Assessing the value of police pursuit

Abstract

This article develops a method for assessing the costs and benefits of police pursuit. Using pursuit data from the State of Minnesota and cost and benefit data from both the insurance industry and scholarly efforts to estimate the costs of crime, we create “pursuit tradeoff ratios” for each of five types of pursuits. Using logistic regression, we analyze several factors said to affect pursuit outcomes. We show that the benefits of pursuit outweigh their costs across all five types of chases, but that some types of chases are less beneficial than others.