Restrictive Pursuit Policies and the Decision to Flee: Evidence from Successive Legislative Changes in Washington State

Research Summary: Evaluations of police pursuit policies generally focus on pursuit counts and their downstream outcomes, treating frequency primarily as a function of departmental permissiveness. I examine an understudied alternative: pursuit policies may alter drivers’ antecedent decision to flee. Using 48 months of Washington State Patrol data (January 2022–December 2025) spanning three pursuit policies and two legislative loosenings of pursuit restrictions, I model total flight from police including both pursued and unpursued vehicles. Total flight per stop was 5.52 per 1,000 attempted stops under the most restrictive policy and 3.28 under the broadest restoration of pursuit authority, a decline of roughly 40%; while the share of flight events resulting in pursuit rose from 5.8% to 30.7%. Because the outcome combines pursued and unpursued flight, the decline cannot be generated mechanically by reclassification between the two categories. Segmented negative binomial models estimate an 18% level reduction at the effective date of the second legislative loosening, but that estimate is sensitive to coding. The evidence that flight was lower under broad restoration is stronger than the evidence that it fell sharply at implementation. Although the design does not directly measure drivers’ perceptions, the pattern is consistent with a deterrence account in which a greater likelihood of being pursued raised drivers’ perceived risk of apprehension.Policy Implications: Evaluations of pursuit policy commonly treat the number of drivers who flee as fixed, so that changes in pursuit counts are read as changes in police behavior alone. These findings suggest that assumption may not hold: the incidence of flight itself differed across pursuit policies. Policymakers should account for the possibility that pursuit policy affects both police tactics and the incidence of flight from police, and evaluations should treat incidence of flight as an outcome distinct from pursuit frequency, pursuit-related harm, and crime.