Letter: Jewelry heist chase, UPS truck shootout could have been prevented
Re the Dec. 7 article “Questions surround hijacked UPS truck and fatal shootout:” The deaths could have been averted if the chase had not taken place.
The robbers would have gotten away and eventually been apprehended without risking the lives of innocent people.
How can the police justify shooting into a UPS truck knowing there was a hostage on board and innocent people all around?
They could have tracked the robbers from the air and then used a hostage negotiator, not bullets.
Often, as in this case, the crime of robbing a Coral Gables jewelry store did not justify the deaths of two innocent people — a hostage and a bystander — and or the potential of more being injured or killed.
If you calculate the loss of life, pursuit was unnecessary.
According to PursuitSAFETY (www.pursuitsafety.org), an organization that was formed to prevent the tragedies caused by pursuits, crashes as a result of drivers fleeing from police, on average kill one person a day including more than one third of innocent bystanders. Plus, one officer is killed every six to eight weeks.
From 1979 to 2017, more than over 13,000 people were killed as a result of police chases.
Not only does that number increase every year, in actuality the number is probably much higher because local police departments are often hesitant to report whether a fatal crash was the result of a police chase.
To prevent unwarranted deaths and injuries, all police departments should modify their pursuit policies to drastically curtail police chases.
Furthermore, and police academies should teach that saving innocent lives is most important.
In my opinion There is no justification to warrant any high-speed chase.
Steven Z. Levinson,
Miami Beach
This story was originally published December 11, 2019 at 2:21 AM.
