A few years back, my partner picked up the phone. Patrol sergeant on the other end, asking for our read on something from the night before — hoping to avoid the full pursuit report package if we could tell him it wasn't one.
I was just outside his door. He popped it on speaker so we could both listen in.
The sergeant walked us through it. Officers had been sent to a noise complaint, a house party spilling out onto the street. As they rolled up, a vehicle was already pulling away. One cruiser did a U-turn, fell in behind it, and the plan became a tandem stop.
For anyone who hasn't run one: a tandem stop is a prevention tool, not a pursuit termination tool. It's supposed to be a surprise. One cruiser gets out in front of the target vehicle, the second comes up behind, both hit the brakes and full emergency equipment at the same moment, and the vehicle gets boxed in before the driver has time to think about it. It's not foolproof — a committed driver can still ram out or bolt — but the whole point is preventing things from ever becoming a pursuit in the first place.
The sergeant told us the subject car tried to break out, hit one of the cruisers, then lost control and crashed into a house. The two cruisers pinned it. Arrest made.
My partner and I talked it over for maybe thirty seconds. Sounded like officers doing exactly what they were trained to do — attempting to prevent a pursuit, contact happened mid-maneuver, the tandem just took longer than usual to complete. We called it: not a pursuit.
Three or four days later, I'm in my office with my partner. A call pops up on my phone saying Deputy Chief. I answer it on speaker so we're both on it.
He's furious. Swearing, asking how the hell we could not call that a pursuit, did we have any idea how much damage was in those photos.
We hadn't seen any photos. We said so.
"You haven't seen the pictures?" Now he's more incredulous than angry. We explained — the sergeant had called in, given us the overview, and based on what we were told, it read as a tandem stop with contact, not a pursuit.
He told us to get the file. Ten minutes later we had the photos and the Major Collision Bureau report, and the actual sequence looked nothing like what we'd been told.
The first officer had gotten out of his cruiser and was on foot approaching the house when the group at the party saw him and scrambled for the car. He banged on the trunk, directing them to stop. The car took off anyway. That's the part that changes everything — a directed stop that gets refused is the start of a pursuit, not the setup for a tandem.
From there: the second unit swung in to block, the subject vehicle went around it, made two turns onto a six-lane arterial, and the original officer — knowing the driver had already refused a lawful direction to stop — ran out in front of the car trying to stop it there. The car hit that cruiser, spinning it a full 360. The subject vehicle tried to regain control. It didn't. It went up over the sidewalk and boulevard, hit a ten-foot sound barrier wall, came back down through a bus shelter, got shouldered by the second cruiser back into the wall a second time, then spun out again and slid into a house's front porch. Roughly 600 meters — close to 2,000 feet — of debris field before it came to rest. No injuries, thank God, but the physical evidence alone — tire marks up onto the boulevard, a flattened sound wall, a demolished bus shelter, a porch shoved sideways — told a story that had nothing to do with a routine tandem stop.
It was a pursuit. A long one, and by the time it ended, an obvious one.
Here's what stuck with me, more than the deputy chief chewing us out: we gave a confident, technically-reasoned opinion off a secondhand summary, and we were wrong — not because our reasoning was bad, but because the facts we reasoned from were incomplete. "Sounds like a tandem stop" was a fair read of what we were told. It just wasn't what happened.
I don't think the sergeant lied to us. I think he gave us the shape of the story as he understood it in the moment. But from that day forward, I've been very adamant, every time someone calls our office for a read: this opinion is based only on what you've just told me. If there's more to it — and there's almost always more to it — my opinion may change once I see it.
That matters more today than it ever did. With dash cams and security video on nearly every call now, we don't get to render an opinion off a verbal summary and hope it holds up. The video is going to corroborate the story or it isn't, and if we've gone on record with a read the footage contradicts, that's on us. State the facts you actually have, and wait for the evidence before you commit to an opinion out loud.
If you sit on anything resembling a review committee — pursuit, collision, use of force — you already know this instinct. But it's worth saying out loud once in a while: the story you're told first is rarely the whole story, and the gap between them is exactly where the trouble lives.
Anyone else have a call where the file told a completely different story than the summary? I'd genuinely like to hear it.
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon
