"I don't see anything wrong with that, because of the sirens, the lights," he said. “... The people there in Winnsboro could hear the sirens, see the lights. It is always dangerous, even on a country road it is a dangerous thing, not only for other individuals but for those in pursuit."
Joining Young for an interview with The Herald Independent was Capt. Frazier Craig who said that pros and cons do have to be weighed in such a situation.
"The officer who saw fit to stop this guy saw that he was acting peculiarly," he said. "He was not in compliance with the officers commands at any point any way. When (Murphy) made a decision not to comply with what the officer was saying he put himself in that position and we had an obligation to the citizens."
Had Murphy not been stopped and went on to threaten Winnsboro in another way, Young said, people would have been asking his office why Murphy had not been taken off the road.
"We needed to get that person off the street,"the Sheriff said "Once you read the incident report and all the information Capt. (Frazier) Craig has there, you clearly will see that to me they did the right thing."
Department policy
The Sheriff’s Office written policy on pursuits states in part, “The initial decision to continue or to terminate a pursuit shall lie with the individual deputy. A supervisor or superior officer may terminate a pursuit at any point. A supervisor may override a deputy’s decision to pursue at any time the supervisor believes termination is the best course of action. A supervisor shall not, however, override a pursuing deputy’s decision to terminate a pursuit. Supervisors and deputies shall terminate any pursuit that appears to be in direct violation of this procedure.”
If the driver of a vehicle fails to stop after being signaled by the deputy to stop, the department’s policy requires that numerous factors be considered. Some of them are as follows:
The policy also provides that unless authorized by a supervisor, pursuit is limited to the primary unit and secondary unit.
Looking back
It was Murphy, Craig stated, that initiated the tone of the pursuit and there is no way of knowing whether the man would have continued down 321 Bypass at 100 miles per hour or not, if he had not been pursued. There was also no way of knowing, he added, whether Murphy was a traffic law violator only or a bank robber or could have killed a person. His erratic driving, the officers said, was suspicious and necessitated a stop.
"If you wrote an article saying that we stopped a pursuit because of putting others in danger, do you know how many bad guys out there would automatically just do that knowing that we are not going to put up a pursuit?" Young asked.
At the time of the incident, officers did not know why Murphy was driving erratically and would not cooperate, Young said.
"The deputy tried to get this person to cooperate and he would not, so what are we supposed to do say, ‘okay’ and the public would, and they would every right, say, ‘are you afraid of everybody out there, - you are not doing your job,’" the Sheriff said.
Law enforcement was in a position of having to make a judgment call, according to Craig, and it was decided that Murphy had to be taken off the road.
"The deputy just happened upon him," Craig said. "Who's to say that another motorist wouldn't have set him off?"
There was no time, the Sheriff said, for the officer involved to get permission to pursue the car, adding that snap decisions must be made.
"I am not saying that the decisions are always right, but I am telling you that the overwhelming majority of the time, they are right," he said. "I feel that they were right in this case."
Lights and sirens, as well as brightly colored cars, are some of the precautions taken to try and ensure citizen safety, Craig mentioned, adding that deputies were stationed at intersections to prevent the public from entering 321 Bypass.
"Although the bad guy is doing the wrong thing, our officers are still obligated to follow the rules of the road, when able to," Craig said.
A lack of time and the unpredictable nature of Murphy's path, the law enforcement officers said, made impractical, putting out spiked devices in the road to flatten his tires and thus disable his vehicle. The entire incident, they estimate, took about 10 minutes and covered 15 miles.
There is not an etched in stone answer to when to call off a pursuit, according to Young, because it would vary as to what the pursuit is like and what is involved.
"There is no direct answer that you can given to that," he said.
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