“You can get a suspect another day, but you can’t get a life back."

These are the words of Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a policy think tank, quoted in a recent AJC article.

Photo: erluko/Wikimedia Commons

The brutal truth of these words hit home on Monday evening, when Cooper Schoenke, a 19-year-old recent graduate of Drew Charter School, was killed in his Honda Accord when a suspect chased by a Georgia State Patrol officer ran a red light at the intersection of McLendon and Moreland Avenues. 

Was the suspect’s alleged offense murder? Rape? Armed robbery? No, this suspect was chased through a densely populated residential neighborhood after being spotted speeding and making “erratic lane changes” on the interstate. 

For the Georgia State Patrol, this is a longstanding pattern. According to an August 2024 AJC investigative report on GSP pursuits, troopers with the agency were involved in more than 6,700 pursuits in five years, and more than half of those ended in crashes. These crashes left 1,900 people injured and 63 people dead – a number that, this year, continues to climb.

As a result, Georgia’s death rate from police pursuits is the highest in the nation. 

Cooper Schoenke was only the latest person to die as a result of a police pursuit. Just a little over a week ago, Richard Wells, 26, died at the intersection of Peachtree Road and Piedmont Ave. when a robbery suspect chased by the Atlanta Police Department ran the red light there. Wells, who had recently moved to Atlanta, worked as an athletic trainer at the University of Kentucky during its run at the College World Series.

As these – and many others – tragically demonstrate, most of those killed are innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And as with other forms of traffic violence, these injustices are more heavily borne by communities of color. A USA Today investigation found police chases kill Black Americans at three times the rate of the overall population.

Pursuits also put the lives of law enforcement officers at risk. In 2020, 486 state troopers were injured during pursuits, compared with just 5 injured in 2019. That's an astonishing 9,620 percent increase.

According to the previously cited AJC report, GSP’s pursuit policy is one of the nation’s most permissive. As the article says: “Unlike most other state law enforcement agencies across the country, the GSP policy offers troopers almost complete discretion and enables them to justify chasing just about anyone who runs — anywhere and for any reason, no matter the consequences.”

We and many others believe it is long past time for this permissive policy to change.

Today we will be standing with Atlanta City Council Member Liliana Bakhtiari, along with State Representatives Park Cannon, Gabriel Sanchez, and Eric Bell, at the intersection of McLendon and Moreland Avenues in Little Five Points to call for fundamental changes to Georgia’s high-speed police pursuit policies:

• Restricting high-speed pursuits to cases involving violent felonies that present an immediate danger to the public.
• Requiring supervisory approval before initiating or continuing a pursuit.
• Prohibiting high-speed pursuits and PIT maneuvers in densely populated areas, during peak-traffic times such as school drop off and pick up, within major pedestrian corridors such as local business districts, and in residential neighborhoods.

Moving forward, we will be calling upon Georgia state officials to make these common-sense changes, and will be asking our supporters to join us. 

Please, help us ensure that our state’s police chases no longer claim the lives of so many innocent victims in the name of protecting them.