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vehicles pursuing a suspect fleeing in a vehicle in 2020|300x300px]]A car chase or vehicle pursuit is the vehicular overland chase of one party by another, involving at least one Car or other wheeled motor vehicle, commonly hot pursuit of by law enforcement. The rise of the automotive industry in the 20th century increased car ownership, leading to a growing number of criminals attempting to evade police in their own vehicle or a stolen car. Car chases may also involve other parties in pursuit of a criminal suspect or intended victim, or simply in an attempt to make contact with a moving person for non-conflict reasons.
Car chases are often captured on news broadcast due to the video footage recorded by , Police aviation, and News media participating in the chase. Car chases are also a popular subject with media and audiences due to their intensity, drama and the innate danger of high-speed driving, and thus are common content in fiction, particularly and .
Police use a number of techniques to end chases, such as ordering the driver to pull over, waiting for the driver's vehicle to crash, overheat, or run out of fuel. More forceful methods include boxing in the vehicle with cruisers, ramming the vehicle, conducting a PIT maneuver, or using . All efforts, many of which pose risk to all involved as well as bystanders, will be aimed at avoiding danger to civilians. When available, police aircraft may be deployed, which may follow the vehicle from above while ground units may or may not be involved.
As police forces became more accustomed to chases, they began to adopt police protocol, techniques, and technologies intended to help pursuits more quickly and safely, such as the PIT maneuver in the 1980s and spike strips in the 1990s.
Since the 2010s, as the dangers of car chases become apparent, police have tested various alternative methods of tracking fleeing suspects without continuing to pursue them such as StarChase's GPS Tracking system or the Grappler bullbar with a tire-catching net. Alternatively, some strategies have centered around simply not pursuing suspect vehicles and instead relying on using vehicle registration to identify the suspect and apprehend them later, though this is ineffective with stolen vehicles.
On January 3, 1992, a lengthy pursuit in Southern California, involving a Volkswagen Cabriolet stolen by a suspected murderer, Darren Michael Stroh, who was eventually killed by California Highway Patrol officers in a shootout, became the first police chase to be broadcast live on television, airing on three channels and preempting daytime programs on the station. The chase was reportedly so popular that, when one station switched to a rerun of Matlock, several viewers called in to complain and request they continue airing the chase. This convinced stations to show further live coverage of police pursuits.
In 2002, 700 pursuits were reported in Los Angeles. In 2003, Los Angeles television station KCAL-TV reported a quadrupling of ratings when police pursuits aired. That same year, the Los Angeles Police Department asked news media to reduce coverage of chases, claiming that coverage encourages suspects to flee and may potentially endanger viewers who attempt to view the chase in person.
Reality television has combined with the car chase genre in a number of television shows and specials such as World's Wildest Police Videos, Most Shocking, and Real TV which often feature real footage of car chases involving suspects fleeing police. In addition, videos and livestreams of car chases are popular content on social media.
On June 17, 1994, former NFL running back O. J. Simpson gained notoriety following national coverage of a low speed chase in his white 1993 Ford Bronco after the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Los Angeles.
One notable recorded police chase occurred when an M60 Patton tank was stolen by Shawn Nelson from an Army National Guard Arsenal, on May 17, 1995. Nelson went on a rampage through San Diego, California, with the massive tank crushing multiple civilian vehicles before becoming stuck on a road divider. Police were able to mount the tank and open the hatch, killing the suspect when he would not surrender.
On June 4, 2004, welder Marvin Heemeyer went on a rampage in a heavily modified bulldozer in Granby, Colorado, wrecking 13 buildings including the town hall, the public library, a bank, a concrete batch plant, and a house owned by the town's former mayor, resulting in over $7 million in damage. The police were initially powerless, as none of their weapons could penetrate the suspect's vehicle. However, the bulldozer's engine failed and the machine became stuck, so Heemeyer committed suicide by gunshot.
On July 27, 2007 in Phoenix, Arizona, two helicopters collided in mid air while filming a police pursuit. Both were AS-350 AStar news helicopters from the KNXV-TV and KTVK news stations. Accident Report 0902 Midair Collision of Electronic News Gathering Helicopters KTVK-TV, Eurocopter AS350B2, N613TV, and U.S. Helicopters, Inc., Eurocopter AS350B2, N215TV Aircraft National Transportation Safety Board. Accessed 2009-03-09. Archived 2009-05-18. All four occupants of both aircraft were killed. No one on the ground was injured.
On September 28, 2012, Fox News aired a live police chase in Arizona which ended in the suspect exiting the vehicle and shooting himself after a short foot chase. Fox News was airing it in a five-second delay instead of a normal ten-second delay, which resulted in the shooting being aired on a live broadcast of the Fox Report. Fox news presenter Shepard Smith soon apologized for the broadcast and vowed to never let it happen again.
Live news coverage of police chases is widely associated with the United States and with the city of Los Angeles in particular, which is often described by journalists as "the car chase capital of the world."
The February 2005 Macquarie Fields riots occurred in Sydney, Australia after a local driver crashed a stolen vehicle into a tree, killing his two passengers following a high-speed police pursuit. The death of university student Clea Rose following a police chase in Canberra sparked major recriminations over police pursuit policies.
In 2007, the United States Supreme Court held in Scott v. Harris (550 U.S. 372) that a "police officer's attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death."
In most common law jurisdictions, the fireman's rule prevents police officers injured in such pursuits from filing civil lawsuits for monetary damages against the fleeing suspects, because such injuries are supposed to be an inherent risk of the job. Public outrage at such immunity has resulted in statutory exceptions. One example is California Civil Code Section 1714.9 (enacted 1982), which reinstates liability where the suspect knew or should have known that the police were present.
Policy on what circumstances justify a high-speed pursuit differ by jurisdiction. Some safety advocates want to restrict risky chases to violent felonies. Another option is to use technology to end or avoid the need for such chases. For example, vehicles can be tracked by aircraft or GPS tagging devices like StarChase, allowing police agencies to reliably intercept suspects using stationary blockades, lower-speed vehicles, or when the vehicle is parked.
A 2023 United States Department of Justice report recommends that police should only initiate a chase only if a violent crime has been committed and the suspect poses an imminent threat to commit another violent crime due to the dangers posed by high speed pursuits. The report also recommends policies that discourage or prohibit pursuits if the suspect is riding a motorcycle.
The city of Dallas, Texas was the first major city in the United States to adopt an "Inter-Jurisdictional Pursuit Policy" to address the problems inherent in car chases that involved more than one law enforcement agency. In August 1984, the Dallas Police Department's Planning and Research Division, under the command of Captain Rick Stone, began crafting a policy that more than twenty (20) local law enforcement agencies could agree to abide by when car chases crossed their borders. The result was a model policy that became the standard for use by police departments around the United States."Dallas-area police departments establish policy on pursuits", Dallas Morning News, September 8, 1985.
In Europe, as many national borders Schengen Area within the Schengen Area, car chases may sometimes cross national boundaries. States often have agreements in place where the police of one state can continue the chase across the national boundary.
In 2021, actor Terrence J was pursued and shot at by a vehicle in an attempted robbery. In 2021, a carjacking victim in Chicago pursued a car thief, resulting in an eight-vehicle collision in which the stolen vehicle was destroyed.
Regulations for dealing with pursuits may be standardized state by state, but in principle, proportionality and the prevention of danger to life and limb take precedence over the interest of repression of crime. German police do not record the number of chases in any official police statistics, so there is little publicly known data on actual chases. However, in 2022 alone, there were 1,164 registered chases in North Rhine-Westphalia; there were 167 recorded in Hamburg in 2020. Chases are frequently reported in the media.
Staging car chase sequences often requires numerous takes and destruction of several vehicles (whether intentional or mishap). Therefore, it is common to use older vehicles that are 1–2 generations behind the current models on the market, since these can be second-hand acquisitions at low cost due to depreciation. Often for rare models such as the Nissan Skyline GT-R (R34) in Fast & Furious (2009), the more common Nissan Skyline 25GT's (R34) were acquired and modified to look like the GT-R (R34), while in another case a dune buggy was fitted with a GT-R (R34) shell.
There are some exceptions wherein a high-profile vehicle is used, such as the James Bond and Transporter franchises, usually because the vehicles used are "star cars" (i.e. used by the film's protagonists and featured prominently). Vehicle manufacturers may also pay for product placement in a film production, such as serving as technical advisors and/or donating the vehicles to be used in filming.
However, some critics claim that CGI eliminates the realism of chase scenes or, when done poorly or too obviously, can be visually jarring and uncanny. Such criticism has affected recent Hollywood productions; Driven, for example, was panned for its heavy use of CGI in chase scenes. As such, some films like Ronin, The Bourne Supremacy, The Kingdom, The Dark Knight, and Need For Speed, used live-action chases with minimal use of CGI, if at all. Furious 7 used CGI for "only 10%" of its action sequences, mostly to erase production artifacts such as wires or add backgrounds, as stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos wanted to rely more on real stunts rather than CGI because he wanted the whole sequence to "feel real" and fulfill audience's expectations so only 10 percent of the action sequences in the film were computer-generated, and even then, much of the CGI was employed simply to erase the wires and other contraptions that were used to film real cars and drivers or to add a background.
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