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By Jennifer Gollan & Susie Neilson, San Francisco Chronicle

Police pursuits are glamorized on television news and in video games. But the causes and aftermaths of these chases receive little public attention. Our investigation shined a spotlight on the reckless decisions that often set pursuits in motion and on the bystanders and passengers they’ve killed.

“Fast and Fatal,” a seven-part series published in the San Francisco Chronicle last year, uncovered the soaring death toll tied to police chases in the U.S., mostly over low-level offenses, and the immunity that shields officers from accountability.

The reporting was exhaustive, requiring a year of digging to identify and examine every fatal police pursuit from 2017 through 2022. We found that nearly two people a day died on average in these chases.

We launched the reporting in the spring of 2023 after spotting a news story about a police pursuit in Louisiana in which an officer killed two teenage bystanders while chasing a man who’d stolen a relative’s car. How often did people die in pursuits? No one knew. The federal government doesn’t comprehensively track pursuit fatalities. So we set to work.

We wanted to understand who was dying and why.

Counting the dead and uncovering the failures contributing to the carnage

We built five databases, the largest of which detailed each fatal pursuit. We pulled records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting system, private research organizations such as Fatal Encounters and IncarcerNation, and our own reporting. We combed through thousands of news reports on LexisNexis and Google using targeted search terms, as well as hundreds of lawsuits, autopsy reports and police records. This process surfaced at least 660 additional pursuit deaths missing from official datasets.

The Chronicle made the data available to the public, inspiring dozens of news outlets around the country to produce their own stories.

Having built a more complete record of casualties, we next performed an array of analyses to figure out how and why thousands had died. The upshot? It turns out officers initiated most chases over low-level infractions, such as a broken tail light or playing loud music. Further, a geospatial analysis matched locations of fatal crashes with neighborhood demographics, revealing these crashes disproportionately occurred in majority-Black neighborhoods.

We also extracted additional data and records from the 30 largest police agencies in the U.S. and scoured Courtlink and PACER for court documents. We found that local governments and insurers paid at least

$82 million in settlements and judgments in lawsuits concerning injuries or deaths caused by police pursuits since 2017 — an undercount, given that some local governments refused to release the data.

A few shortcuts helped us amass public records. We obtained criminal and disciplinary information for 140 officers involved in fatal chases via public records requests filed with police agencies and local prosecutors via a mail merge, finding that just six were convicted of criminal charges tied to pursuits.

We used sample FOI requests available via the National Freedom of Information Coalition to quickly customize letters that cited public records laws specific to certain states. Further, we set up a special email account to handle the flood of responses to our requests. This helped us track which open records requests required additional correspondence or calls as we worked through negotiations with dozens of public officials to free files.

This was, of course, also a story about government failure, and worse — police forces inflicting deadly harm on the public they’re sworn to protect. There is no binding national standard governing when and how police should chase suspects, so officers often operate under permissive rules that vary by department. We pulled pursuit policies from more than 100 police departments across the U.S. Those documents showed that few agencies had meaningful limits.

At the same time, using news reports and police records, we built a more targeted database of each case involving officers across the U.S. who purposely rammed vehicles with PIT maneuvers, causing at least 87 deaths across the country. Nearly half of those who died this way were bystanders and passengers, we discovered.

Fighting for records

Law enforcement agencies didn’t make it easy to get the records, but we came up with workarounds. When several departments demanded exorbitant fees to respond to our requests, we asked them to provide itemized estimates, including the name, job title and hourly pay rate of the official producing the records, which often prompted them to reduce their fees.

Further, when some law enforcement agencies stonewalled because we lived out of state, we prepared records requests for journalists at Hearst TV stations, who agreed to be proxies by filing them on our behalf. Compiling these records helped us show that just a fraction of police officers were criminally convicted for fatal chases.

Interviewing survivors and loved ones

Over the course of a year, we interviewed 150 grief-stricken families, crash survivors and law enforcement officials. We gave survivors agency over our interviews, allowing them to direct the flow of conversation at points and take breaks when needed, which enabled them to talk more freely. We also explained our reporting goals and, in some cases, our top findings, to help build trust.

Janae Carter was typical of many victims. She was on her way to buy baby wipes when a driver fleeing police over a license plate violation smashed into her car at 74 mph, killing her boyfriend and two children in Evansville, Ind. Carter initially felt too traumatized to meet. We balanced compassion with persistence, and Carter ultimately realized she wanted the public to know her family’s tragedy was avoidable. In the end, with her mother and her attorney at her side, Janae talked for hours.

Impact

Reaction to the series was swift. Members of Congress called on regulators to accurately count how many people die in pursuits nationwide, sending a letter to the Attorney General, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and NHTSA. “We cannot fix or prevent deaths when the data is not an accurate reflection of what is happening,” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier wrote.

In response to the reporting, the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, which is focused on police accountability, developed model national rules for state lawmakers across the country to adopt that limit pursuits to incidents involving violent crime, restrict PIT maneuvers and require agencies to adopt policies to discipline officers who violate them.

Newsrooms from California to New York drew on the Chronicle’s data to publish their own stories. Academics from NYU’s School of Global Public Health relied on the Chronicle’s analysis for an article in the medical journal JAMA.

This spring, Hawaii lawmakers passed new legislation that restricts police chases to the most serious offenses.

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