Editorial: Police chase begs restraint, not recriminations
Wild car chases are the stuff of movies, not of sleepy college towns like Tucson. Car chases that end in death are not the stuff of either setting. But it happened here and the repercussions are still being determined.
The big question is this: Did University of Arizona Police Department Officer Jason Kingman give chase to Samuel I Morales, 20, in violation of the UAPD policy forbidding chases for traffic violations?
Kingman pursued Morales after witnessing him running a red light in a chase that turned tragic when Morales ran through a stop sign and plowed his mustang into a minivan.
Now Morales is dead. Kingman, however, is still alive and under scrutiny because of this. The first strike against Kingman is that he is a police officer. The second strike, related to the first, is that he must bear the burden of Morales' poor judgment on top of his own. We cannot, after all, villainize the dead. We can, and frequently do, paint police officers in shades of dark and wrong.
Some of this "blame the cops for any slip-up" mentality, is, of course, justified. Police officers are supposed to be guardians of the public good and they hold us to the public standards. Thus doubly entrusted, they ought be held to high standards of behavior. The spotlight ought be shone bright over them when there is evidence to the contrary.
This test holds true for clear-cut cases of abuse that, in their ugliness, reinforces our tendency to pillory law enforcement folks in general. They should be used to decry the Furhmans of the police world, and the thugs like those New York officials facing charges of sodomizing and beating a Haitian detainee with a toilet plunger. But to apply it to this tragedy would not be appropriate.
UAPD's chase policy asks their officers to consider factors like traffic volume, time of day and weather conditions before initiating chase. The guidelines, much stricter than those of the Sheriff's Department, which allows chases for any reason, also ask the officer to evaluate whether a suspect presents a threat of immediate injury or possible death to others.
The standards are subjective. There is room for poor judgment calls. There is room for calls that may or may not be wrong, until circumstances set their value. Clearly Kingman's judgment call resulted in tragedy. But such is the nature of tragedy. The accumulated burden of hazy calls, not the least of which is Morales' decision to breeze through a red light and then through a stop sign.
What is clear in all of this is that there is not room for heaping blame and wringing hands. Rather, the accumulated spotlight on this incident should be turned to illuminate the hazards of chases and the multitude of alternate remedies. The consequences, borne out to the extreme in this case can at least serve as a cautionary for all UAPD officers serving in the congested university area.
Imagine if Kingman had phoned in Morales' license plate number and not given pursuit. Then Morales would be standing here now, taking the heat for his clearly poor decisions, rather than Kingman.
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