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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.
Sorry if I misunderstand, but isn't this just high-speed chases again?
I agree police should be allowed to chase people who try to flee. I was addressing the false dichotomy between shooting drivers and allowing them to evade justice completely.
High speed chases are worse than cops just shooting the fleeing driver. They put not just the driver at risk, but the police and the rest of the public. At least if you shoot the criminal the worst that can happen is a minor criminal is dead. In a high speed chase you can have dozens of civilians killed.
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