About one-third of pursuits initiated by the Los Angeles Police Department between April 2023 and February 2025 ended in crashes, with the majority of those injured in pursuit crashes being innocent motorists and passengers, according to data presented by the department during a meeting of the Board of Police Commissioners Tuesday, March 25.
During that timeframe, LAPD initiated 1,910 pursuits, with 616 resulting in traffic crashes leading to 384 injuries, the data show. Of the injured, 198 were innocent people, 137 were suspects and 49 were officers.
Of the six deaths reported, three were suspects and three were third-party victims, the data show.
The data show that in 2024, despite the overall number of pursuits increasing, the percentage of pursuit-related traffic crashes remained “relatively stable,” the report said. But the number of injured innocent victims increased from 84 in 2023 to 114 in 2024.
“Part of the issue is that your third parties are completely unaware of what is happening around them,” Deputy Chief Donald Graham told the board Tuesday.
In offering examples, Graham said in instances where police were tracking the suspect, third-party victims may not have heard lights or seen sirens, or the suspect may have fled so fast from officers that “there was very little chance that at the termination they would have been aware of the lights and sirens at the time of termination.”
Police Commission President Erroll Southers noted contradictory statistics showing an increased number of injured third-party victims and an increase in pursuit cancellations, which doubled from 2023 to 2024, from 131 to 263.
“If we are increasing pursuit cancellations by that much and still having this kind of outcome in hurting people, what should we be doing different?” Southers asked.
“That’s the ongoing conversation,” Graham responded, pointing to an importance on the “out of policy” and “administrative disapproval” findings following pursuits.
In 2023, 151 pursuits involving 425 officers were deemed out of policy or were met with administrative disapproval, or both, the data show. That number dropped to 101 involving 277 officers in 2024.
Graham said some improvements have been made in an effort to mitigate the number of injuries and deaths resulting from pursuits, including more active supervision by sergeants and watch commanders, who are able to live stream the pursuits and act as an incident commander without actually being on scene.
According to department policy, when a pursuit is initiated, a supervisor is assigned to respond to the pursuit and provides oversight, declaring himself or herself the incident commander. During a pursuit, officers conduct a balance test to ensure the necessity of a pursuit weighed against the risks to the public’s safety.
“We’re seeing a lot more active supervision,” Sgt. Robert Ramos told the board. “They’re taking ownership of the pursuit, so they want to know how fast it’s going, what the conditions are.”
Graham said that moving forward, the Traffic Bureau planned to work with the training department using a variety of vehicle simulators to “gauge the effect of simulators on pursuit driving” and “to explore the idea of in service (Emergency Vehicle Operations Course) as part of our normal training…in a preventative measure instead of assigning officers to EVOC after an adverse finding on a pursuit.”
Graham and Ramos presented the data after Southers requested a follow-up report to a similar analysis that examined data from Jan. 1, 2018 to March 30, 2023 and was presented to the board in April 2023.
In that report, of 4,203 pursuits, 1,592 – roughly 38% – ended in crashes that left 1,018 injured and 14 dead. Of the injured, nearly half were third-party victims and nine of the deaths were of third-party victims, the data show.
In the first two months of 2025, 79 pursuits ended in four crashes, the data show.
“LAPD is committed to maximizing the safety of everybody on the roadway, while making logical attempts to apprehend dangerous and violent criminals,” Graham said.