According to news reports, the incident began when a motorist involved in a property-damage auto accident drove away without stopping—a hit and run. Rather than waiting to run the license plate number, police gave chase. Lots of them. Some witnesses counted over twenty police cars involved by the time the chase ended inside the Abbey.
Most Sunday mornings, my husband and I meet our youngest son and his wife and baby at the Abbey Coffeehouse on Indiana Avenue for a leisurely breakfast. A couple of times a month, we pop into the Abbey on Massachusetts Avenue for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. The food is good, the service attentive. Mark and Moses, the Abbey’s owners, work hard to make customers feel welcome.
For that matter, they work hard, period. This is no Starbucks franchise, no large-scale, formula operation. It is the quintessential small business. The owners’ major asset is their willingness to work long hours. Loss of even a couple of days’ business can be a serious setback, so we were dismayed to open the newspaper last Sunday and see that a car engaged in a high-speed chase with local police had crashed into the Massachusetts Avenue Abbey, wiping out the entire interior. Miraculously, for an establishment that is open long hours, it happened when no one was there; had it been just a little earlier, people would almost certainly have been killed.
According to news reports, the incident began when a motorist involved in a property-damage auto accident drove away without stopping—a hit and run. Rather than waiting to run the license plate number, police gave chase. Lots of them. Some witnesses counted over twenty police cars involved by the time the chase ended inside the Abbey.
The last time a high-speed chase made local news, a year or so ago, an innocent bystander was killed. A toddler and baby were left motherless, a husband devastated. That tragedy led to assurances that new standards would be set. Chases would occur only when absolutely unavoidable, when the fleeing car’s driver was a violent felon posing an imminent danger.
The rules may have changed, but the cowboy behavior obviously hasn’t.
Lou Reiter, a policing expert who runs a consulting firm in Florida, says that officers see a refusal to stop as a “slap in the face,” requiring immediate response. During the ensuing chase, the officer develops something like “tunnel vision” and is often not even aware of his surroundings. Instead, he becomes fixated on his object, with subsequent clouding of judgment and an escalating risk of fatality. Reiter says that the person being chased is the one most likely to be killed, followed by innocent bystanders and the police themselves.
No one was killed in this most recent episode of testosterone-run-amuck. But while Mark and Moses are grateful that no lives were lost, they are left with losses that their insurance won’t cover. They worry about the effects of the interruption on their business. And they can’t understand what twenty or more police cars were doing chasing someone who could have been apprehended through a safe, conventional investigation.
Even in very rural areas, where the major risk of injury is a slow-moving cow, it is unacceptable for the local constabulary to play Smokey and the Bandit. In populated urban areas, it is criminal.