Before the world went really, really, really batshit and was only fairly batshit, back in March, there were still some issues with how America was policed. Before police were beating protesters all over the country, they were still engaging in some crazy police chases, which ended up in some spectacular action-movie scenes like this one from a San Bernardino police chase.
This story was originally published on June 4, 2020
We were reminded of this from a tweet from 2020:
Thankfully, the officer driving was fine, and the cars he landed on weren’t filled with people, so, incredibly, no injuries resulted from this.
It’s hard to think of a situation where driving this fast down a public street really makes sense; police have radios and helicopters and all kinds of resources that travel faster than cars that could be used to track or at least identify a suspect.
In this case, it’s all the more ridiculous when you realize the whole chase started because a driver failed to yield.
Of course, not yielding is dangerous, and not stopping when you see cop lights is usually a terrible idea. But starting a high-speed chase like this just escalates how dangerous everything gets, especially when cops are driving SUVs that don’t react to driving over intersection humps at high speeds the same way that, say, the old-school, low, body-on-frame Crown Vics did.
The amount of air caught seems to have taken the driver by surprise, as control was lost pretty soon after landing. You could argue that more driver training would help, but at the same time, aside from providing videos like this, it’s hard to tell what positive benefit these high speed chases really provide?
Of course, now there’s so many more issues with policing going on, that, in some perverse way, this almost feels like a throwback to a more innocent time.
That was only about two months ago.