For years now, the Philadelphia Police Department may have been breaking state law when it comes to how they report police chases. NBC10 Investigative reporter Claudia Vargas explains how the city’s under reporting has changed the state’s analysis on police pursuits.
Virgen Martinez was driving to work one November morning in 2020 when at the same time a Philadelphia Police vehicle was pursuing a suspected drug dealer driving a gray SUV.
Just as Martinez was crossing Allegheny and Frankford avenues, the SUV plowed through a red light, T-boning her car on the driver’s side and causing her vehicle to strike a pedestrian on the crosswalk, sending him airborne.
The pedestrian was critically injured.
Martinez died minutes later.
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“They just think about that person. Oh, we have to get this person,” Martinez’s sister Carmen said, still grief-stricken four years later. “But you don't know everything else that you're putting in jeopardy other people's life.”
An internal affairs investigation into the chase found that the two officers in the police vehicle violated the city’s pursuit policy.
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And yet that pursuit does not appear in the Pennsylvania Police Reporting System. Pennsylvania law requires police agencies throughout the commonwealth to report all pursuits to the state police system.
“It's a shame. It's a shame,” Carmen Martinez said. “She's a human being. And the way they treated this case is like she's an animal.”
The NBC10 Investigators found that it wasn’t just the Martinez case but dozens of other Philadelphia Police pursuits between 2019 and this year that have not been reported to state police as required by law. That means pursuits that have left people dead, injured, and resulted in property damage have been left out of the statistics used to produce an annual report.
“If you don't have the data, you don't know what that problem is and you don't know how to fix it,” said Geoff Alpert, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied police pursuits for several decades.
And the annual pursuit report agrees with that. It says that the report is meant to “identify both positive and negative factors influencing the outcome of vehicular pursuits, validate or refute the merits of pursuit policies,” and goes on to say that the “analysis of pursuit statistics enhances the safety of police officers and the public they serve.”
Alpert says it’s important to keep track of not just the number of pursuits but the reason for a pursuit and outcomes.
“If someone gets injured or killed and particularly an innocent bystander. Why? And that's why it's important to have the data,” he said.
State Police has 40 points of data that are supposed to be filled out after each pursuit-- providing insight into road conditions, crimes associated with pursuits, injuries and deaths. Despite listing the nine-page state police form in its pursuit policy, Philly has skipped all of that entirely for the majority of its pursuits in the last five years.
When we reached out to state police about the incomplete Philly data, a spokesperson said in a statement that the agency is “committed to compiling accurate and comprehensive” pursuit data.
“PSP is not responsible for whether a police department reports their data correctly or completely," the spokesperson said. "PSP is only required to collect, analyze, and compile.”
The city does keep some of its own stats - but they are not consistent.
For example, one data set shows 136 pursuits in 2022 while another shows 82 pursuits for that same year.
The most recent PPD-provided dataset shows 145 pursuits for 2023. But the official state pursuit dashboard only shows one pursuit for 2023.
After the NBC10 Investigators started asking about the data discrepancy, PPD Deputy Commissioner Francis Healey told us the department found issues with its record-keeping.
“It just hasn't been reported properly. So we're going to look into it,” Healey said. “I just became aware of it rather recently.”
Healey says the department has a strict pursuit policy and that it investigates every chase.
“I understand the data needs to be reported correctly but don't infer that these aren't being investigated,” he said. “They're all investigated by our crash investigations unit.”
There is no penalty for police agencies that don’t file complete data.
Any changes to that would have to be decided by the state legislature.
State Rep. Joe Hohenstein is a member of the statehouse transportation and judiciary committees. He said he plans to ask both committees to look into the pursuit data gathering process.
“I won't commit that we would need to make it punitive, but there may be more accountability measures,” he said.
He was surprised to learn that Philly hadn’t been reporting its pursuits and corresponding data to state police.
“The fact that it isn't is something that I think will concern a lot of people," he said. "I know it concerns me.”
