emergency, people pick up the phone and cannot perform this
most basic of functions. With their heart rate soaring and their
motor coordination deteriorating, they dial 411 and not 911
because that’s the only number they remember, or they forget
to press “send” on their cell phone, or they simply cannot pick
out the individual numbers at all. “You must rehearse it,”
Grossman says, “because only if you have rehearsed it will it be
there.”
This is precisely the reason that many police departments in
recent years have banned high-speed chases. It’s not just
because of the dangers of hitting some innocent bystander
during the chase, although that is clearly part of the worry,
since about three hundred Americans are killed accidentally
every year during chases. It’s also because of what happens after
the chase, since pursuing a suspect at high speed is precisely the
kind of activity that pushes police officers into this dangerous
state of high arousal. “The L.A. riot was started by what cops
did to Rodney King at the end of the high-speed chase,” says
James Fyfe, head of training for the NYPD, who has testified in
many police brutality cases. “The Liberty City riot in Miami in
1980 was started by what the cops did at the end of a chase.
They beat a guy to death. In 1986, they had another riot in