Skip to footer

Childrens' deaths prompt calls to rein in high-speed police chases

Two young children were killed during a high-speed car chase in Detroit on Wednesday. Every year, more than 300 people die during police pursuits in the United States.

|
Steve Perez/Detroit News/AP
Detroit Police officers check out the damage to a car involved in a police chase on Wednesday, in Detroit. A driver accelerated to more than 70 m.p.h. on a residential street in Detroit while fleeing officers before striking and killing two young children and injuring three other children and an adult, police said.

After the death of two children in a police car chase in Detroit, Mich., an activist group is calling a change in high-speed chase tactics.

The Michigan chapter of the National Action Network said Thursday that chase protocols need to include measures that “place a premium on human life.”

The chair of the Justice for Aiyana Jones Committee also asked for an investigation into why the high-speed chase began. (Aiyana jones was 7-year-old girl when she was fatally shot in Detroit by an officer in a 2010 police raid.)

On Wednesday, a brother and sister ages three and six were struck and killed by a Chevrolet Camaro fleeing police pursuit. The chase lasted 75 seconds. The officers lost sight of the car shortly before it crashed killing the two children, injuring two other children and one adult. Police later arrested the driver and passenger from the car and recovered a handgun.

Every year more than 300 people die during the police pursuits in the United States, according to federal statistics. In 2013 the number was 322 including 208 occupants of the pursued vehicle, 105 occupants of other vehicles, eight bystanders and one chasing police officer.

In 2010 USA Today reported that innocent bystanders account for one-third of those killed in high-speed police case.

Police forces say putting an end to the practice will have its own problems.

“Everybody would take off,” a high-ranking law enforcement official in Western  New York told Buffalo News. “Nobody would stop.”

Ken Novak, a criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who has studied police decision making and discretion for more than 20 years told USA Today that everyone agrees that fleeing from police is wrong, but “it's the police's responsibility to make sure both their officers as well as the public remain safe while they are doing their job.”

This report includes material from the Associated Press.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Childrens' deaths prompt calls to rein in high-speed police chases
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0625/Childrens-deaths-prompt-calls-to-rein-in-high-speed-police-chases
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe