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I will concede that you have a point here, but I think the typical reverse argument, that police should uniformly just let someone go to prevent immediate violence is also a slippery slope. No-high-speed-chase policies were perhaps well-intentioned (such chases do often end in death and destruction, often to bystanders), but the precedent of "if you just drive 90mph they have to let you go" led to its own forms of lawlessness. Policies to not (immediately [1]) arrest people that risk enough police/bystander lives are their own incentives to always escalate. Law enforcement is mostly-uniquely given the arrest power for a reason.
I guess to my mind the underlying crime is obviously relevant to what means are justified in arresting or stopping the suspecting. You've got a murderer with a hostage? By all means, high speed chase. Use deadly force. You think someone has an illegal quantity of drugs? Probably no high speed chase or deadly force. This latter is outside the context of self-defense of course. If guy with drugs pulls a gun on you, feel free to escalate appropriately. The point is that there needs to be a proportional relationship between the means and the crime.
But if you make it trivially easy to evade enforcement of non-capital crimes, it's unclear why anyone would do anything other than evade all the time.
I think there is a wide gap between "lethal force" and "trivially easy."
I don't think there's a wide gap between "trivially easy" and "drive away really fast, oh and the police are not allowed to block you"
Just because they don't block your car doesn't mean you got away scot-free. They can follow you, block roads, use spike strips or PIT maneuvers to make you lose control in a way that's unlikely to be lethal, and so on.
Even if (they let) you get away, they can use your license plate to find out where you live, and arrest you at home. In addition to whatever you were suspected of before, you're now guilty of evading the police too. If you commited traffic violations while fleeing, those wil be added too. If they chased you, your car is likely to get wrecked.
All in all, plenty of good reasons to comply if you're innocent or guilty of a relatively small offence only (e.g. DUI). In short, it's not trivially easy to evade arrest if the police is not generally allowed to shoot drivers of vehicles.
If you just drive away fast, they won't be able to follow you or know where you went if they can't chase you. And obviously they can't PIT you without chasing you.
Just do what a lot of my city's residents do: don't have a license plate. If they try to stop you for not having a license plate, drive away really fast. Not having a license plate is not a serious crime, so they're not allowed to chase you.
Why not? All they need to do is drive equally fast behind you.
That's how it seems to work in practice too. Almost every time I read a newspaper story about a car chase it's something like: police noticed someone commit [small traffic violation], gave suspect the stop signal, instead of stopping suspect tried to make a break for it, police chased them, eventually, suspect lost control and crashed their car into a [tree/ditch/lamppost]; suspect was arrested with minor wounds, car is a total loss.
This seems like a pretty good alternative to shooting and killing the driver from the start. (If you don't kill them, you'd have to chase after them anyway.)
I understand it creates a greater risk to the general public (what if the fleeing suspect crashes head-on into another passenger car?) but that doesn't seem to be a super common outcome, and I don't think “if I don't shoot this guy he might end up causing a fatal accident” is sufficient justification to use lethal force from the start.
That only rules out the one option, plus it gives cops a cause to stop you on sight even if you did nothing else wrong. Again, imagine if you're driving drunk and you don't want to get caught, do you really think it's smart to remove your license plate? I think it just makes it much more likely that you'll be pulled over in the first place.
I understand the confusion but I never said I think police shouldn't chase criminals. Of course they should. I'm arguing they shouldn't shoot them dead if they try to flee, unless the situation explicitly warrants it (i.e., the suspect is known to pose a grave immediate threat to public safety), which is not true on average and was not true in this case.
My line of replies was to Gillitrut, who posited:
So those replies should be read in the context of arguing against someone who doesn't think the police should chase someone outside a context where deadly force would be justified.
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