Car Chase

One of the strange and, indeed, silly happenings that I have seen on local television from time to time since I settled in Southern California four years ago is what they call a “car chase.”

A man (or it could be a woman, I suppose), in a stolen car, drives wildly at breakneck speed through city streets and freeways, ignoring traffic rules and often barely avoiding disastrous accidents involving not only the driver himself but also other motorists and innocent passersby.

As soon as the police spot such a car, one or more patrol cars start pursuing it. Thus, a high-speed chase is on.

The police are not the only ones chasing the car, however. Television networks broadcast a running account of the chase via a camera affixed presumably onto a satellite or a pursuing helicopter overhead. Holding their breaths, viewers are glued to the TV as though watching a stockcar race or even a demolition derby. It is exciting because the outcome is, as it were, up in the air.

What amazes me is the judicious and patient approach of the police to the whole affair, which, after all, is an on-going violation of a whole series of traffic laws, if nothing else. Anyway, as far as televised car chases go, I have never seen police acting stupidly.

And the lenient, hand-in-glove handling on the part of police is what the stolen car drivers are apparently counting on as they no doubt enjoy playing a cat-mouse game.

I don’t know about other TV viewers, but I can’t help visualizing the driver—and his companions, if he has them on board—gleefully laughing as he outmaneuvers and outfoxes the pursuing police cars. He might go 90 to 100 miles (144-160 kilometers) an hour over freeways, weaving through traffic jams and driving on shoulders of highways or even going in the wrong direction, avoiding oncoming cars by a hair’s breath.

If the fugitive driver chooses to go through crowded city streets, the chase gets even more dangerous because almost all such drivers with the police patrol cars closely tailing them do not hesitate to go through red lights at intersections. I even saw some of them drive through busy pedestrian crosswalks, jeopardizing countless people.

Watching such a car chase, which is not a rare occurrence in Los Angeles and vicinity, I often wonder whether the police couldn’t take some effective and drastic action to prevent or nip it in the bud, so to speak, before it develops into a full-blown dangerous car chase. One would have thought there must be a way.

Police could, for instance, shoot and puncture the rear wheels of the stolen car when the driver is forced to slow down. I saw one case in which a truck driver brought his 16-wheeler to a halt, blocking the entire width of a highway after hearing on his radio that a stolen car, chased by police, was heading his way.

When chasing a stolen car, police officers are extra careful, I understand, because their action could easily escalate into a shootout. That probably is one of the reasons why patrol cars usually keep a “respectable” distance throughout the chase.

In any case, a stolen car driver calls it quits presumably when he gets tired, runs out of gas or drives into a dead-end street.

After a long, dangerous and nerve-wracking race, wasting so much public funds and police manpower, and sometimes causing senseless casualties, all car chases eventually come to an end. Then, and only then, the stolen car is surrounded cautiously to police officers who jump out of their patrols cars, which by then number six or seven.

What puzzles many TV viewers with the ending of most such car chases is that the fugitive drivers usually come out of the cars with their arms raised over their heads, showing no detectable sign of guilt or remorse. On the contrary, some of them even display the audacity of grinning or sheepishly smiling at the policemen as if to say: “How was my driving, eh?” or, “We had some fun, didn’t we?”

While hundreds of thousands of viewers watch, police handle the law-breakers as though they had done nothing terribly wrong. They are apparently relieved that no more serious incident occurred.

No doubt, those fun-loving perpetrators are sent to prison upon conviction but are released soon enough so that they can steal a car again and race with patrol cars whenever they feel bored with life.
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