NYPD car chases become more frequent, dangerous

NEW YORK, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- For the most recent fiscal year that ended in June, the crash rate for New York Police Department (NYPD) vehicles hit the highest level ever recorded, according to city data that goes back more than a decade.

So far this year, there have been at least 315 injuries and seven deaths after police chases, according to an analysis by The City, a non-profit organization.

Mayor Eric Adams embraced the uptick when asked about it at a press conference on Monday. "Under my term as mayor we made a complete shift to stop letting dangerous, bad people think they can commit an act, shoot someone, commit a violent crime and just flee," Bloomberg News on Wednesday quoted him as saying.

He emphasized that the department has used a "great deal of caution" and provided training to mitigate risk. "We don't want one life lost," he continued. "But it's not being lost because the police are saying: 'Well we want to go chase someone.' It's being lost because a bad person decides they're going to flee the police and have a total disregard for the safety of the people that's here."

"Police pursuits are part of the American pop cultural consciousness," noted the report. They're a movie trope, but most of the lethal pursuits across the United States since 2017 started with low-level offenses -- things like a broken tail light or neglecting to wear a seatbelt, according to a national database of police chases compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle.