IN THE PRESS: Across the Country, Police Chases Claim Nearly 700 Lives a Year. But Members of One Group are Far More Likely to Die
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Trevon Mitchell lay in the parking lot of a soul food joint, his left arm snapped and blood trickling from an ear.
Sirens wailed. A truck exploded in flames. Mitchell had been launched into the air, with some witnesses saying he flew as high as the green traffic light that ushered him into the intersection. Then he slammed onto the pavement, scraping away flesh and muscle, baring his intestines.
“I’m about to die,” he said.
“Wake up, Trey,” Aidan Colmore pleaded. “Don’t do this on me.”
Moments earlier, the best friends had been riding mopeds west of downtown Louisville. Out of nowhere, a man in a black Ford Five Hundred sedan — who’d failed to use his turn signal in view of the police, and was now being chased — blasted toward the same intersection.
The Ford ran the red at 95 mph, touching off a chaotic pileup that injured seven people. Colmore was briefly knocked unconscious before he rushed to Mitchell’s side, tapping his face outside Sam’s Fast Food, trying to keep him awake until paramedics arrived.
But soon after he made it to the hospital, Mitchell’s heart stopped.
The wreck in July 2021 was emblematic: A police department under investigation for discriminating against Black people chased a Black motorist through a Black neighborhood, leading to the death of a Black bystander.
A cascade of disparate policing practices has fueled a hidden crisis in which a disproportionate number of Black people are dying in police pursuits across the country, a Chronicle investigation found.
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The Police Executive Research Forum, a leading policing think tank, issued pursuit guidelines in a Justice Department-funded study last year, urging police to chase only people who have committed a violent crime and pose an imminent threat to others. But the guidelines aren’t binding. And there is almost no mention of drivers’ race in the report.
“We did not have access to that data on racial disparities,” Chuck Wexler, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview, adding that he was surprised by the Chronicle’s findings. “This opens up a new area for review.”
The disproportionate number of Black people dying in police pursuits across the U.S. is another example of the heavy burden of policing on that community. Police in many areas are far more likely to stop Black people in cars or on foot; to search, detain and use force against them during stops, and to kill them using guns and other “less-lethal” weapons.
Fear prompts some Black drivers to flee a stop even if they haven’t committed a serious crime, said Chauncee Smith, associate director of Reimagine Justice & Safety at Catalyst California, a criminal justice reform nonprofit, and a member of California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board.
“With this history,” Smith said, “people of color know it’s a life-or-death situation. We’ve seen numerous people of color killed at the hands of law enforcement for things that did not need to happen.”