How Many People Were Killed in Florida Police Chases in 2024?

On the evening of July 30, 2024, a trio of West Palm Beach police cars chased Neoni Copeland down Congress Avenue and Lantana Road in Boynton Beach after the 23-year-old allegedly tried to flee from a traffic stop.

Copeland was reportedly driving as fast as 108 miles per hour when his car suddenly collided with a Toyota Corolla driven by 27-year-old Jenice Woods, who was accompanied by her mother, 57-year-old Marica Pochette.

Both Woods and Pochette were taken to a hospital, where they were pronounced dead.

Woods was reportedly two months pregnant at the time of the crash.

"Two and a half lives were taken away from me: my daughter, my wife, my future grandchild," Junel Pochette, Woods’ father and Marcia’s husband, told CBS12 News. "We were looking forward to a new grandbaby."

Woods and Pochette were just two of at least 34 people killed as a result of police chases across Florida in 2024, according to IncarcerNation.com, an online database that tracks police-involved fatalities such as shootings, beatings, and tasings using public records, online news articles, police statements, and family or eyewitness statements.

Data shows that this number slightly increased from 2023, which saw roughly 26 people die in Florida as a result of police chases.

Accurate and complete data on police chases, crashes, and deaths is notoriously hard to find, and it's not clear whether any Florida cities or municipalities have comprehensive, public police-pursuit data.

Although the federal government collects data on fatal crashes, its system relies on the accuracy of information coming from individual police departments, some of which don't gather or release this data publicly.

A recent investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle, which used data from the federal government, private research organizations, and news reports, found that at least 3,336 people across the nation were killed in police pursuits between 2017 and 2022.

More than half of the deaths were either non-driving passengers in fleeing vehicles or bystanders, the investigation found.

While many states and law enforcement agencies have updated their policies over the last decade to allow chases only in narrow circumstances, Florida recently loosened its police chase policy — granting state troopers more discretion to initiate a car chase and allowing them to speed, drive on the wrong side of the road, or even go in the wrong direction.

Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles director Dave Kerner told Axios that the policy is in line with Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' vision of Florida as a "law-and-order state."