Just because you see some fantastic car stunt in the movies, that doesn’t mean it’ll work in real life. An Oklahoma City police officer seems to have thought otherwise, though, jumping on the hood of a civilian’s car and enlisting their aid to pursue a teen on a minibike, reports KFOR.
The unnamed officer had attempted to stop two minibikes for riding at night without headlights. The minibikes took off, then separated as the officer chased them on foot. Body cam footage shows one minibike turned left at an intersection while the officer ran to a stopped car, climbing on top of the hood, saying, “Go, go, go! Drive, drive, drive!” The civilian followed the officer’s directions, enabling him to catch up to the minibike, jump off the hood, and tackle the teenage rider as if his life were a 1980s action flick.
NBC News reports that the officer says he:
Maintained due regard for the safety of the public, the assisting citizen, and the violator while attempting to bring the situation to a safe resolution.
One element missing from this statement is the safety of the officer himself. Hood surfing isn’t exactly the safest activity, which is why we rarely see police using this tactic outside of “T.J. Hooker” reruns.
Not worth the risk
“The benefit of apprehension must outweigh the risk of apprehension,” former Seattle police chief Carmen Best told NBC News. She’s right. Many police chases escalate that risk to the point where the chase is the greater hazard than the suspect. Sometimes, fleeing suspects resort to desperate measures they would not have otherwise taken, such as lobbing live grenades. Other times, police themselves are the hazard, catching air at triple-digit speeds or killing innocent civilians by accident.
Best went on to say:
Well, a whole host of things could’ve gone wrong. The officer could have fallen off of the car and been injured. A bystander could’ve been injured because we have a distracted driver who certainly isn’t trained to drive a car with a person on top of it.
She makes a valid point there — I doubt you get that kind of training outside of stunt driving school. Riding a minibike on public roads with no lights at night is unsafe and illegal, but hood surfing on a civilian’s car amps the danger up to much higher levels. As Elwood Blues once said, “You can’t outrun a Motorola.” It would have been safer to call in other officers to surround the area and block the minibike’s escape instead of jumping on a random driver’s hood to continue the chase. They might have even caught both minibikes that way.
