The Courier Journal: Slamming the breaks on high-speed pursuits with StarChase and other technology

The police chase sped through Old Louisville a week before Christmas.

The roads were dark and slick that night in 2008 as the fleeing car careened through the historic neighborhood, six police cruisers in its wake. The car’s passengers, three teen brothers and their friend, had accepted a ride — not knowing the vehicle was stolen.

All four died when the Honda Accord, which had reached speeds of nearly 80 mph, crashed into a tree on South First Street.

The force of the wreck split the car in half.

Years later, the city of Louisville would pay the boys’ families $1.6 million to settle the case, although it admitted no fault.

A decade after the Old Louisville wreck, the crashes — and the payouts — resulting from high-speed police pursuits continue.

In the past six years, more than half of the police chases — 94 in all — on Louisville’s streets have ended in crashes, according to a Courier Journal review of police records.

In cases big and small, The Courier Journal found the city and its insurers have paid out nearly $3 million among five cases, including the $1.6 million settlement, over the past three years to police chase victims and their families.

These settlements are reached behind closed doors, negotiated by attorneys outside the courtroom without any oversight by metro council members.

The Courier Journal found:

• The city paid nearly $79,000 this summer to the owners of Tandem Sport on Baxter Avenue after it was damaged in 2018 when a police cruiser chasing an armed robbery suspect lost control and crashed through the storefront window.
• Two years ago, the city settled a suit filed by LaQuita Miles, paying her $30,242 after she collided with an officer who had been pursuing a suspect for a traffic violation. The officer was suspended for three days, in part, for failing to exercise “due regard” for the safety of others on the roadway.
• The family of Alexus Gray, a 16-year-old killed in 2017 after the car in which she was a passenger crashed and burst into flames, received nearly $1 million from the city earlier this year. Louisville police had been chasing the car — driven by her boyfriend, who had ran a red light — just seconds before the crash.

After 2012, when LMPD tightened its pursuit rules, the department saw chase numbers and injuries fall.

But those numbers are on the rise, particularly after Police Chief Steve Conrad issued a “special order” in June that allows officers to chase after stolen cars.

The relaxed pursuit policy raises the potential of more crashes — and more lawsuits and high-dollar settlements, attorneys say.

And it renews the question many cities, including Louisville, increasingly are asking: Are high-speed police chases simply not worth the risk?

To Louisville attorney Sam Aguiar, the answer is clear. Police officers should initiate chases far less often, he said.

“The thing that I always go back to with pursuits is, ‘What’s the reasonable expectation of how it’s going to end?'” Aguiar said. “Because if … they’ve (suspects) driven miles at 100 miles an hour, do you really think they’re probably just going to stop, put their hands up, get out of the vehicle and say, ‘You got us?’

“No. They’re gonna end in a wreck. And they’re going to end with people getting hurt.”

Officers also worry about the risks, said Nicolai Jilek, president of the union for Louisville Metro Police.

Pursuits speak to a core mission of policing: Catching suspected bad guys. But when things go wrong, Jilek said, officers can be traumatized by crashes while also dealing with the public and professional fallout.

“You’ve got officers that feel like, ‘OK, I’m expected to do this,'” he said, referring to the department’s newly loosened policy that allows officers to chase stolen cars.

“‘But if anything doesn’t look right, or anything goes wrong, I’m gonna be hung out to dry,'” Jilek said. “… And so there is absolute tension when they start to loosen those things. … Like, ‘I know you want me to do that. But are you going to have my back?'”

11 seconds later, a bright flash

The crash that killed Alexus Gray, 16, and her boyfriend, Isaiah Basham, illustrates the complexity of Louisville’s pursuit crashes — and the desire to assign blame.

It was around 3:30 a.m. July 16, 2017, when Officer Lacey Ezell saw the teens’ SUV run a stoplight near Brownsboro Road and Herr Lane.

Ezell attempted to pull the car over, but it didn’t stop.

With her emergency lights and siren on, she chased the fleeing SUV. The teens’ vehicle eventually accelerated up to 80 mph or more, Ezell later told investigators.

But when the speeding SUV veered into oncoming traffic to pass another vehicle, Ezell said she turned off her lights and sirens and slowed down, giving up the chase.

Eleven seconds later, she saw a bright flash down the road.

The SUV had struck a telephone utility box before hitting a tree, turning on its side and catching fire in front of the Westport Village shopping center.

Ezell and her partner scrambled for a fire extinguisher and tried to pull Gray and Basham from the car. But the fire grew too fast, with the teens helplessly stuck. Flames engulfed the SUV.

The wreckage was so badly burnt, investigators couldn’t determine the car’s make, model or color. The teens were identified through their dental records.

An investigation into a possible violation of the department’s pursuit policy ended in a “not sustained” finding for Ezell and a fellow officer.

However, the Louisville Metro Police Department says what happened that night wasn’t a pursuit.

LMPD policy defines a pursuit as “an active attempt by a law enforcement officer operating a police vehicle, utilizing emergency equipment, to apprehend the operator of a fleeing vehicle, who is attempting to avoid arrest by using speed or other evasive tactics.”

But, according to the department, Ezell never caught up to the speeding car and had stopped trying to chase it before it crashed and burned. That doesn’t qualify as a pursuit under police policy, it determined.

Aguiar, who represented Gray’s family in the wrongful death and negligence lawsuit against the department, disputed that assessment, saying all the elements of a pursuit were in play the night the girl died.

While the department stands by its determination, the city settled the case with Gray’s family in June for $975,000 — without admitting fault.

‘They didn’t want to pay another $1 million’

Aguiar believes the large settlement agreement stems from the department’s recognition that Ezell failed to fully adhere to the department’s pursuit policy.

On the night of the crash, Ezell did not turn her cruiser around after she called off the chase. It was too narrow a road to have done so, she told investigators.

At the time of the chase, officers who were ending a pursuit were required to stop or drive in the opposite direction of the fleeing car. Experts say such a maneuver is intended to show suspects they are no longer being pursued.

In turn, officers hope the suspects lower their speed and become less of a danger to the public.

Eight months after Aguiar filed suit on behalf of Gray, the department amended the “stop or turn” provision from its policy to allow officers to follow while slowing to the posted speed limit.

In an interview with The Courier Journal, Conrad said the department at times changes its policies as a result of litigation.

But police spokeswoman Jessie Halladay said the department changed its stop-or-turn policy to address the needs of officers terminating pursuits on the highway, where it is impossible to turn around.

‘Don’t get mad at the officer’

More than 75 years ago, a police chase in Owensboro ended with the suspect’s car crashing into a horse-drawn milk wagon, splitting the wagon in two and injuring its driver.

A resulting lawsuit made its way to the Kentucky Supreme Court, which in 1952 decided “police cannot be made insurers of the conduct of the culprits they chase.”

But in June 2019, the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned that precedent, which had prevented juries from assigning blame to officers when the people they chase harm bystanders.

That opinion followed a series of appeals involving the case of a bystander killed in 2014 during a police pursuit in Fayette County. The court’s 6-1 decision noted that times, as well as tort law, have changed.

Officers can now be held liable by juries for the damage caused by fleeing suspects during negligent pursuits.

The Louisville Metro Police Department issued a memo to all officers following the ruling, emphasizing that while the decision provides “an avenue of recovery which was previously not available,” officers still had legal defenses and protections.

“As long as they’re following our policy and clearly established law, they have nothing to worry about,” Conrad told The Courier Journal.

Still, Jilek said he is concerned for the officers he represents.

“When the officers of my lodge … pursue somebody, and it ends in a way where somebody is hurt — whether it be an officer or the citizen or the suspect — that officer is going to go through all kinds of hell,” he said.

Aside from the emotional burden officers feel when a pursuit ends poorly, they often face unfair media scrutiny, he said. Officers are just trying to do their jobs, Jilek said.

“Are you going to let us pursue? Then let us pursue,” he said. “But don’t get mad at the officer. Get mad at the department for making the policy.”

‘My baby lost his life’

When a Louisville officer initiates a pursuit, a series of reviews are sent up the chain of command.

Officials flag any suspected policy violations, which can lead to the chief opening an internal affairs investigation and possibly disciplining the officer.

A review of 30 such chase investigations completed between 2012 and 2018, 24 of which resulted in disciplinary action, shows letters of reprimand and one-day suspensions were the most common disciplinary actions when officers violated policy.

The department’s Public Integrity Unit investigates any pursuit that leads to a death or serious injury. The unit’s findings can lead to criminal charges against any of those involved.

Ernestine “Tina” Tyus is still waiting for the department’s findings into the crash that killed her grandson, Ki’Anthony Tyus, last December.

Ki’Anthony, an eighth grader in Jefferson County Public Schools, died Dec. 22, 2018, when a Lexus SUV crashed into a utility pole on Fern Valley Road during a police pursuit.

Ki’Anthony was riding in the car, which had been reported stolen.

The SUV’s 17-year-old driver, identified by police as Reco Smith, was indicted on murder charges in Ki’Anthony’s death.

Tyus, who raised Ki’Anthony, said she had warned her grandson against accepting rides from strangers.

“I used to stress to Ki’Anthony, ‘Don’t let nobody drive you to your death. Don’t jump in these cars. You don’t know if they’re stolen or what,'” Tyus said. “… And look what happened.”

 Funeral for Ki’Anthony Tyus, killed in police chase crash.

Tyus is now suing Smith, saying he made a “dangerous and reckless” decision to drive at high speeds through congested parts of Louisville.

She also has filed suit against the police department and the pursuing officer, Roger Marcum.

The complaint accuses Marcum of failing to follow the department’s pursuit policy, which, at the time, forbade officers from chasing cars unless they suspected a violent felony had been committed.

The Jefferson County Attorney’s Office, which is representing Marcum on behalf of the city, last month filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that Marcum can’t be held liable for Ki’Anthony’s death because of the qualified immunity afforded to him as a public official and because his actions weren’t a substantial factor in causing the crash.

Ki’Anthony would have turned 14 on Aug. 18.

To celebrate his life, friends and family gathered in Smoketown’s Ballard Park on a sweltering August afternoon. A collage of family photos propped against a basketball goal post documented his brief life.

MARTY PEARL/SPECIAL TO COURIER JOURNAL

In one, a pint-sized Ki’Anthony huddled with his cousins around the family dog. Below, school photos indicated the passing of time, baby teeth making way for their permanent replacements. And below that, a photo of 9-year-old Ki’Anthony in a hospital gown, his right leg immobilized before him.

It was at Ballard Park, roughly four years ago, where a stray bullet tore into the boy’s right leg. He would later become known as an anti-violence activist in the Louisville community.

Ki’Anthony died three days before Christmas. The toy drone Tyus bought for her grandson still sits in her living room, unopened, she said.

“I hate that my baby lost his life,” Tyus said. “My baby did not get a chance to live his dream. And it just hurts every day when I wake up.”

‘You know we are going to be sued’

Aguiar, the attorney in the Alexus Gray case, is representing Tyus in her suit against Smith and the department.

Years earlier, when Aguiar was a rookie lawyer, he represented the family of Aaron Shields, one of the boys who died in the 2008 Old Louisville crash.

Aaron and the other boys, brothers Marc, Demar and Jemar Claybrooks, had been on a field trip to a Christmas pageant with a local youth group. Afterward, when there weren’t enough seats left in the group’s van, chaperones directed the boys into a car driven by then 16-year-old Herbert Lee III.

A recording from a dashboard camera on the night of the deadly high-speed chase captured one of the officers involved, James Franklin, saying: “Nobody’s gonna want the city to get sued. You know we are going to be sued but who cares. We didn’t do anything wrong — period.”

Aguiar said he continues to take pursuit cases because of “the substantial risk that these pose to everybody.”

“I think there definitely needs to be a voice for these innocent bystanders,” he said. “Or the folks that just were in a car.”

Part Three: Are police chases worth the risk? More cities are saying no, but Louisville doubles down

Pressed for action after narcotics traffickers began turning their cars and trucks into “rolling drug houses,” the Milwaukee Police Department two years ago gave its officers freer rein to chase drug dealers down.

Over the next year, Milwaukee saw police pursuits soar 155%, surpassing 900 overall.

Six people died, including an officer. And more than 200 people were injured, a threefold increase.

Geoffrey Alpert, a nationally recognized expert on police pursuits, contends that Louisville could be heading down the same path: Pursuing a more aggressive pursuit policy that could get more people hurt or killed.

The Louisville Metro Police Department’s new temporary policy — which gives officers permission to chase stolen cars — may not be as lenient as Milwaukee’s rule allowing officers to chase down drug dealers and reckless drivers.

But, Alpert said, Louisville “is following down a dark path.”

It’s a path that major cities and some states are purposely avoiding, choosing instead to restrict police chases.

Lawmakers in Ohio and Connecticut, for example, are weighing strict pursuit standards following chase deaths in their states.

And the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department is now considering changes to its chase policy after two deadly pursuit crashes the same night in June.

National police groups recommend chasing only for violent felonies or when human life is endangered.

But pursuit policies in cities similarly sized to Louisville still vary widely, The Courier Journal found.

• Officers in Nashville, Tennessee, may pursue suspects demonstrating a disregard for the safety of others, “no matter the offense.”
• In Oklahoma City, officers can pursue anytime they have “reasonable suspicion” the driver has committed a crime, regardless of the type or severity.
• Conversely, officers in Kansas City, Missouri, are prohibited from pursuing suspects for minor offenses, such as traffic violations, unless officers also know the suspect was involved in a “dangerous felony” or presents a “clear and immediate danger” to the public.
• Similarly, in St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio, officers cannot pursue unless suspects were involved in a violent felony or present serious physical harm to others.

Few cities, however, are loosening their pursuit policies, as Louisville and Milwaukee are doing.

And as their pursuits rise, so do questions about the training and technology provided to officers.

“In policing, we will never be able to make it 100% safe,” said Nicolai Jilek, president of the Louisville Metro Police union. “But … the department and the city owe it to us to put us in that position to give us a shot of being successful.”

A death a day tied to pursuits

When LMPD Chief Steve Conrad ushered in the department’s 2012 policy limiting chases to suspects in violent felonies, Louisville joined a growing rank of cities clamping down on pursuits.

For decades, research has demonstrated the high risks of pursuit. From 1996 to 2015, roughly one person a day was killed in the U.S. in pursuit-related crashes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Jim Dudley understands the dangers.

During his 32 years as an officer with the San Francisco Police Department, Dudley estimates he was involved in at least 500 chases. Over the course of those pursuits, he sustained two concussions and a broken wrist.

He also witnessed another officer’s pursuit end tragically.

Standing on the side of the road attending to another police matter, Dudley watched as the suspect — who was being chased over a purse snatching — barreled through an intersection and into an unsuspecting car.

Three of the car’s four passengers were killed.

“When you know the dire consequences of a reckless pursuit, then you know it’s not worth it,” he said. “But that’s hindsight.”

Alpert, who has studied pursuits since the 1980s, said he supports policies like those Louisville instated when Conrad arrived at the department: Only allowing officers to chase people suspected of a violent felony, such as murder or armed robbery.

To Alpert, a criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina, the issue comes back to bystander safety.

In jurisdictions with lax pursuit rules, “going through an intersection is like Russian roulette,” he said.

“And cops need to understand that, even though they have lights and sirens, we don’t hear them all the time. We don’t expect that.”

No new training planned

Dudley retired from his position as deputy patrol chief in 2013 and now teaches at San Francisco State University. He co-hosts a podcast for PoliceOne.com in which he addresses issues facing police.

“Study after study shows that when your adrenaline pumps and your focus is narrowed, you might not consider all the possibilities,” he said, adding that officers, by nature of the job, want to apprehend criminals.

That’s why, Dudley said, supervision and training are especially important.

LMPD officers receive one hour of classroom instruction during academy training dedicated to pursuit policy. The 29-hour vehicle operations curriculum includes defensive and nighttime driving as well as evasive maneuvers.

Vehicle training includes two days at the vehicle operations track at the state’s Department of Criminal Justice Training in Richmond.

On the track, officers must decide whether to chase a “fleeing” car driven by an instructor while other instructors drive “civilian” cars on the roadway, said Lt. Brian Kuriger of LMPD’s Basic Training Section.

Though Louisville’s relaxed pursuit rules will put more officers in position to give chase, Conrad said the department has no plans to increase pursuit-specific training.

“As police officers, we drive for a living,” Conrad said, adding that officers drive in “emergency conditions” every day.

Before Louisville’s city-county merger in 2003, the department had a local drivers’ track, Conrad said. That land was sold and the area has since been redeveloped into a neighborhood. Conrad said the police department’s foundation once looked into constructing a new track, but the proposal fell through.

Without a local track, Conrad said his department has used parking lots throughout the city for driver training. But in general, he said, pursuit training hasn’t been the department’s focus.

Officers must receive 40 hours of training per year after leaving the academy. Conrad said he’s used those hours recently to provide training geared toward reducing officer-involved shootings.

“Every year, I’m trying to look at what it is we can do,” he said. “I wish we could do more training on it, (but) we don’t have the facilities here. And that is absolutely a budget issue.”

Jilek, the Louisville Fraternal Order of Police president, said he’s participated in the department’s parking lot “refresher courses.”

“The academy staff does the best they can with what they’re allowed to do,” he said. “… But at the end of the day, there’s a big difference between ‘refresher’ training and actual training.”

Metro Council President David James, a former Louisville police officer, acknowledged the possible dangers of pursuits and said training in a parking lot is no substitute for the city having its own drivers training facility.

“Loosening the pursuit policy is a needed action,” he said, “but just as needed is training officers how to properly do pursuits, which is impossible to do without a pursuit track.”

Spike strips and GPS ‘bullets’

Dudley, the retired San Francisco officer, said alternatives to pursuit exist.

If the fleeing suspect isn’t driving a stolen vehicle, Dudley said, officers can use the license plate number to identify the car’s owner. They can then call off the chase and later go to the owner’s residence with a warrant.

Departments also can use air support to follow fleeing vehicles, Dudley said, adding that officers can then slow down and, rather than chasing from behind, follow a suspect along a lateral route.

Other techniques — which do carry their own risks — can be used to stop or slow fleeing vehicles.

Officers can deploy spike strips, which are laid across the roadway in the fleeing suspect’s path to puncture tires. Louisville police records show the devices have been used fewer than 10 times in the last decade.

Some departments also use precision immobilization techniques, otherwise known as “PIT” maneuvers, in which an officer bumps a suspect’s vehicle from the side near the rear wheel, causing the vehicle to spin out.

Dudley said San Francisco police do not use the maneuver because it can be risky on that city’s narrow, congested streets. Disarming the driver of a “1,500-pound missile” is inherently dangerous, he said.

Nationally, some departments are looking to GPS “bullet” technology as a solution.

Trevor Fischbach, president of StarChase, said his company’s technology allows officers to catch criminals while keeping roadways safe.

Fischbach said StarChase technology is being used by law enforcement agencies in more than 20 states, as well as Canada and Europe. The StarChase system is installed on the front of a police cruiser.

If a suspect does not pull over when an officer signals, the officer can use the technology to launch and affix a GPS-tracking tag on the back of the fleeing car. The officer can then end the pursuit.

Fischbach said his company’s research shows that on average, suspects slow to within 5 miles of the speed limit within 2 minutes of being tagged when patrols back off. Officers can then track the car’s location and make an arrest once it has stopped.

The technology, once affixed, has an 80% arrest rate, according to Fischbach.

It also comes at a steep price. StarChase systems cost $5,000 to $6,000 per vehicle.

Fischbach said departments typically don’t install the technology on their entire police fleet.

“Agencies know where their problems lie,” he said, adding that departments have opted to install StarChase systems on cruisers used by specific tactical forces.

Jilek said officers would support anything that allows them to catch criminals with “the least amount of physical contact.” But he worries about right-to-privacy issues associated with such technology.

“There will always be an attorney … that will say, ‘You didn’t have a right to do that,'” he said. “And the police will be billed as an overbearing Big Brother again.”

Conrad said he received a solicitation from a company selling GPS-tagging systems the day his June special order relaxing police pursuit rules was in the news. He didn’t initially understand what the technology was, he said, but added that it sounds “really, really cool.”

Conrad said he would be open a “technological fix.” But, he said, “the money just isn’t there.”

A fatal chase over an illegal U-turn

Law enforcement agencies can apply for federal funding through the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, which, in fiscal year 2018, was allocated $269 million.

Grant records show the Louisville Metro Police have used funding from the JAG program in recent years to purchase in-car computers for its fleet of cruisers.

Jon Farris of Madison, Wisconsin, wants the federal government to earmark a portion of its JAG program money for pursuit-reduction training and technology. Farris founded the national advocacy group “Pursuit for Change” after his son, a bystander, was killed during a police pursuit.

In 2007, Paul Farris, 23, was in the backseat of a taxi heading home with his girlfriend to a Boston suburb when a fleeing suspect slammed into the cab, throwing Paul from the car.

Both Paul and the taxi driver were killed. Paul’s girlfriend was critically injured.

Police were chasing the suspect because he made an illegal U-turn.

FAMILY PHOTO

Jon Farris now lobbies Congress, educating lawmakers about the dangers of pursuits.

“The story needs to get out,” he said. “… More departments are considering tougher pursuit policies. You don’t see too many that are doing what Louisville did, which is weakening it over a period of time.”

Farris also is calling on Congress to create a national pursuit database.

Previous government reporting has relied on the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which has been noted to undercount the actual number of pursuits.

Farris said nationwide pursuit-specific data, including property damage, injuries and deaths, is necessary for policymakers to understand the scope of the issue.

“Unless national tracking is mandated, we’re never going to know the extent of this,” he said.

In the meantime, Farris said it comes back to policy, which he believes should set strict guidelines.

Farris criticized a recent revision Louisville made, formalized in 2018, that allows officers to pursue people they believe are “about to commit” a violent felony.

“I don’t know anybody that’s prescient,” he said, adding that the provision appeared to give officers a “fallback every time.”

As for chasing stolen cars, Farris said, “there’s other ways to get them back.”

“Lord knows how many of them get totaled anyway,” he said. “So you’d be better off trying another way to find them and not putting innocent bystanders at risk.”

For Farris, witnessing last year’s pursuit spike in nearby Milwaukee was maddening.

Every time a new pursuit causality flashes across the TV screen, he’s brought back to the 4 a.m. phone call telling him his son was dead.

“How are you going to feel if you get a phone call and your son, daughter, mom, dad, spouse, grandpa, someone you love, was killed because of a decision to pursue somebody … for something that at that point in time, no citizen was at risk?” he asked. “How would you feel? And if you had a way to stop that before it occurred, why wouldn’t you?”

About this story

Reporters Matthew Glowicki and Mandy McLaren spent more than four months examining police use of vehicle pursuits on Louisville roads.

They analyzed seven years of police pursuit data and policy, combed court records and news clippings, and spoke with pursuit victims, police, attorneys and experts to better understand the costs of the chase.

Data shows that pursuits happen in every part of Louisville and pursuit narratives are filled with reckless cars at high speeds, blown red lights and near misses. Each pursuit is inherently dangerous, putting at risk the lives of officers, the fleeing suspect and innocent bystanders.

These three stories examine the changing nature of chases in Louisville, the factors that led to those changes and the human and financial toll that remains long after the heat of pursuit cools.