Some years ago, when editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper took a decidedly leftward turn. Almost overnight, the articles became anti-police, with “exposés” by newly-hired young Woodward-Bernstein wannabes looking to tarnish local police departments. The result of all this has been regular coverage of cops that portray them in a negative light, and the hiring of an avowedly racialist columnist, Justin Phillips. Were Phillips a White man bashing Black people, he’d be unemployable anywhere in America, but Phillips can get away with it at the Chronicle because Garcia-Ruiz (with presumably the blessing of the owning Hearst family) is allowed to peddle his propaganda.
The Chronicle’s latest attack on cops is a multi-day “investigation,” splashed luridly across the front page, that purports to prove the danger of cops pursuing thugs who flee from them, usually at high speed, in their cars. The series’ writers and their research staff scoured the nation—the entire United States—to come up with cases in which the fleeing suspects, or innocent pedestrians, were killed as a result of these police chases. They found a handful, but they make it sound as if America is in the grip of an epidemic of innocent deaths caused by rogue, irresponsible cops. In previous “investigations” the Chronicle’s reporters cited disparities in police stops that practically accused cops of deliberately targeting Black drivers; those articles never mentioned that Black males commit more crimes on the average than do White or Asian people and thus get stopped more often.
There’s actually not much data on police pursuit accidents. In 2019, one of the more reliable reports was issued by the California Highway Patrol. It found that, in that year,
- 8,822 police pursuits occurred (from all police agencies in California, not just CHP)
- Of these, 2,054 (23.3%) resulted in a collision
- Of those, 1,354 (65.9%) were non-injury, property-damage only
- 672 (32.7%) were injury collisions
- 28 (1.4%) were fatal collisions that resulted in 35 deaths
- Of those 35 deaths, 15 (42.9%) were the drivers of the fleeing vehicle
- 6 (17.1%) were passengers in the fleeing vehicle
- 14 (40.0%) were an uninvolved third party
Now, the 14 deaths of uninvolved third parties were a true tragedy, and I’m not here to minimize those losses. But the public has to ask itself, What is the price of not pursuing fleeing drivers as they try to avoid getting arrested for their crimes (which often are violent ones)? This is a policy issue that lately has been much in the news, as various cities debate it. Oakland’s police pursuit policy says that cops may pursue fleeing suspects “only…when there is reasonable suspicion to believe the fleeing individual committed a violent forcible crime and/or a crime involving the use of a firearm, or probable cause that the individual is in possession of a firearm.” In reality, the majority of police pursuits in Oakland are concluded without any arrests, primarily because (1) the police themselves aborted the pursuit, (2) the fleeing car escaped from the cops, or (3) the fleeing vehicle collided with another vehicle.
Since the City Council banned most police pursuits, except under extraordinary circumstances, the number of pursuits in Oakland dropped from 130 in 2022 to only 38 in 2024 (so far). And so has the number of firearms recovered: 15 in 2022, 5 in 2023 and 3 in 2024 (so far). We can logically infer that the firearms not recovered in the last two years will be, or have been, used by criminals to shoot and kill.
Steve Heimoff