https://jnix.netlify.app/tags/pursuits/ Recent content in pursuits on Justin Nix Source Themes Academic (https://sourcethemes.com/academic/) en-us © Justin Nix {year} Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://jnix.netlify.app/publication/73-fast-and-spurious/ Tue, 15 Sep 2026 10:00:00 +0000 https://jnix.netlify.app/publication/73-fast-and-spurious/ This one’s been accepted at the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, with John Hall at Cambridge leading the charge. The publisher embargoes accepted manuscripts for twelve months before authors can post them, so the postprint isn’t up yet — the preprint linked above has the full analysis for anyone who wants to dig in now, or if you’d like the accepted version before the embargo lifts, just email me. The Escalation In October 2022, the NYPD started letting officers chase. Monthly pursuit broadcasts went from an average of eight to a peak above two hundred — a 25-fold jump — and stayed elevated through most of 2023 and 2024, easing only after an August 2023 compliance memo and then dropping sharply once Commissioner Jessica Tisch reined the policy back in in February 2025. What It Cost More pursuits meant more crashes. An interrupted time series shows collisions jumping immediately at the October 2022 break, with no evidence the city was simply getting better or worse at avoiding them over time — collision counts track the four policy regimes almost exactly, rising with the escalation and falling within weeks of the February 2025 restriction. Annual pursuit-related collisions went from 84 in 2022 to 421 at their 2024 peak, more than a fivefold increase in total crash burden. Did It Work? That’s the trade the NYPD was implicitly making: more collision risk, in exchange for less crime. We threw everything we had at that question, and none of it holds up. A generalized synthetic control comparing New York to a donor pool of large U.S. cities finds NYC’s post-2022 shooting trend statistically indistinguishable from cities that never expanded pursuits. Robbery, if anything, ran the other way — it rose relative to comparable cities, not fell. And the cleanest test of all: when Tisch cut pursuits back down in February 2025, crime didn’t go up. Robberies and shootings kept falling. If chasing more cars was deterring crime or incapacitating chronic offenders, taking that away should have shown it. It didn’t. The Bottom Line Year Pursuits Δ Pursuits Collisions Δ Collisions Robberies Δ Robberies Shootings Δ Shootings Gun Violence Δ Gun Violence 2018 61 — 58 — 12,965 — 754 — 2,017 — 2019 64 +4.9% 73 +25.9% 13,434 +3.6% 777 +3.1% 2,324 +15.2% 2020 99 +54.7% 69 -5.5% 13,187 -1.8% 1,532 +97.2% 4,479 +92.7% 2021 109 +10.1% 62 -10.1% 13,861 +5.1% 1,562 +2.0% 5,028 +12.3% 2022 214 +96.3% 84 +35.5% 17,439 +25.8% 1,294 -17.2% 4,162 -17.2% 2023 1,592 +643.9% 318 +278.6% 16,922 -3.0% 974 -24.7% 3,109 -25.3% 2024 1,930 +21.2% 421 +32.4% 16,569 -2.1% 904 -7.2% 2,917 -6.2% 2025 492 -74.5% 104 -75.3% 15,048 -9.2% 688 -23.9% 2,506 -14.1% Annual counts, NYPD/NYC Open Data. Robbery and shooting totals kept declining through the escalation years for reasons the paper argues are unrelated to pursuits — which is exactly why we didn’t stop at the city-level trend. What This Means Pursuit escalation produced clear, attributable collision harm and no credible evidence of a crime-prevention payoff. That doesn’t mean pursuits never matter for public safety — it means the NYPD expanded them without the kind of evidence that should precede a policy change with this much collateral risk. Our recommendation for other agencies facing pressure to loosen pursuit policy is a simple burden-of-proof shift: require affirmative evidence that pursuits outperform the regional trend, not just a hope that they will, before expanding officers’ discretion to chase.