Three of them were handsome young boys—two aged 14, one 15—who had just finished the eighth grade and were preparing to climb the steps to Dudley High School. Another was a 17-year-old. And the fifth was a tiny two-month-old girl whose parents would never see her smash a birthday cake on her first birthday or take her first steps.

The victims’ deaths have left families and Triad residents wondering whether police pursuits are worth the cost of human life, a public safety debate that has raged across the country for decades.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data shows that between 1982 and 2020, 390 people died in speeding police pursuits in North Carolina.

Five of those deaths occurred in Greensboro on Sept. 30, 2017, when a suspect driving a car that had been reported stolen, trying to elude a Guilford County sheriff’s deputy, ran a red light at about 130 mph and hit two young women in another car on Battleground Avenue, killing all five people involved — and sending shockwaves through the community.

From 2012 to 2022, the state recorded 138 high-speed pursuit fatalities. Those fatalities included two law enforcement officers and 72 people who were in the suspects’ vehicles. And the number of innocent bystanders, or passengers in cars struck by suspects during the chase, was a staggering 61, the NHTS found.

The statistics show a disturbing pattern. Consider that in 2018, the death toll in North Carolina was nine. Four years later, that number had risen to 22.

The number of police pursuits in North Carolina has more than doubled in recent years, from 454 in 2019 to 1,053 in 2022, according to State Highway Patrol data.

A look at pursuit-related fatalities nationwide shows that deaths increased by 43% between 2010 and 2020, NHTS data shows. And in 2020, 464 people died as a result of pursuits — the most since 2007, when 372 people died.

Over the past 42 years, 4,200 innocent bystanders have been killed nationwide as a result of police pursuits. That’s an average of 100 people per year.

These numbers beg the question: why chase at all?

It’s a question Dr. Geoff Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina and a leading national expert on risky policing, has been working on for about 30 years.

His research has shown that the risk of fatal crashes can be reduced if law enforcement agencies restrict their pursuit policies, limiting the types of offenders police can pursue to only the most serious crimes.

For example, Alpert and a team of security experts said in a 2023 Police Executive Research Forum report that authorities should only prosecute suspects who have committed violent crimes or pose an imminent threat of committing further crimes.

The report revealed further data showing the effects of pursuits. For example, between 2009 and 2013, an analysis of 100 police pursuits found that suspects were responsible for 76% of serious injuries, 21% were bystanders and 3% were law enforcement officers.

“You can catch a suspect another day, but you can’t get his life back,” Chuck Wexler, the group’s executive director, said in a letter to the authors.

Alpert and other reform advocates are encouraging law enforcement officers to stop pursuing suspects and instead focus on precision investigative techniques, such as knocking on doors and using search warrants to catch suspects at a later date.

Officers can also try tracking methods like Star Chase, a relatively new product that allows officers to place GPS stickers on suspect vehicles and monitor them remotely.

Rigorous training and clear policies that include restraints and accountability are also key to reducing police pursuit-related fatalities, according to Alpert, who has studied pursuit safety for the U.S. Department of Justice and has taught at the FBI National Academy and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.

“We must remember that officers to want catch the bad guy, so it’s a matter of training and explaining to the young officers why the chase is so dangerous,” Alpert said. “You teach them why shouldn’t pursuit. Most are trained in driving, but not necessarily in When ”drive at high speed.”

Research shows that a police officer’s age is a determinant of whether or not he will pursue a person.

“Younger officers are aggressive and probably enjoy the thrill of the chase, whereas older officers are more experienced and won’t take the risk,” Alpert said. “You grow out of the desire to chase when you see a dead baby or a mangled child. In fact, you may never be in a chase again.”

Tom Gleason, a retired Florida police captain, knows this kind of pain all too well.

He currently trains police in pursuit strategies and security protocols and serves as a security expert for the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Two weeks after I graduated from the academy, at 1 a.m., I chased a car because its tail light was out. … We didn’t have a pursuit policy and there was an accident,” Gleason said from Tallahassee during a recent telephone interview.

As a result of the accident, another officer suffered a spinal injury.

“I almost quit,” he said.

Gleason agrees with Alpert that stricter rules should be put in place regarding pursuits, noting that most suspects respond to pursuits by driving faster.

“If you know for sure who is driving the vehicle, they are not armed and have not committed a violent crime, you should not pursue and you should make an arrest at a later date,” Gleason said. “It is not worth putting the officer or the public at risk.”

In an ideal world, pursuit guidelines would be standardized so that law enforcement agencies across the country would have the same guidelines on when and how to conduct a pursuit.

But North Carolina, like most states, has no unified policy, and its 400 police departments and 100 sheriff’s offices have dozens of different guidelines.

Guilford County Sheriff Danny Rogers, elected in 2018, changed his office’s policies in the wake of the Battleground tragedy to ban prosecution of suspects for non-violent offenses such as speeding, vehicle theft and shoplifting.

Rogers, he said in a recent telephone interview, placed great emphasis on training and supervision.

“We wanted to make sure we were taking the young deputies by the reins. We had to make sure we were protecting the deputies and the innocent people,” Rogers said of reducing pursuits.

Deputies refrain from pursuits for non-violent crimes. As an additional measure, supervisors are continually trained on how to direct deputies if they must engage in pursuit.

Equally important, Rogers added that supervisors will not hesitate to end a pursuit if it endangers public safety or is pointless.

In Hendersonville, Police Chief Blair Myhand has placed restrictions on his department’s pursuit policy, authorizing pursuits only for violent offenders who commit crimes and pose an immediate threat.

“It’s a growing trend, and I support it, and I believe that the issue of police prosecution policy is going to be a major, emerging issue that departments (across the state) are going to have to address in the next few years,” said Myhand, a past president of the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police. “The policies are so varied across the state. Some will prosecute you to Wyoming, and some won’t prosecute you at all.”

Myhand added that when evaluating such a policy, it is also important to consider what is acceptable in a given community.

“Our community is pretty congested, the roads are narrow, a lot of my residents are elderly retirees,” he explained. The chases are “high-risk, extremely dangerous” events where “the smallest mistake can have fatal consequences. Someone can get killed while chasing someone who has stolen something from a local retail store.”

Greensboro Police Chief John Thompson recently said he plans to review his department’s policy on when — and when not — to initiate pursuits.

His comments on the pursuit law came after two pursuit-related crashes in three weeks in Greensboro left four teenagers dead and one police officer with life-threatening injuries.

“When there is a loss of life or serious injury, we want to look at our policies and procedures and determine if there is anything we can learn and what we can improve,” Thompson said in an emailed response to questions from the News & Record.

The department’s 14-page pursuit policy allows pursuits only for serious crimes, such as violent crimes, break-ins or drunk drivers. Officers can pursue a suspect responsible for a “hit-and-run” crime involving serious injury or a “high-risk” operation approved by senior management. If the situation poses a risk to the public, the department’s patrol commander can also initiate a pursuit.

Jenean Chapman, the grandmother of 14-year-old Kenyan Saxton-Reese, who was driving the car involved in the deadly July 17 chase, said she couldn’t understand why Greensboro police were chasing her grandson and his friends when they had not committed any violent crimes.

Saxton-Reese — as well as passengers Brandon Bowie, 14, and Derrion Sonjay Legrand, 15 — died in what authorities described as a “near head-on collision” with a police car in the 3900 block of Walker Avenue around 2:50 a.m. Wednesday.

The chase that led to the fiery crash began when an officer spotted the boys in a Nissan Altima driving the wrong way at the intersection of West Market Street and East Lake Drive. The officer pursued the boys because he believed the driver was intoxicated, police said. A second officer, K.D. Benson, who responded to the scene, collided with the teens’ car. He survived but suffered serious injuries.

The crash report says Saxton-Reese was traveling between 85 and 90 miles per hour and the patrol car was traveling between 45 and 55 miles per hour at the time of collision.

Shaking her head on the porch as her daughter called to make funeral arrangements for Saxton-Reese, Chapman said, “I don’t think they should go after someone unless they killed someone or robbed a bank. They were just kids.”