Police Chases

I will be adressing the new Supreme Court Justice nominee Roberts as soon as I can get information on him. I admit to being wrong I thought Bush would pick Gonzales or Ashcroft in an earlier post.

I'd like to talk about something that always happens here in Los Angeles and that's Police chases and what sometimes goes wrong with them and who is really to blame and perhaps get ideas from you my readers on ways that can, while they won't stop but perhaps steps that can be done to prevent injuries and deaths of innocent civillians that occur during the chases.

Let's start at the beginning. Police chases occur when the police attempt to pull over someone and that person/people refuse to listen and take a ticket or whatever fine that they are occuring. So the people take off and run and hence a chase occurs.

Now here is the thing: I would say approximately 90%-95% of chases here in Los Angeles end peacefully. I think I've seen 1-2 chases where the suspect gets away and the rest end with injury/death to either the suspect or an innocent person/people. Again the numbers can be wrong but that's based on my recollection of watching chases.

Now what usually happens in the cases where someone gets hurt, whether it's the suspect or someone innocent, is instead of it being the suspects fault and the blame getting placed on him/her the police department gets wrongfully (my view) blamed and usually the city gets sued and taxpayers have to foot the bill. That is wrong cause the police who are doing their job (mind you I'm not a fan of LAPD but I like to call a spade a spade) I think the public tends to forget in these chases I can imagine addreneline is rushing, if the suspect makes a sudden move toward them you react. As you would or I would.

Now there are a couple of options here. I've seen if the chases appear too dangerous the cops have the helicopters follow them. I've seen the cops use spike strips I've seen several tactics used.

In some cases, like either last week unfortunately an innocent child who was being used as a human shield was killed when the police used force against the suspect and unfortunately innocent people get hurt and killed. It is a tragedy but again it's going to happen when you get crazy people out there.

Here is where I'd like you to come in. I'd like ideas what you would think would help ease the innocent people getting hurt or killed. I'd like to get this to our police commision so I'd really like serious realistic ideas cause I am serious when I say I can forward them and maybe we can see we did something to save lives.