Last Tuesday, 41-year-old Long Beach local and dog-walker Jessica Bingaman was killed — in addition to 5 out of the 6 dogs with her — after a stolen van being pursued by the police smashed into her car. Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) officers had tried to pull the van over, but because the driver refused, the officers initiated a high-speed chase. According to CHP data, the LBPD is well-known for engaging in deadly pursuits, with 37 percent of LBPD pursuits from 2016 to 2018 having ended in a crash.

It’s quite obvious that if the LBPD officers had decided simply not to begin the chase, Jessica Bingaman, and those dogs, would still be alive. Yet it’s beyond evident that they, regrettably, failed to question whether a stolen van was actually worth the elimination of human and animal life. (Or perhaps they did contemplate the consequences, and decided to initiate the chase anyway.)

It’s no secret that Americans absolutely love watching police pursuits, to the extent that chase scenes are part and parcel of every cop movie. People rarely realize, however, that these high-speed pursuits not only injure and kill the “bad guys,” but also entirely innocent bystanders. (Let’s be clear, however, that the death of anybody, no matter what that person did, is horrible.) It’s truly striking: Out of all those killed in police pursuits every year, innocent bystanders make up a third of the victims.

But because there’s no official reporting system to keep track of deaths from police pursuits, the numbers of victims overall, and thus the number of bystanders killed, is certainly higher. Indeed, Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, says the number is likely “three or four times higher.” He says that we don’t even know how many pursuits are made each year, nonetheless how many people are actually killed, and whether those killed are drivers, passengers, or bystanders.

Even if we assume that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s statistics are correct, the data are still abhorrent: Between 1979 and 2017, over 13,000 people were killed in police pursuits. (That’s about a death a day.) And since 1979, more than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed, too, which actually bumps up the percentage of innocent bystanders killed in police pursuits to about 40 percent.

The Los Angeles Police Department is notoriously terrible at pursuing suspects safely. From 2006 to 2014, 1 in 10 car chases initiated by the LAPD resulted in the injury of a bystander, and LAPD car chases have led to bystander injury and death rates that are twice as high as the rest of the state. In 2017, a grand jury found that LAPD officers’ chases were “causing unnecessary bystander injuries and deaths,” and that 17 percent “of the car chases that took place in the county in a 12-month period beginning in October 2015 ended in a crash that could have resulted in injury or death.”

In 2015, LAPD chases injured more bystanders than any other year in the past decade. Recently, LAPD Chief Michel Moore admitted, albeit meekly, that in “the vast majority of our pursuits we find … areas for improvement, areas for training.” But Moore shifted more blame onto the media for sensationalizing the chases (which is certainly a problem, but not the problem), and trotted out the banal “you don’t know what it’s like to be in a cop’s situation” line that the police frequently use to justify their brutality.

Much of the LAPD’s recklessness has to do with the department’s dangerously irresponsible pursuit policy, which allows officers to make snap judgment calls that they are then entirely exempt from the consequences of. Because LA is one of the only major cities that allows its police officers to chase people for nonviolent offenses, the LAPD chases more drunk and reckless drivers than any other department in the state, and so its officers are even more likely to force already dangerous drivers into crashing. This policy was assuredly designed to beget utter vehicular chaos.

California is the only state to have a uniquely disturbing law which exempts police from liability for people’s injuries or deaths caused by pursuits, “even when officers do not follow the vehicle pursuit policy their agency has adopted.” This exemption basically screams at police to drive as fast as they can without any regard for human (or animal) life. Many officers also initiate chases as a sort of “game,” a game that fosters an arrest-at-all-costs mentality and uses people’s lives as points.

As a 2010 FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin made clear: “[D]uring a chase police can be overcome by ‘a need to win and make the arrest,’ which blinds them to the danger they are helping create.” South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy Driver course instructor James Vaughan agrees, having said that “[cops] perceive a fleeing as something personal.” (Indeed, the Criminal Law Handbook defines running from the police as “contempt of cop.”)

Many police officers simply have no qualms about treating chases as if they were a mission in Saints Row 4, and commonly avoid answering the question of whether a chase was actually justified. The study conducted by LA’s grand jury found that out of 8,000 car chases, 42 percent were the result of a traffic infraction, and a national study on police chases by the International Association of Police Chiefs found that 91 percent of high-speed chases are initiated because of a nonviolent offense.

In Jessica Bingaman’s case, the LBPD were pursuing someone suspected of a nonviolent crime, i.e., stealing a van. When asked his thoughts on Bingaman’s death, and whether the police were being reasonable in starting the chase, Jim Bueermann, a former Redlands chief of police, questioned “whether officers should even be chasing stolen cars,” because while “‘you used to go to prison if you stole a car … that is not the case now necessarily.” Every time we forget that it’s ultimately up to an officer to decide whether to initiate a chase, we end up placing all the blame onto suspects who, in many cases, shouldn’t have ever been targeted in the first place.

Like everything else the police do, pursuits are disproportionately initiated against black people, and, when black people are pursued, they’re killed at higher rates than whites. In 2015, USA Today combed through the federal police records of 5,300 fatal pursuits since 1999, and found that “on average, 90 black people were killed each year in police chases, nearly double what would be expected based on their percentage of the population.” Black drivers are routinely pursued for more minor offenses than whites, such that in 2013 and 2014, “nearly every deadly pursuit triggered by an illegally tinted window, a seat-belt violation or the smell of marijuana involved a black driver.”

Of all chases initiated against black drivers during that period, 40 percent were for minor offenses like missing registration stickers or driving a car with a loud exhaust; only about 20 percent of whites were pursued over the same violations. When white people do get chased, it’s typically for an actual crime like speeding, or having a warrant out for a violent offense, whereas blacks are chased for the crime of, well, being poor. (It should be noted that for both high- and low-level offenses, blacks are chased more disproportionately than whites.)

When police chase black drivers, they’re more likely to pursue them through crowded urban areas, as well as more likely to chase them during the day, which places bystanders at even greater risk of injury or death. That’s why when police chase a black motorist, the chase is 75 percent more likely to end in death of a bystander. Out of all bystanders, of course, black people are the most likely to be killed, largely because the police simply have no qualms about driving recklessly through black neighborhoods. Indeed, from 1999 to 2016, black people made up more than 25 percent of all bystanders killed in police chases.

Since the 1970s, most law enforcement agencies have had in place high-speed pursuit restriction policies, and many have upgraded them in the past couple years, amidst new demands for police departments to put an end to excessive, unnecessary, and frequently lethal high-speed pursuits. In 2015, the International Association of Chiefs of Police released a policy model which argued that “pursuit is authorized only if the officer has a reasonable belief that the suspect, if allowed to flee, would present a danger to human life or cause serious injury,” and that “in general, pursuits for minor violations are discouraged.”

Even the police themselves agree that the status quo is both morally and professionally untenable, meaning that there’s no excuse that a police department can make for not having imposed more rigorous and morally acceptable restraints on pursuits.

Several police departments have considerably altered their pursuit policies — with, admittedly, favorable outcomes. In 2012, the Louisville Metro Police Department implemented a new chase policy that only allows officers to chase people suspected of a violent felony. In the five years before the policy was enacted, seven people had been killed in high-speed chases. But since 2013, “total police chases have dropped by over half since the change,” and the “policy has made streets safer, with no deaths, a 17 percent reduction in collisions, and a 57 percent reduction in injury.”

In Miami-Dade County in 2017, the police department put in place a more restrictive chase policy that ended up cutting the number of police chases by fourfold. But police officers actually have to follow the new policies, and must be held accountable when they violate them. (They are hardly ever held accountable.) Reforms are, of course, only useful insofar as the people responsible for implementing them (e.g., cops) actually implement them.

Any police practice that takes more people’s lives every year than floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and lightning combined must be done away with. Because cars are not typically thought of as death-dealing four-wheeled bullets, we do not conceive of chase deaths in the same way that we do police beatings or shootings. Yet police chases, as shown, can be just as lethal as other forms of police brutality.

Any form of police brutality, whether it be fist, baton, gun, car, or bulldozer, must be quashed. Whether one is being actively pursued by the police, or simply walking across the street, nobody (including animals) deserves to burn to death in a flaming wreck, or have their body turned into a soaring ragdoll.

Violent policing is, in all its manifestations, a systemic problem extending far beyond dangerously reckless police chases. Yet because the public and the media tend to pay much more attention to police brutality and shootings, we miss the more subtle ways in which the police terrorize, maim, and kill people.

To be sure, I am not entirely opposed to police chases. There are obviously instances where it is necessary for the police to chase a suspect who poses a dangerous enough risk to the public at large. But it’s also true that the suspects who fit this profile (i.e., murderers, rapists, kidnappers, etc., etc.) make up a very, very tiny part of all the criminals who exist, nonetheless all people.

So, no, I would not argue for a blanket ban on police chases. At the same time, I do not know what the perfect system is for determining who ought to be pulled over. What I do know, however, is that things as they stand are terrible, and something must change, because people continue to die every single day for literally no reason at all.

Tragic as it may be, Bingaman’s death will hopefully inspire more meaningful debate on how to put an end to unnecessarily excessive, and fatal, police pursuits, and the immorality of having laws that place the well-being of four-wheeled boxes of metal above the existence of animal and human lives.