The Woodall Rodgers Freeway overpass near downtown Dallas was shut down for much of Thursday morning after a car carrying four passengers went over the side of the ramp and crashed below, killing all four at the scene.
Friday morning, the Dallas County Medical Examiner named the four individuals involved as Sabria Lacey, DeAvion Aubert, Robert Gowans Jr. and Anthony Lisbon. Ranging in age from 21 to 22 years, the group was evading Irving police in a stolen vehicle.
Irving police released dashcam footage showing the stolen vehicle speeding up the ramp and then bursting into flames after it fell. NBC 5 reported that “officers with the Dallas Police, Dallas County Sheriff’s Office and Dallas Fire-Rescue all arrived and tried to provide first aid to the occupants of the stolen vehicle.”
On Thursday, CBS 11 reported that Irving police have been involved in more than 500 chases since 2018, and that many of them evolved into high-speed affairs.
“Records also show more than one in every four Irving police chases reached or exceeded 100 mph. Police have not said what speed Thursday’s chase reached,” the report stated. “Out of the 515 Irving police chases since 2018, only one time was an officer disciplined for failing to follow the department’s pursuit policy. The officer was suspended by the department, according to police records.”
Earlier this week, The Dallas Morning News reported on the aftermath of a police chase gone wrong when a father and his 3-year-old son were seriously injured during a Garland police pursuit in which they were not the suspects. The report says the injuries resulted from “a terrifying accident caused by what appears to be a violation of Garland’s police pursuit policy.”
Also in Garland, another police chase ended when 32-year-old officer Joe Tsai was killed in pursuit of a vehicle with a fake paper license tag in November.
“Our agency has one of the stricter pursuit policies here in the region.” – Arlington police spokesperson
We reached out to several of the largest police departments in North Texas, including Dallas, Arlington, Plano, Frisco, Fort Worth, Denton and Carrollton, for more about their pursuit policies and to determine how many chases their officers have been involved in over the past few years. Some departments asked us to file an open records request for both pieces of info (which we did), while others asked us to file that request for just the stats. Some other departments, however, filled us in on both their pursuit policy and the number of chases their offices have been involved in recently.
From 2022 until now, Dallas Police Department officers have pursued more than 180 chases: 90 in 2022, 89 in 2023 and three so far this year.
According to the DPD’s General Orders an officer may engage in a chase only under certain conditions, including “when the officer has probable cause to believe that a felony involving the use or threat of physical force or violence has been, or is about to be, committed,” among a number of other circumstances. Should a Dallas officer see “a suspect discharge a firearm in a public place or display a firearm in a public place in a threatening manner,” a chase can be engaged.
From 2018 to 2022, Arlington police officers engaged in 342 chases (numbers for 2023 haven’t been posted yet). According to the annual pursuit analysis report the department publishes, the vast majority of Arlington police chases are due to suspected felonies or suspected DWIs. In 2022 alone, there were 63 police chases in Arlington, with 15 ending in the suspect voluntarily stopping and 13 ending in a collision. The remaining chases in 2022 ended because of officer or supervisor decisions.
A spokesperson for the Arlington Police Department said it does not release its general orders, but that the department requires serious discretion in this area.
“Our agency has one of the stricter pursuit policies here in the region,” the spokesperson explained via email. “It lays out very specific conditions that must be met for an APD officer to initiate a pursuit. It also gives officers and their supervisors flexibility to terminate pursuits if they feel it is no longer safe or prudent for the pursuit to continue.”
Fort Worth would provide neither the police policy for pursuits nor any statistics regarding chases, but KERA reported this week that Cowtown cops have been kept rather busy with chases on its roads in recent years.
“Over the past six years, nearly 1 of out every 3 Fort Worth Police Department car chases have caused a crash,” the KERA report stated. “Fort Worth officers initiated 1,331 pursuits from 2017 to 2022, for an average of four chases a week, according to data from the department’s use of force reports analyzed by the Fort Worth Report. Of those, 432 resulted in an accident.”
Police chases are a hot topic across all of Texas, and especially near the border where Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial and costly border security plan, Operation Lone Star, looms large. In November 2023, Human Rights Watch published a 77-page report noting that the “program led to crashes that killed at least 74 people and injured at least another 189 in a 29-month period.”
