Why is it that the police need 40 police cars to chase one speeding drunk?
In many training videos, films of one car being pursued by 50 trailing squad cars are presented as a failing of effective command and control. There is no good reason why 40+ cars are needed, but it happens that as a speeding suspect passes from one jurisdiction to the next, or from sector to sector within a city, they will pick up units from that sector. Everybody on the ground knows that they might have a few too many cars, but nobody on the ground wants to give up the chase, and dispatch centers may have no way of quickly knowing how many cars from other jurisdictions are currently in pursuit. All they know is that there are 4 cars from their section involved. They have no way of knowing that ten other sections also have units there. Since the pursuit is travelling rapidly from place to place, and they don’t know where it is headed, it is difficult to set up an effective incident command structure where one commander will have control over all of the cars in the pursuit and can make
