph in incidents that killed 20 people, and at least 120 mph in PITs that killed six of them.

“PIT maneuvers should not be allowed at any speed,” Julie Thomas, Dustin Thomas’ widow, said in a phone interview. “They are putting innocent people in harm’s way.”

All but one of the fatalities in the Chronicle’s dataset for which speeds could be pinpointed precisely or estimated involved PITs conducted at 60 mph or faster. In that outlying case, in 2021, a trooper tried to pull over a driver in North Topeka, Kan., for a cracked windshield before chasing him and performing a PIT at about 55 mph. The car slammed into a telephone pole, killing a passenger.

Just one in eight deaths in the dataset stemmed from a PIT performed during a pursuit that was initiated over a suspected violent crime. In the vast majority of the fatalities that the Chronicle identified, officers performed PIT maneuvers during chases over low-level or nonviolent crimes.

In 2019, Tevin Blount allegedly didn’t use his turn signal — a traffic infraction — as he changed lanes to avoid a license checkpoint on a highway exit ramp in Laurens County, Ga. After he refused to pull over, deputies began a high-speed chase. Soon after, a deputy performed a PIT at approximately 120 mph, sending the Chevrolet Impala into a ditch and killing Blount and a passenger.

Despite the growing death toll and recommendations from a leading law enforcement policy organization to restrict the use of PIT maneuvers, federal and state lawmakers have failed to study or regulate them, the Chronicle found.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency charged with reducing crashes, keeps a nationwide count of traffic fatalities. But it does not include deaths caused by PIT maneuvers — because it does not consider them accidents. Instead, the agency says it only tracks deaths during police pursuits that result from unintentional crashes.

“This is very alarming,” Angelo Brown, an assistant professor of criminology at Arkansas State University who focuses on policing, said after reviewing the Chronicle’s findings. “In this country we have this belief that you’re innocent until proven guilty, and with the people who are dying in PIT maneuvers, they’re given a death penalty.”

To be sure, the vast majority of PIT maneuvers employed by police do not kill anyone. And, in some cases, the technique has enabled officers to capture a dangerous suspect.

In Fishers, Ind., officers performed a PIT to stop Carl Roy Webb Boards II, after he allegedly shot and killed a police officer during a traffic stop in July 2022 and then fled. Boards survived. “PITs are pretty foolproof” when used by properly trained officers, Ed Gebhart, the chief of the Fishers Police Department, said in a phone interview.

“This was someone who had just murdered a police officer, so we felt that pursuit needed to end,” Gebhart said. “Why not take control of the scenario, and PIT him where we know he’s going to land?”

PITs result in “a predictable spin-out action of the target vehicle,” which is “one of the reasons the maneuver is considered a precision technique,” stated a 2017 newsletter from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers.

But the Chronicle found that, in practice, the maneuver is as imprecise as it is deadly. And with little to no federal oversight, training varies among jurisdictions.

Police departments differ over whether PITs, particularly at higher speeds, constitute deadly force. While some agencies liken them to firing a gun, others classify them as routine tactical maneuvers requiring relatively little training.

As a result of these lax, inconsistent policies, police have used PITs on an array of motorists, including a driver whose tail lights were off and a pregnant woman who didn’t pull to the side of the road fast enough.

In September 2018, a Georgia state trooper stopped Christopher Hall for driving too slowly. When the trooper asked Hall to step out of the car, Hall, who didn’t have his license with him, drove off along a desolate highway. A chase ensued before the officer rammed Hall’s truck.

The impact caused the pickup to hit a ditch, spin and flip, throwing Hall from the cab and onto the side of the road. Officers found him face-down, dead.

“When I saw the truck,” said Tonya Hall, Christopher’s mother, “it was just horrible.”

The wreck that killed Lakita Davis started with 5-hour Energy drinks and paper towels.

A clerk at a Dollar Store in Jonesboro, Ark., told police she saw Davis leave without paying one evening in October 2020. Davis, 35, drove away with her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend and her stepson in a silver Honda Civic.

Speaking with dispatch, the clerk called the incident a “robbery,” defined as a violent crime in which someone uses, or threatens to use, force to steal.

“Armed robbery?” a supervisor from the Arkansas State Police asked the dispatcher, according to an audio recording of their conversation.

“I don’t know,” the dispatcher replied. Less than two minutes later, as they monitored the pursuit, the supervisor pressed again: “Was it armed robbery?” The dispatcher didn’t answer.

Arkansas State Trooper Tanner Middlecoff joined local police in the chase. Against the urging of a supervising officer, Middlecoff took the lead. “Dang it!” the supervisor said in exasperation as Middlecoff overtook Jonesboro police, according to the audio recording.

Moments later, Middlecoff sped toward Davis at more than 120 mph and deliberately rammed her car. The Civic veered off the road and flipped, landing on its hood.

“Crawl out, or you’re gonna get dog bit!” ordered Chris Shull, an officer with the Jonesboro Police Department, a K9 by his side, according to dash-camera and body-camera footage and documents from Jonesboro and Arkansas State Police.

“Driver, can you crawl out?” another officer asked. Davis didn’t answer.

Standing nearby, Shull said, “I gotta say, that was my first pursuit that was legit and justified, like, fit policy. That was awesome.”

Minutes later, Shull announced Davis was dead — and blamed her family.

“Congratulations, y’all just committed homicide, y’all just committed murder,” he told the passengers: Davis’ 18-year-old daughter, Octavia Jackson, who lay on a stretcher with bone fractures; her stepson, Octavius Moore, 15; and her daughter’s boyfriend, Taccorion Golden, 20, who broke his leg.

In an interview with the Chronicle, Vantina Conley, Lakita’s older sister, said the responding officers “didn’t have no regards for human life — at all.”

“First of all, they’re babies,” she said. “How are they responsible?”

Soon after the crash, body camera footage shows, Shull congratulated Middlecoff: “Good job on a good PIT.”

Later, he learned that the incident had started with a suspected nonviolent theft. “Oh, my God,” Shull said. “I mean, we’re still covered though, but I mean, wow.”

In fact, while Jonesboro’s policy prohibited ramming fleeing vehicles “unless deadly force is justified,” Arkansas State Police are allowed to pursue — and PIT — a fleeing driver for almost any reason.

Across the country, the Chronicle found, law enforcement agencies write their own rules for PIT maneuvers. Some agencies portray PITs as safe: The tactic “will result in no injuries and very little damage to the violator and pursuit vehicle,” the policy of the Kershaw County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina states.

Some departments urge officers to deploy PITs only as a last resort; others don’t clearly specify when to use them. Police in Greenfield, Wis., are told they can initiate a PIT maneuver over any crime, while traveling at any speed, whenever they think someone “displays behavior indicative of fleeing,” and without approval from a supervising officer.

In neighboring Milwaukee, the department bars police officers from ramming or engaging in any “deliberate contact” with a fleeing vehicle. Chicago also bars police from intentionally striking fleeing vehicles.

“The Chicago Police Department prioritizes the sanctity of human life at all times,” said Anthony Spicuzza, an agency spokesperson, when asked why the department bans PITs. “Forcing collision is not in our policies and general orders.”

Most larger departments across the U.S. prohibit the maneuver being used at more than 35 to 45 mph. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol generally bar officers from performing a PIT if a fleeing vehicle is traveling more than 35 mph, with limited exceptions.

San Francisco police policies do not explicitly mention PIT maneuvers, but prohibit officers from deliberately striking a fleeing vehicle unless there is a “substantial risk” that the driver of the vehicle will cause “imminent death or serious bodily injury” if not immediately stopped.

Other departments discourage PITs at high speeds, but still grant officers broad discretion. The North Carolina Highway Patrol, for instance, authorizes PITs above 55 mph only if the trooper believes a vehicle’s occupants committed a violent felony or determines “deadly force” is necessary.

Agencies with looser policies on PIT speeds accounted for far more PIT-related deaths in the Chronicle’s dataset than those that limited the maneuver. In the majority of fatal PITs that occurred at speeds of 60 mph or faster, the Chronicle found that officers did not violate speed limits in their departments’ policy manuals — because their policies included no limits at all.

Together, state troopers in Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma led the nation with the most fatalities tied to PITs — at least 40 since 2017, or nearly half of the deaths in the dataset. Troopers in these states are not subject to speed caps when they perform the maneuver. In all but three of the 40 deaths, including that of Davis, troopers used PITs in chases initiated over suspected low-level, non-violent offenses.

At least 25 people have died since 2018 in PITs by the Georgia State Patrol, compared to none over that period involving the California Highway Patrol, which polices a population nearly four times the size but limits the speed at which officers should perform the maneuver.

A little over a year after the deadly pursuit in Jonesboro, Ark., supervisors disciplined Shull — the officer who had told the crash victims they had “committed murder” — for recklessly operating a police vehicle after he ignored a supervisor’s orders to end another pursuit, his personnel file shows. Instead of heeding his supervisor, Shull pulled in front of the fleeing car and swerved back and forth in a “reckless” manner, according to a reprimand signed by his supervisor.

Later that year, the department fired Shull after he posted a video to social media of himself shocking a woman with a Taser. A caption on the video read: “Can’t stop the flop! Ride the lightning!”

Middlecoff, who performed the PIT that killed Lakita Davis, remains an Arkansas state trooper. The local prosecuting attorney declined to prosecute him. “No action by any ASP trooper strikes me as unreasonable,” he wrote.

None of the passengers in the car with Davis, all of whom survived, were charged with a crime.

As the fog cleared on a recent morning in Castaic, about an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles, deputies took their seats in a low-slung office building. They had gathered for a defensive driving class at the Pitchess Emergency Vehicle Operations Center, a massive facility featuring a race course ringed with mounds of grass and yellow flowers.

Officers with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department spent several hours in a dimly lit classroom, watching video after video of deadly crashes caused by erratic police driving.

“When in doubt, just slow down,” the instructor, Deputy Matt Fitzgerald, advised the class. That would help them avoid crashes — and costly financial settlements for their departments, he said.

“How much training do we get on driving?” Fitzgerald asked. “Not a lot,” several deputies murmured.

After the course’s classroom portion, Fitzgerald’s students took to the track to practice pursuit techniques, blaring their sirens as they chased each other around hairpin turns and traffic cones.

Black-and-white Ford Explorers and Crown Victorias, pockmarked with dents, sat in the parking lot. Guardrails on their fenders protected some of them from major damage when deputies practiced PITing each other.

Zachary Anderson, a sheriff’s deputy and driving instructor, slid into the driver’s seat of an Explorer. In this PIT simulation, he posed as the officer. His fellow deputy, Chris Flores, who hopped into a Crown Victoria, would play the “bad guy,” Anderson said.

A Chronicle reporter sat in Anderson’s Explorer as both cars set off down a straightaway. “It helps when the bad guy doesn’t know we’re PITting,” the deputy said, driving toward Flores as both cars reached speeds of about 25 mph. He nudged the Crown Victoria’s back corner on the driver’s side, forcing Flores to spin out counterclockwise. Both cars came to a rest.

Then the Chronicle reporter climbed into the “bad guy” car, the beat-up passenger-side door creaking as it opened. Flores took off down the course, nearing 30 mph when, suddenly, Anderson’s Explorer smacked the back of the car, sending it into a forceful spin and pinning the reporter to her seat.

Flores braked, hard, and his tires screeched. The second maneuver was almost identical to the first, the speed no more than 5 mph faster. Nevertheless, the experience felt nauseating and frightening: The “bad guy” car seemed as though it could lose control at any moment.

Even at this relatively low speed, it felt “violent,” Flores said. PITs at higher speeds “can send the car flyin’,” he added.

Training programs for law enforcement on PITs vary wildly, the Chronicle found. Los Angeles deputies practice PITs at 35 mph or less because their policy prohibits doing them at higher speeds.

To help Los Angeles deputies understand why they’re prohibited from PITting above 35 mph, Anderson and his fellow trainers show a video of a 2020 PIT conducted by an Arkansas State Police trooper at 109 mph, which flipped driver Justin Battenfield’s truck, killing him. (Police initially pulled over Battenfield for running a red light before he fled.)

Arkansas State Police practice PITs at 40 to 60 mph, retired sergeant and pursuit trainer Jackie Speer told the Chronicle, even though troopers on patrol sometimes perform them at 100 mph or faster. “The technique is the same no matter the speed,” Speer said.

The Arkansas State Police have a reputation for stopping fleeing drivers with PITs, spokesperson Cindy Murphy acknowledged. At least eight people have died in PITs involving the agency since 2020, including four within six months last year, the Chronicle found. Three of these deaths stemmed from chases over alleged traffic violations; the fourth involved a drug investigation.

Litigation has helped shape the training program of the Arkansas State Police.

Janice Harper was pregnant when trooper Rodney Dunn clocked her driving 84 mph — 14 mph over the highway’s speed limit — and switched on his lights one summer evening in July 2020. Harper turned on her hazards and moved to the right lane, an Arkansas State Police report shows.

But with concrete barriers on both sides of the interstate, Harper had nowhere to pull over, so she kept driving. Less than a mile later Dunn performed a PIT on her car, causing it to overturn. She and her unborn baby survived.

State police gave Harper traffic tickets for speeding and failing to yield. But after she sued Dunn and his supervisors, alleging that the trooper’s use of force was excessive and that he negligently performed the PIT, the state dropped all of the charges against her.

Harper reached a $150,000 settlement with the Arkansas State Police in 2021. The agency agreed to update its pursuit policy, adding language that a “reasonable” officer in that position must agree that the PIT was justified.

“In Ms. Harper’s case, it took a catastrophic situation with severe injuries and the temporary thought that she had lost her baby for the Arkansas State Police to change its policy,” said Andrew Norwood, the lead attorney on her case. He said the agency also pledged to use footage from the PIT maneuver that caused her crash in its training program for cadets.

The Arkansas State Police initially indicated that a Chronicle reporter could visit its training course. But after learning more about the focus of this story, an official denied the request. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to accommodate after all. The track is pretty well booked for the foreseeable future,” spokesperson Murphy wrote in an email.

The agency did not return multiple phone and email requests for an interview about the agency’s PIT policies and injury and crash data. It did, however, provide these records to 40/29 News, a local TV station which, along with the Chronicle, is owned by Hearst. Yet the data the agency provided to 40/29 News listed just two fatalities involving the maneuver since 2017, one in April 2020 and one last December.

The agency did not respond to the Chronicle’s questions about its use of PIT maneuvers or the six additional deaths that the newspaper identified. It also did not respond to questions about the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s use of the video of Battenfield’s death to train officers.

Upon learning about the training, Linda Hamm, a family friend who helped raise Battenfield, said: “I don’t know what to say.”

After he died, Hamm said, she watched the video of the maneuver that killed Battenfield, and other PITs that ended badly, over and over until she couldn’t watch them anymore.

“They chased him over running a stoplight. All they had to do was just wait and catch him where he’s at home,” she said. “It should’ve been different.”

For decades, experts have warned that PIT maneuvers are one of the most dangerous tactics in American policing. But law enforcement officials and state and federal lawmakers have failed to take meaningful action to curb the deaths.

More than 30 years ago, the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin published a two-page article that described the risks associated with the technique, concluding that officers must undergo rigorous training to perform a PIT safely.

“Officers learn in training that when violators’ vehicles are hit, fatal injuries may result,” wrote an official from a law enforcement training academy in Fairfax County, Va. “Therefore, they must consider many complex factors before using this type of potentially deadly force.”

Yet the federal government has not laid out standards for police on PIT maneuvers, including when and how officers should perform them — and at what speeds.

Thousands of agencies rely on often loose guidelines developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a professional organization for police leaders.

These guidelines are not based on empirical research — because little to none exists.

Since 2000, the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, has awarded close to $4 billion for over 7,300 research projects on topics ranging from the development of a THC breathalyzer test to the impacts of electric shock weapons on human hearts.

Just one of those studies focused on PIT maneuvers: In 2012, federal law enforcement researchers, alongside officials from the Michigan State Police, found that performing PITs on cars with stabilizing technology — which includes most new cars —  had “unpredictable results at both low and high speeds.”

But researchers stopped short of making recommendations, calling their findings “anecdotal evidence.”

Without more research, influential policy organizations have declined to issue definitive recommendations on how PITs should be performed, if they are used at all.

Last year, a report funded by the Police Executive Research Forum in conjunction with the Justice Department recommended limiting the use of the PIT maneuver: “Until there is research-backed evidence defining the parameters within which PIT maneuvers can be employed safely and effectively, this guide cannot without serious reservation endorse their use,” advised the task force, made up of mostly police chiefs and their representatives from across the U.S.

However, the task force stopped short of calling for agencies to ban the tactic. Nor did they recommend a speed limit at which PITs can be safely performed, citing the lack of research.

In the absence of federal research or guidelines, agencies across the U.S. differ over whether PITs should be classified as a use of deadly force, meaning likely to cause death or serious injury.

As described in the policy of the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia, a PIT maneuver “does not constitute deadly force.” By contrast, the pursuit policy of the Henrico County Police Division in Virginia calls PITs “a use of deadly force.”

While the federal government has little control over local police practices, government-funded research showing PITs are a use of deadly force could motivate departments across the country to restrict them further, policing experts told the Chronicle. Agencies would be more likely to offer extensive training on PITs, and to impose stricter limits on when and how they could be used.

“Most departments have very specific, and fairly standard, policies on when deadly force can be used. So, if a PIT is deadly force, then you can only use it when other forms of deadly force, such as a firearm, would be warranted,” said John P. Gross, a clinical assistant professor and director of the Public Defender Project at the University of Wisconsin Law School who focuses on police use of force.

In the meantime, without meaningful research or guidance, agencies across the country continue to perform PITs on drivers accused of minor crimes.

“Even if they’re executed perfectly, there is a high risk of fatalities,” said Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization. “I think lawmakers should ban PITs completely. Too many people are dying.”

In Manchester, Ga., roadside flowers mark the spot where Christopher Hall died six years ago, at the end of the chase that began with him driving too slowly.

A landscaper who worked alongside his brothers and stepfather, Hall left behind two daughters. This Father’s Day, as she has every year since he died, his mother, Tonya Hall, drove the girls to the site, where they placed the blossoms and shared memories.

Tonya Hall said she still is hit with waves of depression. “When it comes, it comes hard,” she said. Her son shouldn’t have fled, she said. But the trooper shouldn’t have rammed him, either.

“Nobody should take somebody’s child’s life,” she said. “They took an oath to serve and protect.”

Credits

Reporting and data analysis by Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson. Additional reporting by Annie Vainshtein and Katie Hamner/40/29TV. Editing by Lisa Gartner, Dan Kopf and Demian Bulwa. Copy editing by Barbara Jaramillo. Visuals by Kendrick Brinson, Jen Osborne and Liz Sanders. Video editing by Maggie Beidelman. Visuals editing by Emily Jan. Graphics video editing by Daymond Gascon. Graphics, design and development by Todd Trumbull. Graphics, design and development editing by Alex K. Fong.

Across the country, police chases claim nearly 700 lives a year. But members of one group are far more likely to die.

Black people account for roughly one‑eighth of the U.S. population.

But they make up more than one‑third of fatalities caused by police pursuits, a Chronicle investigation found.

So pervasive is the racial disparity that more than 1 in 4 bystanders killed in these incidents are Black.

Among those bystanders: 22-year-old Trevon Mitchell

By Susie Neilson and Jennifer Gollan

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Trevon Mitchell lay in the parking lot of a soul food joint, his left arm snapped and blood trickling from an ear.

Sirens wailed. A truck exploded in flames. Mitchell had been launched into the air, with some witnesses saying he flew as high as the green traffic light that ushered him into the intersection. Then he slammed onto the pavement, scraping away flesh and muscle, baring his intestines.

“I’m about to die,” he said.

“Wake up, Trey,” Aidan Colmore pleaded. “Don’t do this on me.”

Moments earlier, the best friends had been riding mopeds west of downtown Louisville. Out of nowhere, a man in a black Ford Five Hundred sedan — who’d failed to use his turn signal in view of the police, and was now being chased — blasted toward the same intersection.

The Ford ran the red at 95 mph, touching off a chaotic pileup that injured seven people. Colmore was briefly knocked unconscious before he rushed to Mitchell’s side, tapping his face outside Sam’s Fast Food, trying to keep him awake until paramedics arrived.

But soon after he made it to the hospital, Mitchell’s heart stopped.

The wreck in July 2021 was emblematic: A police department under investigation for discriminating against Black people chased a Black motorist through a Black neighborhood, leading to the death of a Black bystander.

A cascade of disparate policing practices has fueled a hidden crisis in which a disproportionate number of Black people are dying in police pursuits across the country, a Chronicle investigation found.

Of the more than 3,600 people — fleeing drivers, passengers, bystanders and officers — who died in police chases across the U.S. from 2017 through 2022, nearly a third, or at least 1,150, were Black, according to a first-of-its-kind dataset reporters built by combining federal records, court documents, local news reports and research by watchdog organizations.

It’s well documented that police in many parts of the U.S. disproportionately stop and search Black drivers — a disparity that partially explains why Black people die in pursuits at four times the per-capita rate of white people.

But the bloodshed uncovered by the Chronicle goes deeper: Black people accounted for upward of 1 in 4 bystanders killed as a result of pursuits, though they represent about 1 in 8 U.S. residents. This includes people like Mitchell, who were neither chasing nor being chased.

And that’s largely because of yet another imbalance: Deadly police pursuits are much more likely to occur in majority Black neighborhoods, raising questions about the consequences of aggressive policing in these areas, and how one of the most dangerous tactics in law enforcement is deployed in these places.

The Chronicle pinpointed the location of more than 3,600 police-chase deaths, then examined the racial demographics of the U.S. Census tracts where they occurred. The result: One in 7 pursuit deaths happened in a majority Black neighborhood, though these areas account for just 1 in 13 communities in the U.S.

“We should be shocked by these findings,” said Kristy Parker, a former deputy chief in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division who prosecuted police misconduct and excessive force cases, adding that the disparities should prompt action from state and federal lawmakers. “It’s outrageous. It is a feature of systemic racism that exists within many systems in this country, but certainly within law enforcement.”

Certain high-speed police chases are broadly seen as reasonable, such as when a dangerous criminal is fleeing a violent crime. But the Chronicle’s review of cases showed that a disproportionate number of Black people died in pursuits that officers launched over minor infractions, often in violation of their departments’ chase policies.

Among the fatalities: a 5-month-old girl whose father shoplifted food from a grocery store in Parma, Ohio, then sped away from police and crashed into a garbage truck, killing them both; a 62-year-old Milwaukee police dispatcher who was nearing retirement when she was hit by a driver who took off during a traffic stop, and Mitchell, a 22-year-old community college student who hoped to become a Navy SEAL.

The Police Executive Research Forum, a leading policing think tank, issued pursuit guidelines in a Justice Department-funded study last year, urging police to chase only people who have committed a violent crime and pose an imminent threat to others. But the guidelines aren’t binding. And there is almost no mention of drivers’ race in the report.

“We did not have access to that data on racial disparities,” Chuck Wexler, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview, adding that he was surprised by the Chronicle’s findings. “This opens up a new area for review.”

The disproportionate number of Black people dying in police pursuits across the U.S. is another example of the heavy burden of policing on that community. Police in many areas are far more likely to stop Black people in cars or on foot; to search, detain and use force against them during stops, and to kill them using guns and other “less-lethal” weapons.

Fear prompts some Black drivers to flee a stop even if they haven’t committed a serious crime, said Chauncee Smith, associate director of Reimagine Justice & Safety at Catalyst California, a criminal justice reform nonprofit, and a member of California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board.

“With this history,” Smith said, “people of color know it’s a life-or-death situation. We’ve seen numerous people of color killed at the hands of law enforcement for things that did not need to happen.”

Minutes before the collision in that Louisville intersection, shortly before 9 p.m., Officer Benjamin Sullivan sat behind the wheel of an unmarked squad car on Dixie Highway.

The rookie spotted the black Ford sedan with a tinted windshield. Jutting out the driver's side window: the elbow of a Black man.

“I thought that that individual was somebody ... the type of person that we were trying to get,” Sullivan, who is white, testified later, adding that he based his decision on his “gut feeling.” “I wanted to get bad people off the street.”

At the time, the Justice Department was three months into an investigation of the Louisville Metro Police Department, prompted in part by the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor during a botched drug raid. The investigation would find that the department “practiced an aggressive style of policing that it deploys selectively, especially against Black people.”

The department, the federal officials said, targeted Black people for “pretextual stops,” in which officers use minor infractions to try to uncover more serious crimes, like carrying guns or drugs. From 2016 through 2021, Louisville police stopped Black drivers at nearly twice the rate of white ones for low-level violations such as broken headlights and expired tags, according to the Justice Department, which is seeking an agreement for mandatory reforms to curb abuses.

Danita Mitchell, who grew up in the city’s West End, the neighborhood where her grandson was killed and whose population is three-quarters Black, said residents refer to the disparate treatment as “West End policing.”

“You can just be Black, and they’ll stop you,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Louisville Metro Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Nor did Sullivan, the officer who chased Mitchell.

Sullivan and his partner, Joseph Nett, pulled behind the Ford. Then the driver, Larry Williams, failed to use his signal before making a right turn, dash-camera footage shows.

Sullivan flicked on his lights and blared his siren. Instead of pulling over, Williams took off.

“We’ve got one fleeing,” Nett, who is white, said into the radio.

As Sullivan later testified, he knew that he and Nett “did not have anything to pursue over.” That’s because their policy limited chases to suspects who had committed violent crimes or were in stolen cars.

He and his partner did not know at the time that Williams had a handgun as well as cocaine and methamphetamine in his car. Williams would go on to plead guilty to multiple drug trafficking and assault charges. At the trial, Williams testified that he was a “junkie,” not a big-time dealer, and that he fled out of fear — “something about the lights” flashing behind him.

In the 34 seconds after Sullivan activated his lights, the officers accelerated to 89 mph as they tried to keep pace with Williams along busy residential streets. Then the officers saw Williams barreling toward the red light.

Three seconds before he entered the intersection, the officers changed their minds: “We’re not chasing anymore,” Nett said into his radio.

Running the red light, Williams smashed into a tight cluster of vehicles, setting off the chain reaction that threw Colmore and Mitchell off their mopeds.

Crumpled cars littered the intersection. Onlookers rushed to help the injured. Flames leapt from the bed of the Honda, whose driver, a deacon at a local church, fractured his spine. His passenger, a homeless man he’d befriended, broke his neck, sternum and three ribs.

Mitchell lay nearby, his left lung crushed, his chest filling with blood.

As Aidan Colmore tried to comfort his catastrophically injured friend in the restaurant parking lot, a camera worn by a responding officer captured the scene in graphic detail (viewer discretion is advised):

From 2017 through 2022, six people died in chases initiated by Louisville police, the Chronicle’s data shows. They included two fleeing drivers, three passengers in fleeing vehicles, and one bystander — Mitchell.

Five of the six were Black, in a city where 22% of residents are Black. Four of those five died in pursuits over traffic infractions — even though the department’s policy expressly prohibits officers from pursuing suspects in such cases.

“It’s a hunt,” said Tony Johnson, a West End resident and one of two Black jurors in a wrongful death and injury lawsuit filed by Mitchell’s grandmother and others.

Johnson said he worries police will pull over his nieces and nephews: “I look at their vehicles,” he said. “I’ll make sure their tail lights are working.”

The pattern in Louisville is similar to that in communities across the country.

Police pursuits that began with suspected traffic violations accounted for roughly half of the deaths of Black people, according to an analysis of more than 1,800 deaths over six years for which the Chronicle obtained detailed information. Fewer than 1 in 5 died in chases tied to suspected violent crimes.

In case after case reviewed by the Chronicle, fleeing drivers and chasing officers escalated low-level infractions that are commonly a basis for pretextual stops, such as tinted windows, into deadly pursuits.

In North Carolina, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police tried to stop a Black man driving a Jeep with a covered, but still visible, license plate, during rush hour in January 2022. During the ensuing chase, the driver veered into the wrong lane, crashing head-on into another car and seriously injuring three people. One, a mother of two, spent 18 days on life support before she died.

“Didn’t y’all hear me saying, we don’t need to… chase this vehicle? What happened?” a supervising officer asked the officers who were involved just after the wreck.

Agencies and jurisdictions collect limited data on pursuits, making it difficult to fully understand the cause of racial disparities associated with fatal police chases. For example, few agencies track whether police more frequently choose to pursue Black drivers who flee, compared to white drivers who flee.

Racial disparities in stops and chases likely stem from many factors, according to researchers, including the level of traffic enforcement in particular areas with different racial compositions, drivers’ fear of police or of being arrested, drivers’ ability to afford fixes for broken tail lights and other repairs, and racial profiling by officers.

Regardless, advocates for police reform say the racial gaps in deaths, including of bystanders, demand action. Chloé White, a senior policy counsel at the The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 240 civil and human rights organizations based in Washington D.C., called the Chronicle’s findings “outrageous.”

“I think there is an opportunity now — whether it's the Department of Transportation, Department of Justice, or state and local officials — to think about a collaboration to encourage reductions in these deaths,” she said.

One way to reduce deaths, research shows, is to impose stricter limits on chases overall. Currently, the nation’s 18,000-plus agencies aren’t required to follow standardized pursuit procedures.

After Michigan State Police tightened its chase policy, pursuit crash rates fell faster in cities with higher proportions of Black residents, which previously had much higher crash rates than whiter areas, according to a 2021 report by David Macpherson, chair of the economics department at Trinity University in Texas.

The Justice Department has prompted some police agencies to change their pursuit policies via federal consent decrees. For example, the New Orleans Police Department has tightened its policy to comply with federal oversight that began more than a decade ago. Now, officers can only pursue suspects of “felony crimes of violence.” They must also get express approval from a supervisor in real time.

“We know discretion is one of the key breeding grounds for bias, both explicit and implicit,” said Phillip Atiba Solomon, a psychology professor and chair of African American Studies at Yale University who is the  chief executive of the Center for Policing Equity.

Given how frequently officers stop people for low-level infractions, limiting or prohibiting pretextual stops would also reduce chases — and the associated deaths and injuries, some policing experts say.

The state of Virginia, the Los Angeles Police Department, and cities including Philadelphia now restrict pretextual stops, as does San Francisco, where police are barred from pulling people over solely for certain minor infractions, including driving with a broken tail light or brake light.

Studies have shown that using such stops can yield even higher racial disparities than other kinds of traffic stops, most often results in no criminal enforcement, and can divert police time and resources away from serious crimes.

When officers use low-level stops as a pretext to probe for more serious offenses, the data shows that, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, significant racial disparities emerge, said Josh Parker, deputy director of policy for New York University’s Policing Project, an organization focused on accountability in law enforcement.

“Unfortunately that pattern follows when it comes to low-level traffic stops and police pursuits,” he said. Restricting pretextual stops “should significantly reduce racial disparities and save lives.”

The Chronicle’s investigation provides “one more data point as far as limiting or banning pretextual stops,” said Stephen Rushin, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago who researches police reform. “A substantial number of killings of Black citizens are tied to pretext stops.”

Yet pretextual stops remain a bedrock of policing, across California and the country. In Louisville’s case, the Justice Department last year noted that they may diminish trust in police and hamper officers’ ability to solve crimes.

One Louisville police official who was interviewed by the Justice Department said making pretextual stops in “certain ‘hot spot’ neighborhoods means that residents are ‘targeted twice’: first by violent crime, and then by the police.”

For about a year after Mitchell died, Officer Sullivan insisted what occurred that day was not a pursuit.

An initial police report, written by another officer, described the incident as a pursuit. Yet days later, in an interview with a department investigator, Sullivan said he didn't pursue anyone. The department then referred to the encounter as an “attempted traffic stop.”

A year later, in 2022, Sullivan changed his mind after reviewing video footage of the crash and the department’s pursuit policy. He also expressed regret: “I wish I never even tried to stop the car,” he testified in a deposition taken as part of the Mitchell family’s wrongful death and injury case.

In April 2023, nearly two years after the incident, the department suspended Sullivan for two days for violating the agency’s pursuit policy, and failing to turn on his body camera when he attempted the stop.

Sullivan’s discipline mirrors a broader pattern, the Chronicle found: Of 74 police officers accused of breaking the law or violating their agencies’ policies in fatal chases over six years, 52 of them — 70% — faced no consequences or minor discipline.

Retired Louisville Officer Jay Moss, who is Black, said officers typically don’t admit to chasing people. “Usually the line is, I stopped pursuing, I’m following at a distance,” he said, even if the officer is “still doing 99 miles an hour.” Moss is suing his former agency for racial discrimination; the department has denied some of his allegations and stated it needs more time to address others.

Last year, a jury awarded Mitchell's family and others injured in the chase $31 million in a lawsuit against Sullivan. But it’s likely they will receive a small fraction of that sum.

The jury determined that Williams, the fleeing driver, was mostly at fault, with Sullivan liable for 3% of the settlement, or less than $1 million. Williams, who is serving 20 years in prison for manslaughter in Mitchell’s death and other charges, was held responsible for the other 97%, but likely won’t pay anything close to what he owes —  because he does not have the money.

In an effort to force the city to pay a larger share, Danita Mitchell’s lawyers pressed for — and won — a new trial, after arguing a number of errors were made, including Sullivan’s lawyers improperly bringing in evidence of Williams’ criminal record. The trial is scheduled for next November. In any event, Sullivan will owe nothing; the city will pay any damages for which he’s found responsible.

“Police officers need to be regulated more,” Colmore said. “They can do whatever they want and they won't get in trouble for it.”

Sullivan remains on the force. Earlier this year, he earned four commendation letters, including one for a successful drug bust. Meanwhile, Colmore is languishing.

Now 20, he still lives in the basement of his childhood home. He dropped out of high school in 11th grade after flashbacks from the crash destroyed his focus. He and Mitchell were like brothers, and his friend, the more outgoing of the pair, would encourage him to talk to strangers. Now he spends his days alone, playing video games.

“He was my very, very best friend," Colmore said. “It’s a trauma you can’t get justice for.”

Danita Mitchell wears a heart-shaped necklace bearing her grandson’s fingerprint. She’d raised Mitchell as if he were her son, and the two were close, working on puzzles together at her kitchen table and talking for hours. She used to lend him her credit card so he could buy clothes for homeless people; now, she holds annual clothing drives in his memory.

Danita Mitchell recalled how he told her he wanted to go into the Navy so he could support her and his ailing grandfather: “‘You’ve been taking care of me all my life,” she recalled him saying. “I want to take care of you and Papa.’”

When she learned her grandson had died, “It felt like somebody snatched my breath out of me.”

She still wants an apology from the police department.

A year after Mitchell died, his cousin, Ahmad, took his own life. Mitchell’s death had hit him so hard, Danita Mitchell said, it triggered a deep depression from which he couldn’t escape.

“I had five grandsons,” she said. “Now I’m down to three.”

Credits

Reporting by Susie Neilson and Jennifer Gollan. Visuals by Andrew Cenci/Special to the Chronicle. Visuals editing by Emily Jan. Video editing by Maggie Beidelman. Editing by Dan Kopf and Demian Bulwa. Data visualization, design and development by Erin Caughey. Copy editing by Barbara Jaramillo.

Rep. Mark DeSaulnier cited the series, “Fast and Fatal,” which found that more than 3,300 people died in pursuits from 2017 through 2022.

By Jennifer Gollan, Susie Neilson

Two members of Congress are calling on U.S. regulators to accurately count how many people are killed in police chases nationwide, sending a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and other federal officials after a Chronicle investigation revealed a dramatic undercount of the deaths.

“We cannot fix or prevent deaths when the data is not an accurate reflection of what is happening,” wrote Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, an East Bay Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

The letter, co-signed by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat from the District of Columbia and ranking member of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, decried the “unacceptable number of fatalities” caused by police pursuits. The lawmakers also sent the letter to Kevin M. Scott, acting director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Sophie Shulman, deputy administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

DeSaulnier cited this year’s Chronicle investigative series, “Fast and Fatal,” which documented that more than 3,300 people died in police pursuits from 2017 through 2022, far more than previously known.

Reporters who built a first-of-its-kind database of deadly chases — combining information from the federal government, research organizations, local news accounts and court records — found that many of these incidents begin with a low-level crime. And it’s not only drivers, their passengers and the pursuing officers who are in danger: At least 551 bystanders died in chases over six years, the Chronicle found.

Yet there is no binding national standard governing when and how police should chase suspects. This means that officers operate under often permissive rules that vary by department. And even when they break the rules, police officers are rarely held accountable.

Citing the newspaper’s discovery that the NHTSA, the agency charged with keeping motorists safe, did not count at least 660 people killed in police pursuits from 2017 through 2021, DeSaulnier called on federal officials to “protect our roadways by expanding and improving data collection on police pursuit deaths” to inform policy reforms. 

After they were briefed on the Chronicle’s findings earlier this year, NHTSA officials acknowledged that some fatalities were missing from the agency’s count and said they would update their pursuit data.

But the officials said the agency’s data on fatal police pursuits was not meant to be comprehensive. Instead, the NHTSA said it provided “a nationwide census of unintentional crashes resulting in fatal injuries, which includes some police pursuits and excludes others.”

The Chronicle series found that at least 87 people were killed from 2017 through July 2024 when officers purposely collided with fleeing vehicles using a maneuver known as the precision immobilization technique, or PIT. The NHTSA does not include deaths caused by PITs in its fatality data because it does not consider them accidents.

DeSaulnier’s letter coincides with a continuing national effort, if uneven, to tighten chase policies.  

Prompted by the Chronicle’s investigation, the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, which focuses on law enforcement accountability, last month proposed a national standard for police pursuits that would limit them to people suspected of violent felonies or, in some cases, dangerous driving offenses such as reckless driving or being under the influence.

Even in these cases, officers would need to “believe the suspect poses significant risk of serious injury to another if not immediately apprehended.” The standard mirrors recommendations published last year by the Police Executive Research Forum, a leading law enforcement policy organization based in Washington, D.C.

The Policing Project model prohibits PIT maneuvers, except for those authorized by a supervisor when there is an imminent risk of death or serious injury to an officer or another person that cannot be avoided through other means. It also requires pursuit training for officers and establishes transparency and accountability measures, such as compelling all law enforcement agencies to collect detailed data on vehicle pursuits, which must be sent to a state agency to share with the public.

Additionally, the proposed rules would require agencies to adopt policies that include meaningful discipline for officers who violate pursuit policies.

Reforming police chases has become intertwined with larger tensions over policing in the United States, where efforts to hold officers accountable in the wake of high-profile killings have collided with calls for tightened enforcement spurred by fluctuations in pandemic-era crime.

In San Francisco, residents voted in March to loosen the police department’s policy to allow pursuits over nonviolent felonies, such as grand theft. Previously, the department authorized chases only over suspected violent felonies unless officers had a “reasonable belief” that a fleeing suspect posed an immediate threat.

Across the bay, the Oakland Police Commission cited the Chronicle’s investigation in September, when it declined to recommend changes to the city police force’s pursuit policy, which allows officers to pursue suspects only over suspected violent crimes, such as robberies, homicides and assaults. “There seems to be no debate on anyone’s part that increased, more aggressive police pursuits put lives at risk,” the commission wrote.