As a cops beat reporter for the Star, I had written about numerous police chases that had ended in tragedy -- including the case of Marian W. Woempner, 78, who was driving to church with her husband, Robert, 82, when a Indianapolis Housing Agency police car, joining a chase as it was ending, sped through a red light at Emerson and Edgewood avenues and hit the Woempners' car, killing the woman.
Coworkers Eunice Trotter and I embarked on a project in which we pored through thousands of pages of police IA records to look at crash reports. Our two-day series published by The Indianapolis Star of 947 police pursuits in Indiana from 2003 and 2004 showed police were virtually unrestricted when they chase suspects. They pursue fleeing vehicles at high speeds and usually for traffic infractions, according to The Star's examination of reports from the Indianapolis Police Department, the Marion County Sheriff's Department and the Indiana State Police. At least 86 people -- bystanders, suspects and law enforcement officers -- died as the result of police pursuits in Indiana from 1993 through 2003, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Twenty-five of them were bystanders not involved in the chase. Nationally, 3,877 were killed during the same period, 1,251 of them not a part of the pursuit.
The series included a graphic about average speeds by police in pursuits, had PDFs of actual pursuit policies nationally.
We also looked at cities in the U.S. that abandoned police pursuits because of safety concerns.
I also discovered that due to maintenance problems, IPD had helicopters in the air (to assist with chases) far less often than they had projected when they beefed up that unit.
It was profiled in IRE's Extra Extra for May 2005. Neill Borowski, who edited the series, also wrote about it in the American Editor. AP in Indiana gave it first-place in the 2006 competition.
