Q & A follow-up to previous post on traffic deaths caused by non-pursuit law

In my previous post I showed that our state’s traffic fatalities are up dramatically since Washington’s police non-pursuit law was implemented.  Highway fatality rates which had been getting better for decades went up across the US in 2020 due in large part to police choosing not to pull people over for unsafe driving during the pandemic.  As Covid concerns diminished, other states began rigorously enforcing driving laws again, and road safety started trending back to baseline. But Washington State implemented a new non-pursuit law, and our highway fatality rates are climbing faster than ever.  Deaths on our roads and highways are 37 percent higher than pre-pandemic, and climbing fast, representing a current excess death toll of 207 lives lost per year over the baseline.

Thank you to all of you who left comments on my blog post.  I also received many great comments and questions in a private facebook forum where I shared this post. I’ll respect others’ privacy by paraphrasing and bundling their questions, but because others may have the same questions, I will share my answers here.

Question: I just read a tragic story about two innocent young people killed in a police crash in Louisiana. Shouldn’t we be ending this carnage?

Answer:  The tragedy in which two precious young people were killed in a crash with a police car, with a third young man in critical condition, is heartbreaking. I can truly understand why people would read it, and say we need to call off police pursuits. However, that reaction is what I described in my blog as a “sub-optimization for safety.” When we focus on an event 2000 miles away that happened a month ago, we ignore the equally precious innocent Washington drivers being killed right here in our state by reckless motorists, at a rate of more than two every day. This rate is up 37 % as a result of lax traffic enforcement, meaning one needless death of an innocent is occuring every 40 hours in our state as a result of lawmakers failing to grasp the big picture.  The media is great at sharing the sensational story about the officer hitting a bystander, but fails to show us the innocent person killed last night, or the night before, right here in our state because some idiot has figured out he can drive any speed he wants in a stolen or unlicensed vehicle with no repercussions. Lawmakers need to use actual data, not rare, far-away heartbreaking stories being shared on facebook, to make life and death decisions in our state.

Question:  I don’t know what data to trust, because I’ve seen other data in places like “Real Change” showing this law is working to save lives.

Answer: The data that the legislature, Real Change, and former Sheriff John Urquhart have recently used to argue that this has been a successful change comes from this report. The report looks at a time period of 543 days before the non-pursuit law was passed, and compares it to 543 days after (543 days is 1.48 years). It shows a fatality rate of 7.5 fatalities per year in the pre implementation time period, and a fatality rate of 2 per year after.  Elsewhere in the report you can find a chart showing the number of fatal pursuit accidents per year, which were as low as 2 in 2016, and 3 in 2018, and only spiked at 6 in 2020, possibly due to unprecedented unrest during the year.  The historical rate is approximately 3-6 fatalities in our state from police chases when viewed over a ten year period.

Whether it’s 3, 6, or 7.5 people killed in police chases per year prior to the non-pursuit law, this study is tragically silent regarding the 37 percent increase in all other auto fatalities during the same time period. These new accidents took the lives of 207  innocent souls who were crashed into by drivers who would have likely been stopped in previous years. Furthermore, five or six out of the seven or eight people per year killed in police pursuits were either the driver of the fleeing car or their passenger, and could have ended the carnage by pulling over. The two-hundred and seven people lost to reckless drivers as a result of this law had no such chance, typically getting T-boned by a stolen car while on their way home to see their family, attend school, or go to work. Their grieving families would give anything for them to have had the chance to pull over to save their own lives.

Question: Just a few months ago one of my loved ones was almost hit by a police chase.  Doesn’t that show they are still too dangerous?

Answer: A near-miss that just happened a few months ago would have occurred over a year after the non-pursuit law went into effect.  If it had never happened to you before that, then it is actually statistical evidence that the non-pursuit law has made things worse, not better.  This type of event is happening frequently now.  Since police are not able to pull lawbreakers over for little things, many of the lawbreakers rapidly escalate until they are fleeing the cops in crimes of violence.  (A man who violently kidnapped his girlfriend actually phoned 911, asking to have the police chase called off because he had grown accustomed to having no accountability.)