A Des Moines officer stopped an SUV near the airport at about 10:30 p.m. on Oct. 14 for a lighting equipment violation, and when the chase ended on Fleur Drive a 38-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman had been ejected from the vehicle and killed, Radio Iowa reported.
Police say the driver gave the officer a fake name, ran, scuffled with the officer and injured him, then returned to the SUV and drove away. He went north on Fleur Drive and at one point crossed into the southbound lanes. An officer used a pursuit intervention technique, or PIT; the driver lost control and the SUV crashed. The officer’s injuries were minor. Radio Iowa’s account does not say how fast the SUV was traveling, what make it was, whether either person wore a seat belt, which agency is investigating or whether anyone faces charges.
What Iowa law asks of an officer who uses a PIT
I read Iowa Code section 321.231, the statute that governs emergency vehicle drivers. Subsection 4 allows a peace officer to use a pursuit intervention technique when it is reasonable based on what the officer perceived at the time, and only if the officer has completed a training course approved by the Iowa law enforcement academy. The same subsection says it does not limit an officer’s objectively reasonable use of force in a pursuit.
That is a two-part test: a training certificate and a judgment about the moment. Neither part asks how the encounter began. A lighting violation, a stolen car and an armed robbery all pass through the same filter, which looks at what the officer saw in the seconds before contact. Here, police describe an assault on an officer and a flight into oncoming lanes, and those facts will carry weight in any review. The statute also keeps a limit: its exemptions do not relieve an emergency vehicle driver of the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons, and they do not shield a driver from the consequences of reckless disregard.
The section has no list of offenses that justify a pursuit and no requirement that a department adopt a pursuit policy, so the practical line sits in each agency’s own written order. The Auto Wire could not read Des Moines’s current pursuit order. The department posts its policies on PowerDMS, but the page returned no readable text. What that order says about a chase that began with a lighting violation is unconfirmed.
Why a PIT does not produce a controlled stop
The National Institute of Justice describes the PIT as a tactic that spins a fleeing vehicle around so it stalls and stops. In October 2012 its Weapons and Protective Systems Technology Center of Excellence worked with the Michigan State Police to study vehicle dynamics during the maneuver, comparing cars with electronic stability control to cars without it. The NIJ write-up reported that PIT maneuvers on ESC-equipped cars could produce unpredictable results at both low and high speeds.
That matters because ESC, which brakes individual wheels to resist a spin, is no longer optional. NHTSA’s final rule required all new light vehicles to carry it by Sept. 1, 2011. The reports do not identify the SUV, but nearly any SUV built since then was required to have the system, so the SUV likely had a system built to resist the very spin a PIT is meant to cause.
Ejection is the other variable. In NHTSA’s 2023 data on occupant protection (DOT HS 813 730), 25% of unrestrained occupants in fatal crashes with known restraint use were totally ejected, against 1% of restrained occupants, and 82% of totally ejected occupants were killed. Nobody has reported whether the two people on Fleur Drive were belted, and ejection alone does not settle it. But the numbers show how much of a spin-out’s outcome rides on a strap that an officer cannot check before making contact.
Who dies in pursuit crashes
The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated about 68,000 police pursuits in 2012 and 351 deaths in pursuit-related crashes that year. From 1996 to 2015, more than 7,000 people died, an average of 355 a year, using NHTSA’s fatality data. Of those, 65% were occupants of the pursued vehicle, 29% were occupants of vehicles not involved in the pursuit and 4% were bystanders not in a vehicle. The two people on Fleur Drive fall in the largest group, but about a third of the dead in that tally never ran from anyone.
The Auto Wire has covered what a PIT can do when it goes wrong, including a 122 mph PIT that ejected a fleeing Lexus driver and a fatal crash that followed stop sticks.
What to watch in the Des Moines investigation
Start with the department’s written pursuit order. After that, a crash reconstruction that pins down speed at contact and seat belt use, plus whatever the officer’s car and body cameras caught. Section 321.231 also makes the officer’s academy-approved PIT training a condition of using the technique, so that certification is a checkable fact, not a matter of opinion.
Police say the driver fought the officer and fled over a lighting violation. Does that justify a PIT at speed, or should they have let the chase go and found him later?