© RT/Screengrab
Just past midnight on December 23, 2012, in unincorporated Chambers County, Texas, 25-year-old Steven Gaydos ran a stop sign on his Suzuki 750. DPS Trooper Abraham Martinez, who happened to be waiting in a nearby parking lot, pulled out in his cop car in pursuit of the scofflaw motorcyclist.
But Gaydos didn't stop. And neither did Martinez. Hitting speeds of up to 130 miles an hour, Martinez followed Gaydos through nearly 40 miles of east Texas highway, and finally pulled alongside his target and, from the window of his vehicle, fired his .357 handgun four times. One of the bullets penetrated Gaydos' right thigh.
Injured, Gaydos finally pulled over and sat on his motorcycle to wait for police. Gaydos had been driving with a suspended license, and he hadn't wanted his motorcycle confiscated by police, but Gaydos' ability to flee had suddenly become more limited, what with the cop firing at him and the gunshot wound in the leg.
Martinez approached Gaydos on foot and launched an aerial kick directly into Gaydos' back, knocking the wounded motorcyclist onto the ground. Martinez promptly called for medical assistance, but the officer did receive three days of unpaid probation from DPS for violating excessive use of force regulations.
DPS instructors told the Statesman Martinez had received training on things like not shooting motorcyclists who run stop signs. Per DPS, Martinez would have learned that skill when studying "the agency's ban on using tire-deflating devices on fleeing motorcycles so as not to cause a high-speed, possibly fatal crash." But, the Statesman reports, "Martinez said he didn't recall that part of the class."
The Texas Department of Public Safety is notorious for firing first and shooting questions later. As when an airborne trooper fired on a pickup truck from his helicopter and killed two Guatemalan immigrants. Or when a DPS officer assaulted a handcuffed woman on the side of a Texas highway. Or when a DPS trooper pulled over a man on suspicion of DWI and proceeded to beat him unconscious.
Watch a Texas officer kick the man he suspects of running a stop sign, and had just shot in the leg, off of his motorcyle:
American police regularly use the 'pit manuever', where the chasing police car deliberately nudges the rear quarter of a fleeing vehicle in order to make them lose control and crash. It's something they've been allowed to get away with for decades, even though it clearly endangers life and/or limb, and has always been controversial.
The worst video I saw was a dash-cam video of a cop car chasing a motorcyclist who had a girl as a pillion passenger (I assume it was his girlfriend). I believe it was featured on a show called 'World's Wildest Police Videos', hosted by a gritted-teeth and clench-jawed John Bunnell, a former police sheriff himself, who is unconditionally uncritical of any police behaiviour. To use another term, he is a bigot.
The video showed the police car side-swiping the motorcyclist (that pit maneuver), who then left the road at high speed, crashing into the roadside vegetation, and both cyclist and passenger were flung into the undergrowth. As a motorcyclist myself, I was appalled at the police officer's action, and hotly declared it was little more than attempted murder (I've tried to look up that video on the internet in order to link it, but failed, yet I remember it distinctly, it made a great impression on me).
In Australia there is a guideline: if a police chase exceeds safe speeds (somewhere around 135kph, or 80mph), they are required to give up the chase, as the chase itself endangers public safety. The cure (arrest) in these situations, is quite rightly regarded as being worse than the disease, since the speeding vehicle is more than likely to slow down to sensible speeds once they have escaped. That's called common sense, something American police officers seem to lack, instead regarding themselves as being above the law themselves and allowed to do anything they like, such as shooting black people in the back and killing them for being wicked enough to have a broken tail-light.
There was a case in my own home town. A police car was chasing a motorcyclist down a dual lane suburban road. The rider turned around, began howling down the other way on the opposite side of the carriageway. Another police car, somewhat behind the chase, swapped over that opposite lane, driving the wrong way down the road, and collided head-on with the speeding motorcyclist.
The motorcyclist lost one of his legs because of the crash, and was fortunate not to lose his life. Both police officers who were in the car that caused the crash lost their jobs. I think they got off cheaply.