[MISSION VALLEY Sat Jun 20, 4:30 p.m.] — The car at the center of Saturday’s sprawling police pursuit was not a getaway vehicle or a weapon. It was a 2014 Ford Fusion — a white sedan still in service as a marked taxi, logos and all, worth maybe $9,000.
A woman driving that taxi led San Diego County Sheriff’s deputies on a chase that began as a stolen-vehicle report in Santee around 4:30 p.m. June 20 and wound east on SR-52, south on SR-67, through El Cajon and west on Interstate 8 before ending in Mission Valley. San Diego police were brought in for a K9 unit; the CHP joined when the pursuit returned to the freeway. Along the way the driver stopped, stepped out, got back in and drove erratically for miles. Officers deployed spike strips twice, deflating the taxi’s right front tire — and disabling an uninvolved motorist’s small white sedan in the process. About 20 patrol cars rolled code 3. A black BMW swerved into one of them, causing a non-injury crash that blocked lanes past the Texas Street overpass. It ended past the Mission Center Road exit, where a police dog and officers pulled the woman from the car. She was arrested and taken by ambulance.
Now tally what it cost to recover that $9,000 taxi.
Two spike-strip deployments. One damaged patrol vehicle and a damaged BMW. An innocent driver who did nothing but share a freeway now needs a new set of tires. The Sheriff’s Department committed the bulk of the response, with SDPD lending a K9 unit and the CHP folding in on jurisdiction — roughly 20 patrol cars rolling code 3, an ASTREA helicopter overhead, and an ambulance and the medical workup that follow a K9 bite and use of force. Add the freeway traffic breaks that forced hundreds of drivers to brake hard and scramble across lanes — the exact conditions that produced Saturday’s secondary crash.
It is fair to ask whether the math works. The point of a pursuit is to stop a danger to the public, but the pursuit itself becomes the danger: high speeds, weaving traffic breaks, spike strips that catch the wrong car, and rattled drivers making split-second mistakes at freeway speed. When the prize is a 12-year-old midsize sedan, the public absorbs far more risk and cost than the property is worth.
And consider what was being chased: a clearly marked taxi, logos and all — about the most trackable vehicle on the road. It is exactly the kind of target that an aircraft already overhead and a plate already in the system can follow to a stop without a freeway chase. Many law-enforcement agencies have shifted toward restrictive pursuit policies that reserve chases for violent felonies, not stolen property, for precisely this reason. Saturday ended, by luck, with an arrest and no bystander injuries. Luck is not a policy. The next $9,000 car could cost a great deal more than $9,000.
