For some odd reason, I'm semi-fascinated by televised police pursuits. I'm always curious about what's going on in the mind of the fleeing driver. That's presuming anything is, which is probably not always so. He's being chased by eight police cars and there are three helicopters overhead. Is he thinking he can get away? It's true that every once in an odd while, someone does but the odds are pretty slim.
The chances are probably something like this: 70% chance he'll be captured unharmed, 27% he'll be killed or injured in a collision, 3% chance he'll get away from police. And even if the last of these occurs, they'll probably be able to track him down later. Also of course — and this might not matter to some of them — he might kill or injure some innocent pedestrian or driver. Still, they keep fleeing, perhaps forgetting that when you run red lights and endanger the public, you rack up more charges against you. You could easily be turning ten years in prison into twenty.
But also what interests me is how TV covers these events, which are among the few things you ever see on your screen where the producers have no friggin' clue what's going to happen — and it's all coming to you live, as it transpires. You could argue that happens with sporting events but sporting events are rarely that unpredictable. Also in sporting events, you usually have some idea how much longer they're going to go on, whereas a police chase could be over in two minutes or two hours.
A police chase often gives you the chance to discover that your local news anchors really don't have much to say, especially when the chase is just officers following suspect for a long, long time with no accidents or close calls. I think I mentioned this once before but I once heard a news anchor say, as a chase went on and on and on, "We've established that there is at least one person in the car." Now, that's Breaking News.
And I keep thinking about the guy or gal at the newsroom who makes the decision as to whether to cover a given chase…and when to bail out on the coverage if it's getting dull. Once you commit and get your audience interested, it's anti-climactic to cut away and it may make your viewers very frustrated. Also, for an indeterminable period, you're pre-empting other news stories that they might want to see like the weather or the sports. At some point, especially if you opt to cover a chase during the 11 PM News, you have the problem of what to do when it's time for the show that follows and your chase isn't over yet.
Last night in Los Angeles, there was a chase that started shortly after 11 PM. It involved a suspect in a white Nissan Sentra who was reportedly armed. The local ABC and CBS affiliates rushed their copters to the scene and probably regretted it. I guess they hoped it would reach a conclusion before they had to hand off to Mssrs. Colbert or Kimmel at 11:35 but that did not happen. The chase jumped from freeway to freeway, ultimately speeding through the communities of Lynwood, Hawthorne, Paramount, Norwalk, Azusa, Irwindale, San Dimas and Rancho Cucamonga before moving into the high desert communities.
Worse, it was boring. For most of that time, the freeway wasn't crowded and there was no possibility of a crash or any sort of game-ender. It was just a bunch of police cars following a white Nissan. The reporters had nothing to say for a long period…then came one bit of information that probably made the newsroom guys realize they weren't going to be showing the end of this chase and probably shouldn't have even started.
Police had run the license plate and discovered the car was registered to an address in Victorville. And since the guy was on a freeway heading towards Victorville, that's probably where he was heading — quite some distance. The California Highway Patrol had decided the safest thing for all was to follow the guy until he got to wherever he was going…or ran out of gas.
In other words: It was likely to just be the police following him for another hour or more. No crashes. No spike strips. No PIT maneuvers. No excitement.
At 11:35, both channels shifted their coverage elsewhere. Channel 7 (ABC) announced that if you wanted to continue following this story, you could do so on their website. They made that available for a while and at some point realized that it was too monotonous even for a website. So they shut that down and called their chopper home.
Channel 2 (CBS) is a sister station to Channel 9, which is not a network affiliate. So when Channel 2 began showing Stephen Colbert, they shifted coverage to Channel 9 — which I'm sure did wonders for Colbert's ratings here. I was wondering how Johnny Carson would have responded if his lead-in had suggested people change the channel. On Channel 9, they were pre-empting a rerun of Mike & Molly instead of a first-run, might-never-be-repeated show for which, one assumes, a lot more folks had set their DVRs.
I changed because (a) my TiVo was recording Colbert and I could watch him later and (b) the coverage on Channels 2 and 9 was being done by my favorite local helicopter reporter, Stu Mundel. Stu is the Vin Scully of televised car chases. Scully can usually make the most boring, nothing-happening games interesting and so can Stu…but this one was beyond even his ability. About the only thing to note was this: The driver was fleeing from the law but when he changed lanes, he always made sure to signal with his turn indicator.
After a half-hour on Channel 9 of essentially the same, unchanging shot of six or seven C.H.P. cars following the Nissan, the only suspense was how much longer the Channel 2 helicopter could continue to bring us that image. By heading out into the High Desert, they explained, they were now nowhere near any open airfield where the chopper could land and refuel in order to get back to home base. And they were still maybe an hour from Victorville.
Just shy of Midnight, they announced that Stu and his pilot had to get back so they weren't able to show us any more of this chase and they instead ran Entertainment Tonight. Anyone who'd been watching the chase since coverage commenced had seen about 50 minutes of an adventure but wouldn't be able to view its conclusion. Ironically, on the way back to home base, the CBS copter did get some shots of a far more exciting chase involving a motorcycle but I don't think those were broadcast live.
The Nissan chase wrapped up just before 1 AM at a gas station in Victorville. Apparently, the police did lay down some spike strips that punctured the suspect's tires but he still made it to the station where much of his family was waiting for him…and there, he gave up without a struggle. It appears that something was going through his mind: A fear that when he surrendered, he'd be shot, regardless of what he did. So he phoned his family from the car and had them waiting there for him, presuming — and this is just a theory on my part — that the cops were less likely to open fire if he was surrounded by his loved ones.
If that's what was on his mind, he may have been a rarity: A fleeing driver who was actually thinking (somewhat) straight. That might even explain why he was using his turn indicator, trying to break as few laws as possible. He would have been better off giving up two hours earlier and he could have done it without being shot…but at least he wasn't under the delusion he could outrun them.