‘Three times the limit’: Witnesses question high-speed police chase that ended in crash, blackout

Its tires were all flat.

The car’s headlights were off and it was dark. Leslyn Upshaw also said she’d never seen a car moving so fast. She was standing just in front of the Salvation Army on Herring Cove Road with a fresh cup of coffee from McDonald’s.

The car was a beater — an old grey Pontiac Grand Am, she figured. It whizzed by her with seven police cars right behind. Lined with crosswalks and intersections, it’s one of the busiest traffic arteries in Spryfield. The speed limit is 50 kilometres an hour. The string of speeding cars was going almost three times over the limit, figured Upshaw.

A few moments later, she noticed everything go dark across the street.

The car would travel another two kilometres or so towards the Armdale roundabout before crashing into a pair of power poles and a Halifax Transit bus shelter. More than 4,000 Nova Scotia Power customers lost electricity for about five hours while crews worked to repair the damage.

Upshaw believes that the police were to blame for the crash. In her view, it was a clear case of police overkill.

“The first thing I thought was there’s no way that the police are allowed to do this,” she said. “There could have been my kids or somebody else’s kids in those crosswalks and nobody would be stopping.”

‘Use some common sense’

SaltWire spoke with a retired RCMP officer who said that the police chase simply didn’t make sense.

“If the speed starts to get in excess of the posted speed limit, you abort the chase,” said the officer.

“Basically, what it comes down to is, use some common sense. It seems in this case, common sense was left at the police station. All those cars chasing one car seems like the Keystone Cops, for goodness sakes.”

Halifax Regional Police wouldn’t say how many police vehicles or officers were involved in the Dec. 26 pursuit. The police would not share any of their policies or protocols around high-speed police chases. Nor would the force share any more details than it already had on the incident.

What we do know is that the driver was a 14-year-old boy. He was driving a vehicle that had been reported stolen less than two hours before the crash. Halifax RCMP had spotted the car in Sackville and trailed it back to Halifax. The Mounties tried twice to pull the call over, but it kept going over the MacKay bridge. The police had received several calls about the car, according to the force. The boy is now facing several charges, including mischief over $5,000, theft over $5,000, dangerous driving and breach of probation.

HRP spokesman Const. John MacLeod defended the force’s actions.

“I can tell you that public safety is the primary consideration in relation to initiating or terminating pursuits and the actions taken during them, however that oversight only applies to our officers and not the actions taken by the offenders.”

‘This boy is not a terrorist’

SaltWire also spoke with a second woman, and her teenage son, who witnessed the high-speed chase and believe the police were too aggressive. The woman, who did not want her name used in the story, said that she was filling up her car at the Irving gas station on Herring Cove Road when she saw the cars go by.

“I didn’t know what this person did wrong but it seemed like the police were creating a problem,” she said. “I don’t know why you needed so many police cars to chase one car. This boy is not a terrorist.”

Her son, who’s 14, said he was told by a friend that he was caught in a crosswalk at the time of the chase and nearly got hit by a police car.

This isn’t the first time that Halifax police have faced criticism after a chase gone wrong. Back in October 2022, residents in Armdale spoke out about a dangerous pursuit in their neighbourhood. As in this case, police were chasing the driver of a stolen vehicle. Officers tried to pull the vehicle over, but the driver fled. They caught up with the vehicle on a nearby cul-de-sac, where officers tried to block the driver but he rammed two police cars before driving across some lawns to escape. The neighbourhood is home to two elementary schools, playgrounds and families with small children.

In some provinces, such as British Columbia, there are legal restrictions on police pursuits. Nova Scotia has a policy, but there is no system for enforcing it.