High-speed Chases
Kevin J. Mullen
As occurred following the Rodney King beating case, a number of "activist" and advocacy groups, along with the usual assortment of professional pundits, (1996) are lining up to assign blame in the videotaped beating of illegal immigrants by two white Riverside County deputy sheriffs. The attacks were rooted in racism, we are informed, committed by white officers who feel they have license to break heads in the black and brown communities. Several investigations have been instituted but the proponents of the racial explanation already know what made the incident inevitable.
In the climate engendered by the proponents of State Proposition 187, the message bas been to law enforcement officers that it is open season on hapless immigrants. It's not always easy to agree with ACLU, but this time they have it right. The explanation for post-chase assaults by officers, according to ACLU spokesman Allan Parchini, lies in the phenomenon known as "high-speed pursuit syndrome," and has nothing to do with the race or ethnicity of those involved.
"What happens," says Parchini, "is officers get so angry and pumped up and the adrenaline rush is such that again and again. . . you see violence visited on suspects at the end of a pursuit." None of which makes an unwarranted beating excusable, if after a full investigation it is determined that there were no extenuating circumstances. One way or another, the officers involved are going to suffer greatly, and does anyone doubt that the fleeing illegal immigrants will be rewarded handsomely? Talk about messages.
Following the Rodney King beating, the U.S. Department of Justice announced loudly that it would conduct an analysis of all police brutality complaints for the previous six years to identify "any geographic or systemic patterns of violence." The report, issued belatedly more than two years later, was a disappointment. Because of the way data was collected, no valid conclusions about the geographic distribution of incidents could be made. And as to "any systematic patterns" of brutality, Michigan Congressman John Conyers complained that "the Justice Department did not attempt to find out what percentage of the victims of police brutality were black." It seems that the data wasn't collected in a way to permit such analyses. Neither, for the same reason, did the researchers identify accused officers by race or ethnicity, despite strong anecdotal evidence that excessive use of police force cuts across racial and ethnic lines.
So we are left with the uncontested assertion that these incidents are almost always committed by whites on "people of color." If, as the ACLU spokesman contends, such incidents happen "again and again" there should be a data base somewhere which lends itself to an ethnic analysis of who is doing what to whom. In any event, experienced police managers are aware of the danger of overreaction inherent in hot chases and insist that supervising officers respond immediately to stop anything before it starts—regardless of race, creed or color.
(SF Examiner April 5, 1996)