In July 2020, an Arkansas State Trooper attempted to pull over Janice Nicole Harper for a speeding violation. Traveling south on US 67 in a Ford SUV, Harper turned on her hazard lights and slowed down as the officer continued to follow her vehicle. This goes on for several uneventful minutes in the dashboard video. Then, without any clear indicator as to why, State Trooper Rodney Dunn pulls alongside the car and nudges the left side of the vehicle near the back wheel. The SUV skids out as it veers across the highway and into the far left lane, rolls, and lands upside down with smoke billowing from the hood. When Dunn approaches the vehicle and asks why Harper—still trapped in the upside-down car—didn’t stop, she responds, “I didn’t feel like it was safe.” Dunn tells her, “Well, this is where you ended up.” A moment later, she tells Dunn that she is pregnant. His immediate response: “Well, ma’am, you’ve got to pull over when we stop [you].”

Sixteen months later, Harper settled a lawsuit against the Arkansas State Police that included revisions to the department’s pursuit policies and additional training in the use of “PIT Maneuvers,” short for “precision immobilization technique,” or the method used by Trooper Dunn. Specifically, the new policy set an “objective standard” for justifying PIT maneuvers only when a pursuing officer is attempting to “protect a third person or an officer from imminent death or serious physical injury.” Despite the claim that this new threshold replaced the previous “subjective standard,” it still left ample space for officer discretion and PIT maneuvers (also called “tactical vehicle interventions,” or TVIs) have actually become more common in the state. Between 2016 and 2022, the number of PITs used by Arkansas State Police rose an astonishing 387 percent. In 2023, three drivers were killed in three months as the result of PITs. Just last December, Arkansas Police were involved in seven PIT incidents in four days. Despite Harper’s suit raising public ire about PITs, the department continued to justify their use of the technique, blaming the public’s actions, not law enforcement, for its overuse. As director of the state police, Colonel Mike Hagar stated, while defending the practice, “They’ve been instructed to stop [the car], and more times than not, that’s going to be a TVI.”

Many police departments claim that PITs are necessary tools for halting vehicles that do pose a serious threat to the public. Some consider the maneuver a use of force; at certain speeds, they even concede it is a form of deadly force. But police tend to ignore or belittle the extent to which vehicular pursuit itself endangers the public, constituting a form of police violence. One reason is that police believe their training has given them mastery over high-speed pursuits, providing an illusion that they are in control even at high speeds. This is despite the fact that training does not mimic real-life scenarios—the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers teach trainees at only 25 to 35 miles per hour, with occasional demonstrations at 55 miles per hour. Nevertheless, police officers become confident that they can perform such a dangerous maneuver at speeds well over 100 mph. Meanwhile, reporting on PIT maneuvers reasserts claims of police expertise by showcasing training, rather than questioning the tactic itself.

PIT maneuvers, and police chases more broadly, place ordinary citizens in grave danger. No amount of training or increasingly strict department policies will change that, and in fact those “solutions” only serve to justify this use of force. There is good reason, then, to identify PIT maneuvers not as a benign policing technique but rather an overlooked and unchecked form of police brutality. Like all forms of police brutality, its essential purpose is not to protect the public but to violently reassert police authority. Janice Nicole Harper’s case is but one example that sharply illuminates how the PIT maneuver serves this function.

Despite a decade of renewed focus on police brutality, car chases and vehicular violence have not garnered much attention. In part, this is because there is something visceral about the physical violence of a police choke hold, an officer kneeling on a person’s neck, or law enforcement firing a weapon. Car crashes caused by police, however, do not resonate as police violence, in part because the risks of driving are so normalized, even as car crashes have recently become one of our greatest public health crises. The commonness of car crashes thus masks the source of police car violence: death from a car crash can easily be framed as the product of human error or displaced onto the inanimate though deadly object of the vehicle itself. In any case, we tend not to think about car chases and techniques like PIT maneuvers as police violence.

This is a mistake. At least 3,336 people died during vehicle pursuits from 2017 through 2022. More than one quarter of those who died in police chases were passengers, and 27.1 percent were pedestrians or other drivers.

To put these numbers in context, Campaign Zero’s “Mapping Police Violence” database estimates that the police killed 6,955 people in total in the same five-year period. That database only counts 162 police killings caused by “vehicular force,” but this is a significant undercount because it excludes bystanders and therefore does not capture the full scope of police car violence. Indeed, a recent report found that police pursuits caused between 311 and 455 fatal crashes annually between 2015 and 2020, a number that has remained consistent for decades.

There is good reason to identify PIT maneuvers not as a benign policing technique but rather an overlooked and unchecked form of police brutality.

Whether or not to count victims of police pursuits in figures of police killings is more than an esoteric question of data methods. It strikes at the very heart of how the police justify PIT maneuvers used to end high-speed pursuits: to protect the public. In part, the common exclusion of PIT maneuvers and police chases from discussions of police violence derives from the courts’ authorization of such policing techniques as legitimate forms of police force. In Scott v. Harris (2007), the US Supreme Court gave law enforcement the green light to consider PIT maneuvers a lawful use of police force when seeking to halt a high-speed chase, “notwithstanding the risk of serious harm to the suspect.” That justification completely relieves law enforcement of responsibility for causing the dangerous driving itself: the very existence of a high-speed chase derives from the fact that a driver is being pursued by a police officer. As Justice Stevens recognized in his dissent, any speculation “that if the officers had let [the driver] go, [he] might have been ‘just as likely’ to continue to drive recklessly as to slow down and wipe his brow,” was “unconvincing as a matter of common sense and improper as a matter of law.”

The segmentation of PIT maneuvers and high-speed chases from discussions of police violence, however, was not a foregone conclusion. Even today, only about half of police forces allow PITs in any scenario, while others limit the speed at which they can be performed. The PIT maneuver itself, like so many other violent policing techniques, actually began as a police reform. When some began scrutinizing police car chases in the 1980s, police reformers responded by arguing that the PIT maneuver offered a technocratic solution that could quash burgeoning criticism of police tactics, reassert the authority of law enforcement expertise, and justify vehicular force. PIT maneuvers thus offer a particularly illustrative example of how seemingly neutral or professional police practices—frequently framed as “reforms” to prior police misconduct—actually offer a cover for police violence.

As Sarah Seo has argued, policing an automotive society fundamentally altered American law enforcement: “The need to discipline drivers” required new forms of police discretion, the law’s accommodation of which “profoundly altered what it meant to live free from state intrusion.” Early in the 20th century, the authority of the police to “seize” citizens traveling on American roadways was an open legal question. Americans frequently recoiled at the idea that cops could stop them in their private vehicles, often for minor traffic violations. In 1925, though, the Supreme Court case Carroll v. United States established the “automobile exception” for warrantless searches based on reasonable suspicion. As Seo points out, rather than settling on a “jurisprudential philosophy [that] could both enable and limit police discretion … judges deferred to the police,” enshrining the discretionary power of police to define “reasonableness.” That discretionary authority became a bedrock for many police tactics, including the decision to pursue and immobilize fleeing vehicles.

The right of the police to engage in high speed chases and forcibly disable vehicles, though, would not be fully adjudicated until 2007. As such, police were largely left to their own devices. Some local leaders and citizens sought to limit the public safety hazard posed by police chases. As early as 1920, city managers in Norfolk, Virginia, ordered their police and fire departments that “reckless driving on city streets must be stopped” after a series of police chases had injured or killed civilians. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, more cities sought to limit the speed of police vehicles, as in DC, where police were not allowed to travel faster than 30 miles per hour. During World War II, in an effort to preserve automobiles and tires during rubber rationing, Kansas City prohibited the sounding of police sirens and limited all police vehicles to 45 miles per hour.

Despite these restrictions, however, from the 1920s onward, newspapers across the country reported the continued frequency of high-speed police chases. Most of this reporting emphasized and exaggerated the excitement of these pursuits rather than pointing to their inherent risks, playing to an increasingly popular genre of radio (and later, TV) shows: the car chase. Early radio shows marked an evolution in crime drama, shifting the narrative focus from identifying suspects to apprehending suspects. Some radio listeners were even treated to live action, since very early police radio broadcast over commercial airwaves and departments were required to play music between dispatches, leading Detroit’s commissioner to ask “Do we have to play a violin solo before we dispatch the police to catch a criminal?” In fact, they did, and over time Americans increasingly became accustomed to, and even excited by, the idea of police chases.

Car manufacturers, too, embraced high-speed pursuit as a promising market opportunity. In 1923, Ford advertised proudly that it had won all speed contests in a test sponsored by the Detroit Police Department, and its cars were thus well positioned to counter “bandits, thugs and bootleggers [who] have resorted to the use of high-powered cars.” Many of these cars were, no doubt, Fords. In 1950, Ford released its first dedicated police package, which included the “V-8 Interceptor” engine, a “special highway patrol engine, available only to Ford cars in law enforcement service.” In 1957, Law and Order magazine published an article on “Legal Hot Rods,” which excitedly described the Ford Interceptor as an “agile high powered bomb” that was capable of maneuvering “through thick traffic at high speeds.” Slogans like “It takes a Ford to catch a Ford,” “They don’t get away when you’ve got a Chevrolet,” and “Powered to pull anybody over” began appearing in law enforcement magazines, reinforcing the proverbial need for speed. Such advertising traded on excitement and played down the danger of police pursuits, normalizing the practice in police departments just as car chases in popular culture normalized them for the public.

In the 1980s, however, criminologists began to critically examine pursuits, weighing concerns for public safety against the presumed danger imposed by allowing suspects to flee. In 1986, two scholars described police vehicles as “the deadliest weapon in their arsenal,” following it up with a book comparing police vehicles to firearms as “instruments of deadly force.” They were right to do so. Studies in the 1960s found that one fifth of pursuits ended in somebody’s death, half resulted in injuries, and pursuits were causing about 500 deaths per year (recall, too, that about 500 people died each year in pursuits between 2017 and 2022). Later studies cast doubt on those figures, such that consensus regarding the risk of police pursuit for the general public remains elusive even today. Nevertheless, critical scholarship in the 1980s threw the logic of police pursuit into question and created a demand for new ways to bring an end to car chases more quickly and safely.

Enter the PIT maneuver.

The first documented police department to adopt PIT maneuvers as standard practice was the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia in 1985. The Fairfax police began teaching the technique to other departments, and it spread across the country in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Greensboro Police, for example, became the first in North Carolina to use it in 2004, and as recently as 2020, it was newly adopted by police in Harris County, Texas. But while many credit the Fairfax County Police with pioneering the tactic, this narrative obfuscates the true origins and context surrounding its emergence.

The technique was actually developed in the early 1980s by Bill Scott Racing, Inc. (BSR), located at Summit Point Raceway in West Virginia. Bill Scott, a professional race car driver who held a doctorate from Yale in geophysics, initially purchased Summit Point for his own training. But he quickly began using the facility to train federal agencies in high-speed maneuvers and other driving techniques including “counterterrorism tactics.” Today, the training facility markets itself as “the recognized leader in security and counterterrorism training,” and includes a host of driving courses alongside SWAT and firearms training, further demonstrating how the PIT and its history is deeply embedded in the militarized violence of policing.

Rooted in the expertise of professional drivers like Bill Scott, PIT maneuvers carried an aura of predictability and control that served to assuage concerns about the chaotic danger of police pursuits. As with other police reforms, its primary effect was to shroud violent police practices in new levels of expertise that justified otherwise excessive use of force and cultivated a professional hubris about the ability of cops to control an inherently uncontrollable situation.

Take, for example, the explanation of PITs provided by one Arkansas State Patrol spokesperson who told the Washington Post that the technique is “supposed to be a controlled maneuver based on all of the factors at that second the law enforcement officer’s bumper makes contact with the vehicle.” The technique, in this reasoning, only becomes dangerous when the fleeing citizen alters those factors: “If the suspect changes the dynamics in any way, it could very easily turn bad, and no question about it.” This is a remarkable abdication of responsibility, based essentially on the notion that PIT maneuvers would always be safe and effective if only suspects would cooperate and allow the police to crash more effectively into their vehicles. For this spokesperson, a fleeing suspect poses multiple challenges to police authority here by failing to stop in the first place and then undermining the supposed control that a technique like the PIT maneuver is meant to provide for the officer. It obscures the fact that police have total discretion over whether to use this highly dangerous technique, and that they are well aware of its capacity to seriously injure or kill individuals in the targeted car.

By making police believe they can control any situation and have a right to do so at any cost, PIT maneuvers, like all technocratic solutions to policing, actually make cops more deadly. Such lines of thinking cannot be corrected with new techniques or expanded training. In fact, they may actually be worsened by it. An important but underdiscussed consequence of these more advanced police training and tools is their incubation of a sense of infallibility that provides cover for otherwise inexcusable violence. As legal historian Anna Lvovsky argues, assumed professional expertise creates a “legitimating aura that supports [the police’s] own essentially identity-based bid for deference.” In other words, the police demand legitimacy because they are the police, and the main function of “expertise” is to simply back up those claims.

Police chases are not exciting or theatrical. They endanger all of us. They are lethal. No amount of training for our law enforcement officials can change this reality. More likely, training officers in techniques like PIT maneuvers will further enable and encourage our police to put the public at risk.

Moreover, the call to end PIT maneuvers is increasingly mainstream. Many police departments have already recognized that this tactic does not give the police control over high-speed pursuits and instead adds a level of danger beyond the chase itself. While some agencies ban the practice outright, others place restrictions on the speed at which police can perform the maneuver, as in Los Angeles, where PITs can only happen at speeds under 35 miles per hour. As a 2023 PERF report states, “Any predictability of this maneuver is lost at higher speeds, and the risk of the suspect vehicle rolling over or colliding into nearby objects and causing serious injury greatly increases.”

PIT maneuvers offer a window into a form of police violence that is deadly, unneeded, and largely unacknowledged. Encouragingly, though, eliminating this technique is an achievable step toward reducing the power of the police to inflict harm, one that many agencies have already taken. Reforming policies around it, as the case of Arkansas and the broader history of police reform have shown, will not suffice as long as they leave officer discretion intact. As the public remains deeply divided over the future of policing in the United States, eliminating PIT maneuvers offers a simple and effective step toward building a safer society.