Opinion – The harms of poor policy: The urgent need to end police pursuits

On Monday April 14th, 19 year old Cooper Schoenke was killed by a driver who sped through a red light, hitting their vehicle. This horrifying crash in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood occurred as the driver was being chased by the Georgia State Patrol (GSP). Far from an outlier, this tragedy is part of a larger pattern of police chases ending disastrously. As Cooper’s friends and family continue to mourn, they also call for a change to GSP’s pursuit policies.

Georgia, where GSP has one of the least restrictive police pursuit policies in the nation, has seen hundreds of deaths result from police chases. From 2018-2022 alone, at least 68 deaths resulted from GSP pursuits. Despite rhetoric from sheriffs and police chiefs, there is little public safety justification for these high risk chases. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that nearly 90 percent of pursuits were for non-felony violations, with most for minor traffic violations.

National data reveals about one-third of police chase fatalities are bystanders, as was the case with Cooper. With at least 30 percent of pursuits ending in a crash, thousands of additional people are injured each year. Decades of evidence has shown that the harms of police chases far outweigh any safety benefits and the Department of Justice has recommended severely limiting police pursuits.

However, GSP, like police agencies in general, abhors being told what to do. It is this stubborn refusal to change policy that took Cooper’s life. Too often, those least responsible for harmful policies bear the brunt of their consequences. That this death could have been prevented with common sense policy change years ago compounds an already devastating loss.

The Power of Policy

As physicians in Georgia, we are intimately familiar with how policy can cause preventable suffering and premature death. Working in a safety-net hospital, each day is a Sisyphean struggle to address patients’ unmet needs that result from policy decisions. Our patients experience extreme marginalization and vulnerability due to predatory housing, medical insurance, drug pricing, education, transit and wage policy.

Policy creates the conditions under which we live our lives, the opportunities and choices we have and what resources we have access to. Ultimately, policy is a way of assigning value. In GSP’s estimate, freedom to act how they want supersedes the value of innocent lives.

For survivors of police chases, the human cost is staggering. Polytrauma, the type of trauma that often results from high-speed motor vehicle accidents, causes injury to multiple areas of a person’s body. These injuries exacerbate Georgia’s overburdened trauma care system, typically require recurrent, complex care, and can result in permanent disability or death. Those who survive face long-standing physical and psychological distress, adding tremendous financial cost to the state through hospitalizations, disability, and litigation.

Immune To Evidence

Given the irreparable harm that police chases cause, there is simply no excuse for the lack of pursuit policy change. This continued inaction is emblematic of a criminal legal system that is immune to evidence and free from accountability. As with wealth-based detention, drug-induced homicide laws, and three-strikes laws, the punishment bureaucracy remains more interested in power than efficacy. Because of this, people continue to die preventable deaths in our communities, on our roads, and in our jails and prisons.

In medicine, we are taught to interrogate the potential harm, benefits, and alternatives to any intervention. If we, like the police, continued to pursue an intervention known to cause more harm than good—despite readily available alternatives—we’d be rightfully charged with malpractice.

The police attempt to distract from their malpractice by focusing myopically on the individual who fled, ignoring the fact that many are driving away recklessly because they are being chased.

There are a myriad of reasons someone might run from a police stop. They might be a caregiver and need to get home, on probation and concerned about a violation, afraid of a stint in our decrepit local jails, or fear the worst case scenario as stories of Sandra Bland, Philandro Castile, and Deacon Hollman flash through their minds.

Police and their political boosters too often encourage a simplified, two-dimensional world of “good” or “bad” people who do “good” or “bad” things. In reality, all of us make good and bad decisions, in large part driven by structural influences and policy conditions of our past and present. The driver should not have fled. GSP should not have chased. As any kindergartner in Georgia could tell you, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Seeking True Public Safety

In America, we have enabled the growth of a policing system that is simultaneously the most politically powerful and well-funded while being the least accountable. As a result of this duality, common-sense changes are hard to come by. Politicians balk at restricting police, not because of a careful weighing of evidence, but out of deference to a powerful electoral coalition.

Critiquing police practices does not mean taking public safety less seriously. In order to envision and build systems that truly keep us safe, we must first sever the ideological link between policing and public safety.

It is simply unnecessary and undesirable to continue to have armed guards with the power to arrest and kill doing routine traffic enforcement. A large portion of police time is spent on traffic violations, nearly half of which are minor violations that do not affect public safety. Often used as a pretext for vehicle searches, these stops are racially discriminatory and rarely uncover evidence of other crime.

Beyond traffic stops, why do we insist on sending police into situations others are better suited for? With less than 5 percent of 911 calls relating to violence, police introduce unnecessary risk, with predictably catastrophic results. From welfare checks to mental health crises, from homeless encampments to public intoxication, there are individuals better trained to respond to each of these situations. If we were to build community responses from scratch today, they would look nothing like our modern police monopoly.

Ultimately, evidence-free, carceral-centric policies undermine our ability to live safely and well. Cooper’s death, a preventable tragedy, should be a cause of concern to all. It should also push us to re-examine what can truly keep us safe, and demand policy frameworks that do so.

If you would like to donate: Honor Cooper Schoenke: Prevent Future Tragedies

Mark Spencer, MD is an Internal Medicine physician in Atlanta and Executive Director of Stop Criminalization Of Our Patients (SCOOP)

Mihir Chaudhary, MD, MPH is a trauma surgeon in Atlanta and contributing author to “All This Safety Is Killing Us”