Police Pursuits &
Emergency Vehicle Operation

A pursuit that ends in a crash can produce claims from people who share nothing but the event, and the questions a police pursuit expert witness is asked to answer follow from whose claim it is. The decisions themselves, and how policy structures them, are covered in pursuit policy standards.

An uninvolved motorist, passenger or pedestrian hurt in a pursuit crash had no part in starting it. The question that claimant's case raises is why the pursuit was still going when it reached the place of the crash. The record that carries it spans the whole pursuit up to the collision: the pursuing units' transmissions, what each unit's camera shows of the traffic and the road, and what any supervisor monitoring the pursuit had been told. Where a police car rather than the fleeing car struck the claimant, that officer's own driving is in dispute as well, measured against the agency's emergency driving rules and the officer's training on them.

The occupants of the pursued car stand in different places. The driver who fled puts two decisions in play: the reason the pursuit began and, where it ended in contact, the means used to end it. The initiating officer's first transmission fixes the reason given at the time, and the written report shows whether it changed. For a passenger who had no say in the flight, the question is closer to the uninvolved motorist's: what the officers knew about who was in the car, and whether their policy made that knowledge part of the decision to continue or to use a tactic.

Counsel defending the officer or the agency read the same record for the opposite showing, and the two defenses can part ways. An officer can point to authorization: the policy permitted the pursuit, training taught the technique, a supervisor approved what was done. An agency can point to the same policy and training, and to the supervision the radio records, and argue that any departure was the officer's alone. Professor Gilbertson is retained by both sides. Where a pursuit ended in a death, the claim is read the way every death case is read here, with the conduct and the cause of death kept apart, as set out under police wrongful death cases.

Some pursuits end because an officer used a vehicle to end them: a pursuit intervention technique, a deliberate ramming, a roadblock across the route, or several units boxing the car in. Whether the contact was a seizure, and whether it was a use of force, are questions for counsel, and the force framework itself is treated in the use of force practice.

The practices questions come in four parts, and the record answers each one separately. The first is authorization: whether the agency's written policy in force that day permitted the tactic, and on what conditions. The second is training, whether this officer was taught the technique and kept current on it, which is a question about what training records reveal. The third is approval: where the policy required a supervisor's permission, whether the radio shows it requested and given before the contact, or whether it appears only in a report written afterward.

The fourth is the one no single frame of video can answer: what the whole pursuit leading up to the contact shows. A tactic used to end a pursuit that policy already required to be called off stands on a different record from the same tactic used to end a pursuit that was authorized, supervised and still within policy when the contact came. The analysis therefore reads the pursuit from its first transmission to the contact, never only the seconds around the contact.

Since legal conclusions remain counsel's, all four answers are given as practices findings. A tactic used outside policy, by an officer never trained on it, without an approval the policy required, departs from policy and practice, but that is not a finding that any right was violated and it does not settle liability; the guide to generally accepted police practices explains why.

Not every police vehicle crash involves a pursuit. An officer running lights and siren to a call, entering an intersection against the signal, or hurrying to back up another unit is operating under the agency's emergency-response rules rather than its pursuit policy, and a crash on the way to a call raises its own questions. With no one fleeing, the case turns on the call itself and on the driving it was used to justify.

Three practices questions frame it. The first is the agency's emergency-response policy: which calls it allowed an officer to answer with lights and siren, and what it required of a unit entering an intersection against the signal. The second is the officer's emergency vehicle operations training, whether those rules were taught and how recently. The third is the urgency of the call as the dispatch record shows it: the priority assigned, whether the unit was sent or sent itself, and whether the call had been downgraded, cancelled or answered by another unit before the crash, each read with the limits that attach to CAD reports.

The answers sit in different places. The policy and the training file answer the first two; the dispatch log and the radio answer the third, and the in-car recording, where the camera ran, can show the signal, the intersection and whether the siren was sounding as the unit entered it. Aligned into the record chronology, those sources show what the officer had been told about the call when the unit entered the intersection, and the driving is measured against that, not against what the call turned out to be. However serious the crash, a response to a call that carried the priority the policy required, driven the way the training taught, is reported as within policy; a low-priority call run as an emergency, or an intersection entered against the signal without the care the policy required, is reported as outside it.

After a pursuit the record grows: the officers' pursuit reports, the supervisor's review, any review by command or a board and, where the pursuit ended in a crash, the crash investigation, which another agency may have conducted. Each has its own author and purpose, and they are read separately and in the order they were written, so that a later summary is not read as the record it summarizes.

The crash investigation is read for the times, positions and conditions it records, while its findings on speed and cause stay with the qualified experts named above. The administrative review is read for who conducted it and what that person did during the pursuit: a supervisor who monitored the pursuit on the radio and then reviewed it afterward was reviewing decisions that included the supervisor's own, and the report records that as a fact about the review. The officer's earlier pursuits, and what the agency did after each, belong with supervision and discipline rather than with the decisions in this one.