• The live police chase has become a staple — if not a cliché — of local television news in the United States in the last 20 years. But what are the psychoanalytical dynamics of this event? Why does an otherwise unremarkable property felony become elevated to a matter of instant civic importance merely by virtue of being broadcast, and why do viewers’ sympathies often feel tugged toward the criminal rather than the state? This article examines one notorious case in Seattle and outlines the ‘stages’ of a police chase, as delineated by law enforcement, as an essential dramatic pattern redolent of Girardian release. The police chase is a live-broadcast panopticon in which every viewer is a participant in a triangulated tautology: the subject is running because he is being chased, and we are watching because he is running and he is being broadcast live because he is being chased. •
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