SALT LAKE CITY — Yes, says Utah Highway Patrol Col. Mike Rapich, it puts troopers in “great danger” when you teach them to steer into an on-coming, wrong-way driver.
“But the danger to everyone on that freeway is at least (as great) or more so,” added Rapich.
Since the start of 2018, Utah law enforcement has intentionally steered into 12 vehicles driving the wrong way on a Utah freeway but not fleeing from police, according to a FOX 13 News review of public records. In all the cases, the trooper, officer or deputy used the front of his patrol car to try to stop the errant driver, usually by striking the on-coming car on a front corner.
One Utah driver has died, and peace officers have been injured. The tactics, which have been shared with police across Utah, have not been vetted elsewhere nor by any national association or accrediting agency.
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“When you first sent this to me, I was like… they… seriously… like… right?” John Gross, who studies police practices and use of force as a clinical professor of law at the University of Wisconsin. “And then, my God, some officers have done this twice?”
The officers are trying to prevent the wrong-way drivers from colliding with unsuspecting motorists. Such collisions have killed about 30 people in Utah in the last five years, according to the Utah Department of Transportation.
“It's one of the most dangerous situations we can come up with,” said Rapich, who commands the Utah Highway Patrol.
“You're talking about the most violent and horrible collision that you can possibly imagine,” Rapich added.
UHP troopers steered into wrong-way drivers in seven of those 12 cases. Rapich said that a few years ago, UHP was looking for training on what troopers should do when they receive a report of someone traveling against traffic.
“We didn't identify that there was really any training out there,” he explained. “So, we did that. We actually dug in with our training division.”
UHP developed what it calls the wrong-way driver intercept technique. When troopers are notified of a wrong-way driver, the training calls for them to close the freeway on-ramps so no more cars can enter.
Then, they stop traffic from traveling toward the errant driver. If a trooper deems it safe, he or she travels the wrong way, too, until the trooper can get behind the driver, strike the car on a rear quarter panel and force it off the road.
All that requires time and manpower. So, if a trooper doesn’t think the safer options are feasible, he or she is authorized to steer into the oncoming car.
“Huge liability of the officer safety,” said Angelo Brown, assistant professor of criminology at Arkansas State University.
Brown also worried about the “safety of the innocent victims in the vehicle they're crashing into.”
FOX 13 News showed videos of the collisions to Gross and Brown.
“I'm really kind of shocked,” Gross said.
“I've never heard,” he continued, “of a department saying, ‘We're going to ram vehicles going in the wrong direction,’ like, period, as a policy.”
Gross said law enforcement policies usually discuss evaluating multiple factors before using only the force necessary to subdue the suspect with minimal risk to others.
“Are there occupants in the vehicle?” Gross asked as an example. “Do you know who the driver is? Do you know if they're intoxicated?”
Brown pointed out that deaths and injuries stemming from police pursuits have cost taxpayers millions of dollars over the years.
FOX 13 News could find no record of lawsuits after any of the 12 collisions it documented.
The only death was in December. A state trooper steered into and killed 26-year-old Natalie Munchgesang. She was driving south in a northbound lane of Interstate 15 in Orem.
Munchgesang, a mother of three, had been at bars earlier in the day and appeared intoxicated, according to a search warrant. The Utah County Attorney’s Office is still investigating the collision and has not released its full report. Neither the county attorney nor UHP has released video of the crash.
Munchgesang had a friend in the car. When reached by phone, that friend declined an interview but said she’d suffered a broken leg and a brain injury in the crash. A search warrant said the trooper also suffered a broken leg.
In all, seven of those 12 drivers documented by FOX 13 New were drunk, according to a review of public records. The five who weren’t intoxicated either had physical or mental health problems contributing to their wrong-way driving or just made a mistake.
In July of this year, a Summit County deputy steered into a driver traveling the wrong direction on U.S. Highway 40 in Park City. UHP investigated the crash and later said it appeared the driver was having a diabetic episode.
“And now there's a crashed car in the middle of the highway,” Brown said of such instances. “It causes public safety hazard.”
Driving the wrong way, if you’re sober, and don’t hit anybody and are not fleeing, is a misdemeanor offense in Utah. Gross said that’s something judges and juries would take into consideration in any lawsuits.
“This level of force is probably something that most courts would look at and say, ‘It's not reasonable,’” Gross said.
Gross and Brown noticed something FOX 13 News saw, too. In at least four of the videos, the wrong-way drivers appear to be slowing, but the peace officer steers into the car anyway.
“I think the officer,” Gross said, “at that moment, needs to reassess whether it's really necessary to strike this vehicle.”
Gross acknowledged police are being placed in difficult situations. He speculated that if officers did let a wrong-way driver pass and that driver went on to hit a school bus, “they would all get fired, right?”
Rapich says he’s not disciplining any trooper who opts not to collide with a wrong-way driver, but he doesn’t believe UHP should change its policies. UHP has shared its training with other Utah police forces.
FOX 13 News called the highway patrols in surrounding states to ask what they do. They all said their troopers have either steered into wrong-way drivers, too or have policies allowing for it.
A spokesman for the Idaho State Police said the department would be interested in the UHP training. The spokesman asked for the name of a contact at UHP.
Monday: Meet a Utah police officer who has steered into two wrong-way drivers. The cases are indicative of what’s happening on Utah’s freeways and the dangers to drivers and law enforcement.