A series of police pursuits have led to at least eight deaths around the country in less than a week amid ongoing calls from some law enforcement experts to curb risky high speed car chases.
In Texas, a man fleeing from police died Sunday. In Alabama, four people died when a car being pursued by a state trooper went off a road and hit a tree Friday. And in California, three people were killed in vehicle crashes during police pursuits in separate incidents last week.
The deadly incidents are among the hundreds of fatalities that occur during police chases each year.
In 2023, a report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a national think tank on policing standards, called for police to put the brakes on car chases unless a violent crime has been committed and the suspect poses an imminent threat. The report noted a spike in fatalities and an increase in pursuits by some departments, including in Houston and New York City.
In the case in Alabama, a driver was trying to elude the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency’s highway patrol on a rural road in southeast Alabama’s Pike County when the crash occurred late Friday night, agency spokeswoman Amanda Wasden said in an email Sunday. No other vehicles were involved.
The driver and two passengers, one of them a 17-year-old, were not wearing seat belts and were thrown from the sedan. A third passenger was not ejected, but all four were pronounced dead at the scene.
Wasden said the crash was under investigation, and no additional information was available. Her email did not say what prompted the pursuit.
In Fort Worth, Texas, police had been pursuing a car which had been driving without headlights on Interstate 35 when the car hit multiple other vehicles and eventually crashed, killing the driver, according to the Fort Worth Police Department.
In southern California, the Pomona Police Department said in a statement that its officers were pursuing a fleeing domestic violence suspect Wednesday when his car hit another vehicle, killing the couple inside. The two were days away from the birth of their child, according to KCBS-TV.
In another case, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said that deputies had attempted to stop a stolen U-Haul truck before it slammed into an SUV, killing the SUV’s driver and critically injuring her three passengers.
