Feb 15, 2005 3 min read

Who investigates police? Two police chases within a week – the first in which a man was run over, the second causing four police cruisers to crash – require full and public hearings.

But if police are expected to release this information without any agency pushing for it, the public is not likely to ever learn how or why these incidents occurred. Fayette County District Attorney Nancy Vernon should push hard for disclosure, especially since her drug task force was involved in one of the incidents.

Apparently suspect Charles Opel of Luzerne Township wasn’t in the mood to be scooped up during a roundup of drug suspects. As police closed in on the upper road at Tower Hill, he took off on the lower road. His vehicle stalled. Opel then got out and started running.

Fairchance police officer Ken Bittinger, according to the borough’s mayor, said that Opel slipped on the ice and that the borough’s four-wheel drive vehicle started to slide and that the front wheel ran over him. The mayor said Bittinger made it sound as though Opel wasn’t injured. That was the same information that Vernon said she received and that she didn’t know Opel sustained several broken bones until contacted much later by a reporter.

If that wasn’t bad enough, apparently none of the many police officers available that morning initiated an accident investigation. State police thought Luzerne Township police were handling it. Luzerne was off duty. With as many police officers involved in these drug roundups as the district attorney has at her disposal, shouldn’t someone, anyone, have secured the scene and started an investigation? By the time it was sorted out, vehicles had been moved and the weather conditions that might have contributed to the accident had changed.

The credibility of Vernon’s drug task force is on the line. The task force is made up of many dedicated police officers who unfortunately are tarred by this incident.

Full disclosure as to why it happened, and why the initial investigation was bungled would do much to restore credibility. Vernon asked the state police to investigate the incident but she might find it better to call in the attorney general’s office to remove any hint that she is viewing information in a light most positive to the officer involved. And while she’s making calls, she should find out why a dozen state and local police cars would chase a pickup truck for 25 minutes over snow-covered road, wrecking four cruisers along the way.

Last Thursday night, state police spotted a stolen truck with two teens inside. The truck took off. The public needs to know why the high-speed chase lasted as long as it did, risking catastrophe at every stretch along the way. This zealous pursuit placed the public at substantial risk and created danger where little had existed. Certainly, police ought to attempt to pull over a stolen truck, but officers are expected to exercise more common sense than joyriding teens.