High-speed police pursuits can create serious dangers on Connecticut roads. Reforming the state’s pursuit policy has been a hot topic since 2019, after a series of pursuits ended in crashes, including a head-on crash in Enfield.
Current Data Collection Issues
Researchers recently reviewed Connecticut’s 2025 police pursuit data. Broadly, it showed more than half of pursuits started with traffic violations, and more than three-quarters were called off. However, even figuring out how many pursuits happened in a year is still hard to pin down.
The state group that tracks police pursuits says the numbers collected over the past five years have major problems. Some are incomplete. Some are inaccurate. And some do not lead to clear conclusions.
Refining Data Collection
Ken Barone, with UConn’s Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, is helping refine how Connecticut collects pursuit information. He said the data collected so far is “very limiting.” Barone explained that one of the biggest problems is that police departments do not always define a pursuit the same way.
Barone is designing a more user-friendly version of the form officers have to fill out after a pursuit. The new form will rely more on checkboxes, dropdown menus, and clear options rather than long written narratives. He said the state’s more than 8,000 officers should be using the new pursuit forms by the end of the year.
Original reporting: NBC Connecticut — read the source article.
