April is a 911 supervisor. The supervisor has to authorize pursuits.
High-speed chases frequently have to be authorized by a sworn
official. All of that takes time. It didn't used to be that way, but
people are so litigious anymore that you need a record of when and
why the use of high-speed interception tactics were authorized in
case there's an accident. Anyway, as goofy as it sounds, most
pursuits are called off as soon as the speed passes 90 mph. They
figure that they have a vehicle description and they'll pick the perp
up again when it's not as great a hazard to the public. So (and I'm
not endorsing this...heh...) the one nearly surefire way to get out
of a speeding ticket is to put the pedal to the floor. ;-)
Of course, that doesn't always work out. Sometimes the deputies don't
properly explain the conditions of the pursuit (though that's getting
harder and harder to do now that the location and speed of each
cruiser is identified on the operator's screens) and they just "go
get the bad guy." We had some "Blue Rage" cases here a couple of
years ago, the worst of which involved a high-speed pursuit where the
deputy finally ran the perp off the road, emptied a clip into the
driver, reloaded and emptied another clip into him. They called that
a "non-standard procedure." ;-)
On Jun 22, 2005, at 7:23 PM, Willie Wonka wrote:
> You can, if you drive really fast...:)
> There was a famous case in Bulgaria in the early 80's. The camera
> "cought" someone going 160km/h in a 40km/h speed zone...The picture
> came out slightly blurred, just enough for the number on the
> licence plate to be illegible.
> Boris
>
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