They love the chase.
The number of crashes following police chases has skyrocketed since 2022 in Queens's 114th Precinct, the very same precinct where cyclist Amanda Servedio was killed by a suspected burglar fleeing cops earlier this year.
In the nine years from 2014 through 2022, cops at the Astoria stationhouse engaged in just 11 high-speed chases that resulted in a crash. But in the subsequent two years from Jan. 1, 2023 through Dec. 13, 2024, chases undertaken by 114th cops have ended in 26 crashes — an annual average rate nearly 11 times higher than the average during the previous nine years.
Citywide, crashes resulting from police chases have grown by a staggering amount since 2022, The City reported on Monday. Through November of 2024, there were 398 car crashes preceded by police chases, an uptick that began after Mayor Adams promoted John Chell to Chief of Patrol and Jeffrey Maddrey to Chief of Department.
The mayor told reporters on Monday that the NYPD uses caution, and that chases are the result of violent crime.
“Under my term as mayor we made a complete shift to stop letting dangerous bad people think they can commit a violent crime and just flee," he said, under questioning about The City story. "We have used a great deal of caution, a great deal of training. We have a supervisor that’s on the ground, makes a decision to call off a chase or not. But let’s be clear. We have far too many people who are extremely dangerous that have become comfortable."
The driver who killed Servedio was a suspected burglar, not a violent criminal, yet the police still engaged in the chase. The NYPD has declined to provide Streetsblog with answers about the incident, refusing to even share whether a supervisor OK'd the chase, which is department policy.
Cops in the 114th are true outliers. The precinct ranks seventh in the city for number of high speed chases and stands out as an island of bad behavior in an otherwise quiet area. Crashes are spread across the precinct's residential areas, endangering pedestrians and cyclists.
(Another crash on Sunday began in the 114th, but ended in Jackson Heights just outside the precinct borders and, thus, does not show up on the map above.)
The problem is so ubiquitous in the area that residents have been attending the precinct's community council meetings to plead with officers to stop chasing since February 2023. Members of the community warned on multiple occasions that the dangerous practice could have deadly consequences.
After a crash in July that was sparked by a police chase and ended up injuring a female cyclist on Crescent Avenue, residents explicitly asked the officers at the community council meeting what their policy was.
"I asked [the officers present] to clarify their chase policy," said Kian Betancourt, an Astoria resident who has been attending the community council meetings for two years and a member of the Community Board's Transportation Committee. "They reiterated, 'We only chase when the threat to the general public of the person getting away outweighs that of the danger that it represents to the community.'"
On Oct. 22, just a month after Betancourt asked to confirm the precinct's chase policy, Servedio was struck and killed by a driver suspected feeling cops, who chased him down on an alleged burglary charge.
"Last month [after Amanda was killed], I went to the meeting, and I brought it up again," said Betancourt.
The officers at the meeting dismissed his question, refusing to reiterate their chase policy and tell residents if they planned to change their behavior, he said.
"This is not what leadership looks like. This is not accountability. We are asking you to protect us as the general public that you were tasked to do, and just nothing, I mean, like blank face, absolutely no response whatsoever," said Betancourt.
On Monday night, officers from the 114th Precinct were scheduled to appear before Queens Community Board 1 and residents were poised to question them. Stay tuned.
Correction: A previous version of this story claimed that in the 114th precinct the last two years had 15 times the average number of crashes than the last nine. The correct statistic is nearly 11 times the average.
