SnapShot: The Fast and Furious: The Pursuit I Should Have Ended…Before the Crash

Blue lights don’t just flip on; they flip a switch in the mind. We open up about the rush, the pressure, and the quiet math behind police pursuits—where 100 miles per hour means 150 feet a second and a single call on the radio can change the outcome. I walk through a chase that still sticks with me: nighttime streets on the city’s edge, a string of units behind me, and a Jeep that wouldn’t stop. I knew the risks were stacking up—blind corners, dips, unfamiliar roads—and I still pushed forward. Then I tried a PIT I shouldn’t have, cratered the hood of our brand-new Dodge Charger, and kept going until a final move pinned the suspect in place.

That’s where the real lesson starts. Was it a pin or a ram? Did necessity justify contact, or did I cross into deadly force without grounds? Supervisors called it a ram, and a policy was born with my name on it—an uncomfortable legacy that now defines speeds, contact, and the exact line officers can’t cross. We unpack why pursuit guidelines shifted over the years: from chasing broken taillights to near-zero tolerance for risk, and back again as agencies respond to crime trends, liability, and public trust. You’ll hear how adrenaline, pride, and peer pressure can blur judgment, and how disciplined radio traffic and supervisory oversight are meant to keep everyone safe.

If you’ve ever asked why officers sometimes let a car go, or why a minor infraction ends with sirens and wreckage, this story brings clarity. We talk training, PIT standards, ethical thresholds, and the stark difference between stopping someone today and arresting them safely tomorrow. It’s not about taking the “fun” out of the job; it’s about putting life first—yours, mine, and the people who never chose to be part of the chase. If this conversation gave you a new lens on police pursuits, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review to help others find it. Your feedback shapes what we tackle next.

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Chapters

• 0:00 How Pursuit Policies Shifted
• 1:40 The Ethics Of Chasing For Minor Crimes
• 3:16 Pressure, Radio Chatter, And Risk
• 4:22 The New Charger And A High-Speed Chase
• 6:15 Lost In Neighborhoods At 70 MPH
• 7:41 A Botched PIT And A Cratered Hood
• 9:10 Pin Or Ram And The Turnage Rule

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a Murders to Music snapshot. So I want to talk about, you know, in law enforcement, we get into vehicle pursuits quite a bit and times have changed. I mean, I remember starting my career back in 2001, 2002, whenever it was. And uh at that time, we would absolutely chase the wheels off of a broken taillight. If somebody went by us with a broken taillight or we tried to make a traffic stop for uh expired registration, and those people ran. I mean, those were the good old days, and we would pursue them until we were down to bare metal, sparks flying, car crashes, people dying. That was just the price of doing business. If you ran from the police, you were gonna get chased. Then we started to realize should we be killing people over a broken taillight? And I think the resounding answer is no. And then they took the fun out of law enforcement and we couldn't chase them for a long time. And then there were rules. Well, they had to meet these criteria, and if we knew who the person was and we couldn't chase them, or if it wasn't a life or death thing, or immediate threat to harm on somebody, then we, you know, we couldn't chase them. Then we went to no pursuit at all. So unless you're a murder suspect or you try to kill a cop, you're not going to get chased. And now, in current day and age, the rules are reversing, and we're able to, I say we, they are able to chase more. And I start seeing these, you know, this trend in law enforcement where we're getting into these pursuits, and again, people are dying. You know, we're killing people three, four times. One agency is killing three or four people in a matter of uh one and a half year period on these pursuits that are really, really insignificant infractions. So I mean, I don't know where the happy is. When I was out there chasing them, every time I would, you know, can I give 15, 10, 36? Go ahead. And I hit those lights, I would hope for this person to run and just go and go and go. And I was gonna chase them. That's what I used to really hope for. Now, maybe I don't know if I'm wiser, but I'm definitely older and maybe a little bit less overzealous. Now I can understand. But anyway, it's not what this is about. I want to talk about a pursuit that I did get involved in, and it's the only pursuit that I got involved in where I felt like I should have terminated. And by terminated, I mean I should have shut down this pursuit. And the reason is because it when you're in a pursuit and you're driving, let's say you're driving 100 miles an hour, and if you've just driven, if you've ever if you as a civilian have ever driven 100 miles an hour in your car, you know that you have very little reaction time to input or to change directions or anything like that, right? At 100 miles an hour, you're traveling 150 feet per second. That's not a lot of time to think. Now you're in a vehicle pursuit, you're talking on the radio, you're driving 100 miles an hour, you're talking on the radio, you're changing your lights and sirens, you're clearing intersections, you're setting up spike strips, you're telling people to set up spike strips, you're managing that pursuit. You've got a lot of things going on inside that tiny little head of yours that is going to muddy the waters if a bad decision is made or if a crash occurs, they're going to try to blame all these other things. What is the threat of harm? Why am I pursuing this person? And as human beings, am I getting judged? Am I saying stupid shit on the radio? Is my supervisor going to shut me down because I sound too excited? I can't sound too excited, and my heart is going a thousand miles an hour. But on the radio, I got a sound. And traffic is nice and light, and the uh road conditions are dry. We're approaching a clear intersection. I mean, that's the way you got a sound on the radio, but inside you're like, but holy shit, I gotta go. You know, you're moving fast. So all these things are going through your mind. So I'm on patrol and one of our officers traffic stops a car. And during the traffic stop, the officer uh contacts the driver, and then the driver flees. And when the driver flees, that is when he calls out a pursuit. So I'm in the area, I get involved, and I find the suspect vehicle. Now I need to tell you, if there's a night that I need to pursue somebody, it's tonight. Why do you ask? Thanks for asking. Because I am driving the department's brand new Dodge Charger. Now, this car is sweet. We've taken it out to the racetrack, we've done our pursuit driving in it, I've been behind the wheel. This thing at the time was the most powerful vehicle our department has ever seen. I'm driving it. It's been on the road about a week, and I happen to get into the first pursuit with it. So all that stuff I was thinking about, guess what? Now I'm compounding that because I'm driving the pursuit car, right? This is gonna be pretty awesome. So I get involved in this pursuit. It's nighttime. I'm on the outskirts of town, way kind of northeast corner of our city, a bunch of streets that we never patrol because it's industrial, residential, and we just don't get in that area much, and I'm unfamiliar with it. It's right on the bordering edge of our neighboring city of Portland, and we're in this pursuit. And I'm chasing this car around. And if I remember correctly, this was like a uh Jeep Cherokee of some kind that I'm that we're chasing, and I don't even know why we're chasing this. This is during one of those periods where we could chase anything we wanted, and I'm chasing this car around, and I've got a whole string of cops behind me. It's kind of like you see on TV. It was similar to the OJ Simpson pursuit, if you saw that on TV, except we weren't on a freeway in the middle of the afternoon in sunny California going 20 miles an hour, but the string of cops were the same, I guess. We were in the side streets going 60 to 70 miles an hour, cutting across lawns, jumping driveway, Dukes of Hazard style is what we're doing. And uh, I remember the whole time I'm giving these updates and in a pursuit, the first car drives. That was me. And when the second car shows up, the second car takes over calling the pursuit or giving that radio traffic. So the first guy can just focus on driving. So as we're chasing this guy through these blocks, we're making left-hand turns, we're making right-hand turns, we're putting out on the radio where we are, but I don't know where we are, so I'm having to make stuff up as we go. I'm like, I'm about a hundred yards past the oak tree, I'm taking a left. And we're going through this whole thing. I look at my rearview mirror, and I have got a string of cops behind me a mile long. And we're like this conga line going through the neighborhood. And so finally, we are, you know, and I keep thinking, man, I've got to terminate this pursuit. I don't know what we're stopping this guy for, but this is too dangerous. The speeds are too fast. We're in a neighborhood, it's nighttime, unfamiliar area, dips in the road, low spots, blind corners. This could end terribly. But machismo and pride and peer pressure got in the way, and I didn't first I didn't call it. I'm like, all right, let's just keep going. So pedal to the metal, keep going. And this car is performing like none other, right? So we're all trained in the pit maneuver, pursuing intervention technique, and we're coming down this hill and we're coming to a T intersection. And as we're coming down to intersect with the T intersection, the vehicle is setting up to make a left-hand turn at the T. So I'm coming up behind it, and I see this opportunity in the corner. As the car makes the corner, I'm gonna try to make a pit maneuver. Now it's not the way we were trained, but I'm like, this is a perfect opportunity to take the back end of this car, push it around. He's already making a left-hand turn. We're gonna spin him out of control. We're gonna pin him, we're gonna pit him, we're good to go. So as I come up behind him, I try to make contact with that car. So I take the front passenger side of my car, I put it on the rear driver side of his car, and I input a little bit of gas. And when I do, he slips off and he crunches the hood of my car. And the hood of my car is now like cratered, and I can see it. As I look down the hood of my car, it literally is shaped like Mount Hood. And you know, Mount Hood is where we live here, and it kind of comes up in the middle, there's a big peak, and it comes back down. And I'm like, holy crap, I just wrecked the freaking brand new car. Well, all right, keep going. So he didn't the pit maneuver didn't work. He kept going. We ultimately he runs up into this driveway about two minutes later. And when he runs up in the driveway, I mean he hits this yard and he kind of goes up the inclined yard and gets stopped. And when he gets stopped, he kind of gets uh his front tires lose traction, but his rear tires are up at about two and a half feet off kind of the grade of the road. And I'm like, perfect, my car's already wrecked. I'm just gonna take my car and I'm gonna wedge it underneath his tires, and that way he can't go anywhere. I get his rear end up off the ground on this rear-wheel drive car, and he's stuck and pursuits over, and he doesn't run through this house and he doesn't continue injuring people. So that's what I do. I hit him, boom, and wreck my car some more. And uh we get out, we take him into custody, and then the supervisor shows up and he's like, Why'd you ram the car? I'm like, I didn't ram the car. He's like, You rammed the car, clearly your car's wedged underneath his, you rammed it. And so we had a disagreement there, and then they win, as they always do, and now there's a memo. So there's the Turnage memo that everybody has to sign during Evoc training, emergency vehicle operations training. And you know, if you've been a plea part of a police department or any agency like that, and you have a rule named after you, that is not a good thing, right? They don't give you a rule and name something after you if you've been like a rock star. My argument was that I was pinning the car in place. Their argument was that I was ramming the car and ramming equals deadly force, and it wasn't justified in that night. So everybody has to sign this form that says a pin is contact with a vehicle at zero miles an hour, and then a ram is anything over five miles an hour. So that is what everybody had to sign till this day. They'll have to sign the Turnage form, the Turnage Rule, and apparently you can't pit pin RAM vehicles or something. I don't know. At the end of the day, I caused almost$10,000 damage to the brand new car. The hood was cratered, the uh grill was cratered, but we stopped the pursuit. So I didn't get to drive the Dodge again. And uh everybody gets to live in my memory when they sign this waiver saying, I shall not ram a car. That is a murders to music snapshot.