To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on dut

To put this in perspective, that’s about the same number of bystanders killed just by police chases, per year, as all officers killed by all causes while on duty in 2022, according to the FBI’s database of deaths and assaults of police officers. There are a lot fewer police officers than there are total people in the US, so it’s normally not useful to compare figures like this, however, in this case, it kind of is, because these are all deaths that involve police action, just like all the officer deaths (necessarily) are. If we (reasonably, I think) default to assuming all police killed in the line of duty by any cause basically did not “have it coming” (contrary to the other 75% of chase deaths that I’m ignoring for this analysis to focus on the least-defensible harm) and should be regarded as innocents, then bystander deaths in police chases are doubling the figure of total annual wholly-unwarranted deaths due to police action, just for this one narrow category of activity. If we regard police chase deaths as nearly always preventable and fundamentally “the fault” of police, and then only consider felonious killing of police officers (as opposed to purely accidental ones) for our comparison, then we’re looking at ~60 police deaths in 2022 vs ~125 bystander deaths from police chases, so the relative proportion of preventable harm during police activities due to this policy looks even worse. And this is while totally disregarding the people being chased as worth ethical consideration in the do-or-don’t chase calculus. Plus I don’t know if that figure counts passengers as bystanders.