CARBON MOTORS

Carbon Motors



Carbon Motors

Introduction

Law enforcement is an occupation fraught with uncertainty and danger. Officers are often called upon to analyze critical situations with accuracy, integrity, and resourcefulness. Not only are officers required to make decisions quickly and accurately, they must do so within the confines of constitutional legal standards and administrative guidelines. Police policy is often the only major source of guidance many patrol officers have while in the performance of their daily duties. This reliance on policy is never so evident as in the field of vehicular pursuits.(Barancik,1983) Officers must make split-second decisions while traveling at speeds often in excess of the posted limit all while affording the general public some semblance of protection from unnecessary safety risks. It is the responsibility of police administrators to provide officers with the necessary guidance, in the form of policy, to assist in the decision-making process.

Discussion

The field of vehicular pursuits is a very important aspect of law enforcement duties. Negative outcomes of police pursuits, in the form of accidents, injuries, fatalities, and property damage can pose some very serious problems and questions for society as a whole. Litigation from negative outcomes of pursuits costs taxpayers and police departments millions of dollars annually as officers and agencies are found liable for negligence incurred during the course of a police pursuit gone awry. Hence, it is vital for a law enforcement agency to have a viable and effective pursuit policy for added protection should tragedy befall an officer or civilian in the course of a vehicular pursuit. The policy is designed to protect not only the organization but civilians and officers as well. It is a guide for officer discretion as to the proper and solicitous course of action during a pursuit. (American Association for Automotive Medicine, 1985)

To date there has been no attempt by criminal justice scholars to describe the variety of pursuit policies utilized by contemporary American law enforcement. Certainly there has been research into the field of pursuits, but none dealing specifically with the contents of policy itself. It is the purpose of this research to provide a glimpse into the components of vehicular pursuit policies of State Police and State Highway Patrol agencies across the United States. Commonalities among the various agencies examined will be identified in an effort to describe existing policies used by state law enforcement agencies in their daily operations.

The PAS data were later contradicted in a study conducted by the California Highway Patrol (CHP)(1983) who conducted a 6-month investigation of all CHP pursuits and those of ten cooperating law enforcement agencies in Southern California. The findings collected on the 683 pursuits contradicted earlier studies with the observation that only 1 percent (n=7) of all pursuits ended in a fatality with 29 percent (n=198) resulting in accidents, and only 11 percent (n=75) resulting in injury of any kind (CHP, 1983). Thus, results indicated that the typical law enforcement pursuits did not result in death or injury to innocent persons and injury to third parties was quite ...