The High-Speed Car Chases of Los Angeles

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Residents of Los Angeles know to turn on their televisions when they receive a one-word text message from friends: Pursuit! “In local parlance, it is shorthand for ‘the police are chasing a driver—for what, you usually have no idea—and you’d better get to your TV, fast, because the news choppers are overhead and the pursuit is airing live,’ ” the Los Angeles-based writer Mary Melton said. Last year, she wrote an article for Los Angeles Magazine about the city’s high-speed car chases and the various players—including the Los Angeles Police Department, the news stations, and the video-game industry—that have turned them into thrilling public spectacles. This entertainment does not come without consequences: since 1979, more than thirteen thousand people have been killed in the United States as a result of police pursuits, and more than ninety per cent of those pursuits were for nonviolent crimes.

In the video above, the first in our “Obsessions” series, which documents cultural fascinations, Melton explores Southern California’s fixation on car chases, starting with O. J. Simpson’s high-profile pursuit along Los Angeles’s 405 freeway in a white Ford Bronco, in 1994. Last year, one chase involved a car doing doughnuts down Hollywood Boulevard. The dangers of what Melton calls the city’s “longest-running reality series” are often debated, sometimes even on-air, while the latest pursuit is broadcast live. Yet those conversations are inevitably forgotten as soon as the next chase begins; the news choppers go roaring back into action to satisfy a Los Angeles public always eager for more.

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