THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 3, 1995 TAG: 9502030007
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: BETH BARBER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
On Jan. 21 in Norfolk, two people died when a van driver being pursued by police demolished their car. There is tremendous sorrow in the community for the families of those killed, sorrow which cannot begin to lessen their losses.
There is also much second-guessing: Why the police pursuit? What could have been, should have been and can be done differently? That discussion could prove useful - and will prove more useful minus some critics' implication that po-lice officers are hot-rodders out to catch every suspect come hell, high water or bystanders.
It isn't so. And this is so: Getting dangerous drivers out of the driver's seat, and keeping them out, is not entirely, or even mainly, up to police. It is up to the courts as well, and their record particularly with regard to drunken driving could be and should be improved.
Current policy in our local and state police departments requires officers to weigh the harm the person pursued has done and may do against the potential for harm to police officers and the public. That is hardly a precise calculation - the variables include weather, traffic, road conditions and, above all, human behavior. An error either way can end and al-ter lives forever. In 1993 nine people died in Virginia from accidents involving police pursuit, four of whom were neither the chased nor the chaser.
But drunken drivers needn't be chased to do irreparable damage - and police may then be faulted for, say, having called off a pursuit on Brambleton Avenue and thereby having failed to prevent a subsequent hit-and-run on Olney Road. Over only five months of 1993, May through September, drunken drivers injured 5,234 people and killed more than 150.
That is cold comfort to the families of those who died innocently during a police chase. But it is a perspective germane to the debate on pursuit policy.
There are other points for debate. Chases are often multijurisdictional. For example, state police are more familiar with interstates, local police with municipal streets, so they hand off when and where possible. Direct communication between and among local and state police units would improve that coordination. But the cost has long been considered prohibitive. Police would surely support that expenditure. Would the public support it, too?
A helicopter can track a fleeing driver without endangering other vehicles and pedestrians, but in South Hampton Roads only Virginia Beach maintains a helicopter. It is on call to neighboring localities, but it cannot reach every corner of the region before a drunken driver can kill or flee. Police helicopters cost: Virginia Beach budgeted more than $200,000 this year on helicopter operation and maintenance - out of a police budget of $47 million. Will the public support more helicopters?
Police can and do let suspects flee when a chase is too perilous. But pursuit, as detailed in these newspapers over the past week, can often mean the apprehension of a driver guilty of far worse than a traffic offense. Norfolk learned just last year that calling off a pursuit may not avert tragedy. And drunken drivers, at least one expert says, have already learned that outrunning police is often their only way to avoid conviction and harsher penalties under toughened drunk-driving laws. That's not a lesson society can want to teach.
It's not a reason, either, to weaken drunken-driving laws or their enforcement, including pursuit, by cops and courts. In fact, drunks who drive would be far less dangerous to police and public if the courts took their offenses as seriously as the police and, increasingly, the public do.
So many times a drunken driver who kills turns out to have a known problem with alcohol, often documented in his driving record or a police file. Yet he is out on bond, or back on the road after serving a minimal sentence, or driving despite a revoked or suspended license. An accused whom a magistrate or judge considers a danger to himself or others can be held without bond. Few DUI suspects are.
Virginia's point system allows a long enough period of good driving to negate the bad, even the DUIs. Should it?
Having prevailed against strong opposition, Virginia law now permits first police officers and then the courts to impound the vehicles of drunken drivers. How often will they?
Regulations of the state Alcohol Beverage Control Board now prohibit establishments that serve alcohol to serve obviously inebriated patrons. The ABC board has its own agents to enforce such regulations. Yet two top lawmakers who agree on little else, Gov. George Allen and House Speaker Tom Moss, agree on dismantling at least partially the ABC system and handing enforcement of restaurant regulations to the State Police. Is that efficiency/economics? Or tomfoolery/politics?
Unfortunately, only tragedy seems to focus public and political attention on the problem of drunken driving, and then only briefly. Maybe this time, we'll get beyond sorrow and scapegoats to solutions that recognize some facts: The courts have years to get drunks off the road; the police, only minutes. And the courts decide from a safe and contemplative perch, the critics from hindsight, the cops from behind the wheel. MEMO: Ms. Barber is an associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star.
by CNB