A Study of Police Vehicle Pursuit Policy Characteristics

Abstract

Police vehicle pursuits are a discretionary activity involving substantial risks to police officers, bystanders, and communities, as well as legal liabilities for police agencies. Recent legal decisions clearly indicate the need for explicit formal policies to regulate pursuit behaviors and tactics. However, policing organizations vary widely in whether or not they have formal written policies to regulate pursuit behavior, and in how extensive and explicit these guidelines might be. To evaluate this diversity, the paper analyzes vehicle pursuit policies from a nonrandom national sample of 288 municipal and county police agencies solicited by the Police Executive Research Forum in 1995. Written pursuit policies were content analyzed, coded on their coverage of 12 policy concerns (including 114 specific issues), and scored on overall policy comprehensiveness and restrictiveness. These measured pursuit policy variables were first factor analyzed to identify dominant policy themes or dimensions. Next, the policy variables were cross-tabulated with police agency characteristics (e.g., location, size, type of agency) to determine how organizational variables may influence or correlate with the specific content, comprehensiveness, and restrictiveness of their policies.

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