Are the dangers of high speed pursuits worth the public safety benefit?

There was NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell at a crime briefing on Thursday, clotheslining a strawman and then kicking it in the ribs for good measure:

“Are we not supposed to engage a scooter that drives down Vermilyea Ave. in Washington Heights with two occupants, with cops standing 50 feet away writing a C summons for urination, and someone jumps off that moped, walks up to a gentleman in front of his building enjoying the 4th of July, shoots and kills him — are we not supposed to engage that?”

He answered himself: “We will.”

And there was Chell cuffing the strawman he’d roughed up, and charging it with obstruction of justice:

“Are we not supposed to engage a white car with mismatched plates, that two occupants felt the need to chase kids down a block and fire 12 rounds into a crowd, killing an 18-year-old kid who’s an aspiring singer?”

He answered himself: “Yeah, we’re going to chase that car, and we did.”

Of course, no one was asking him if the police are supposed to engage with people in vehicles committing murders.

But that was a big part of Chell’s answer to something that people, including some police officials, really are asking: Why has the NYPD suddenly floored the pedal on dangerous cop car chases?

There were 133 vehicle pursuits this January, nearly as many as in all of 2022.

The 304 chases in the first three months of this year is nearly as many as in the last three years of the de Blasio administration.

There had been about one police car chase every three days in New York over the last several years, as it had joined other big cities in a consensus that those should be a last resort as the damage to people and property from those pursuits often exceed the benefit to public safety.

Now, there are about three chases every day, including many that don’t end well.

The great majority of those don’t involve people firing guns from vehicles, but cops pursuing people in cars with stolen plates or on rides that aren’t street legal — and putting the lives of everyone involved or who happened to be passing by at real risk to try and make stops that tend to end up, if all goes according to plan, with a desk appearance ticket.

Conveniently, the NYPD doesn’t appear to keep numbers on the property damage, injuries or deaths that inevitably result from some of these chases but, a concerned police official said, “for every fatality, there’s something like 10 property damage incidents where we wreck our car or somebody else’s car or they do.”

The official went on: “This is a lesson we’d learned a long time ago. Policing has pretty much solved this problem, where we’ve decided that very conservative pursuit policies are necessary in urban environments.”

That lesson appears to be getting unlearned here now.

Asked by my colleague at The City, Yoav Gonan, about the eye-popping numbers we reported there, Chell started off by saying his aggressive new “Community Response Teams” were responding to citizen complaints about dirt bike riders on city streets and “ghost cars” with fake or obstructed plates that “drive around this community with reckless behavior without a care in the world, like they don’t have to answer to anybody.”

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Indeed, the NYPD had seemed to give up on patrolling the roads during the pandemic, letting cameras pick up that work so that people going 38 in a 25 mph zone racked up tickets while people breaking 100 on the Belt Parkway or riding ATV caravans through city streets had little to fear.

“So we made a pledge,” Chell continued. “No more. You’re not going to drive around this city in a reckless manner thinking you can do whatever you want to do with your attitude and commit crimes at that rate.”

But what starts off as a useful tactic to discourage dangerous activities and find really bad guys can turn into an end of its own as management fixates on an approach while losing sight of the broader goal of public safety.

Chell noted that supervisors can call off chases and claimed that there’s better supervision now, but offered no specifics about that.

“It’s almost like they’re saying the gloves are off but guys are running with it too much, like how we doubled down on stop and frisk,” the police official said.

“At first it was, ‘yeah, maybe we should stop people that look like they have guns.’ But then it turned into ‘we need 20 stops a month from you.’ ”

Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.