Comment

Elisabeth Adamson
A NSW police chase killed my partner

It’s December 30, 2021. Life is good. Harri and I have had a fabulous family Christmas and we’re excited, loading our cars full of gardening and building equipment. We’re heading to our new home in a town and community we love just north of Merimbula, where we plan to retire. I set off 20 minutes earlier in a separate car – at one point I see a cavalcade of emergency vehicles flash past on the Monaro Highway. I cannot shake a sense of unease.

Just before I reach Bega, the phone rings. My younger stepdaughter’s voice says, “Dad’s gone. Dad’s dead.”

Someone else takes the phone and I hear, “Harri has been killed. It’s okay, we’ve arrested the other driver.”

Those words stay with me. So simple, yet they minimise the destroyed lives, the harm and cost to our community inflicted by New South Wales Police Force pursuits, with their focus on apprehension at any cost. The next day the police tell me they were not in pursuit at the time of the fatal collision. It takes 20 days and an official complaint before I receive confirmation that the media reports were correct – the police were in active pursuit.

Harri would have turned 60 this week. My family has lived in a world dominated by criminal and coronial legal processes for nearly four years. We manage prolonged grief disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder and panic at the sound of police sirens and the sight of police cars. The coronial process is gruelling, made more so by the knowledge that a decade of coronial recommendations is collecting dust.

NSW police pursuit policy lags many years behind significant reform in surrounding states and the ACT. It ignores current evidence on community safety and crime reduction. It hurts offenders, innocent road users and police personnel. The statistics don’t lie: NSW practice needs immediate reform.

NSW Police Force define a police pursuit as “An attempt to stop a subject motor vehicle and apprehend the occupant(s) – regardless of speed or distance, when the driver of the subject motor vehicle appears to have ignored a police direction to stop, and appears to be attempting to avoid apprehension.”

NSW pursuit statistics have been published since 2015. In 2023/2024, the state recorded 4087, rising to 5029 for 2024/2025. In comparison, in 2024 Victoria recorded 214 pursuits and Queensland reported 95 pursuits.

Traffic offences, random breath test evasion and stolen vehicles account for about 90 per cent of NSW pursuits.

In the case of minor offences, there is clear evidence that the costs of pursuit – from injury and death to litigation and insurance – far outweigh the benefits in terms of arrest, deterrence and crime control. In 2013, the Australian Institute of Criminology found that fatal pursuits typically involved males under the age of 25 and were triggered by traffic offences, stolen vehicles and drink-driving. Fatalities were mostly the drivers and occupants of the pursued vehicle and in almost 90 per cent of cases, the driver had consumed alcohol, drugs or a combination of both. First Nations Australians were over-represented among the deaths.

Studies such as these have led to reform around the world, including in Australia. In the past two decades, Tasmania, South Australia, Queensland, Victoria and the ACT have all adopted restrictive policies that allow pursuit only when the need for apprehension is urgent based on serious risk to a person’s health and safety. Property and traffic offences are no justification – the overall harm the police officers seek to prevent must be greater than the risks involved.

This constraint doesn’t undermine enforcement. A former officer of the Queensland Police Service, Peter Hosking, published a PhD thesis reviewing 10 years of the state’s restrictive police pursuit policy. He found such policies “did not contribute to increases in the general road death toll due to any lack of road policing enforcement”. Nor did they lead to an increase in crimes associated with the use of a vehicle, except in the case of evasion offences.

Harri Jokinen was killed during a police operation involving two pursuits. The first was to apprehend a driver in a speeding car without a rear number plate. Police assessed the risk of the pursuit as high to surrounding motorists and it was terminated. A second one began about half an hour later but when the target vehicle was neither speeding nor driving dangerously. A tyre deflation device was placed on the Monaro Highway just before the ACT border. A police vehicle with activated lights sat adjacent to the device, forcing vehicles to slow down and create a choke point for traffic.

The police officer drove at a speed of up to 204 kilometres an hour over about three kilometres as the two vehicles approached the device. The pursued driver attempted to overtake at high speed and collided head-on with Harri’s vehicle. Harri died at the scene.

The pursued driver was convicted of manslaughter. The coronial inquest into Harri’s death found NSW Police Force should not have permitted the second pursuit, nor the placement of a tyre deflation device. The inquest also noted multiple failed communications during the operation.

The NSW Police Force’s website states police will take “due care when conducting any duty response”, and take into account factors including danger to all other road users and police, weather and road conditions and time of day. It says that if “the danger to the public outweighs the need to undertake the activity, police will discontinue the activity”.

The full policy documents relating to police pursuit in the state are not available for public viewing. This means many details of coronial inquests into pursuit deaths remain hidden.

The Safe Driving policy that was in place at the time of Harri’s death was replaced by the Safe Driving Response and Operations Guideline in July 2024. That update ignored significant coronial recommendations from inquests into the deaths of Andrew Ngo (with findings handed down in January 2020), Tyrone Adams (December 2022) and Andrew Stark (November 2023).

The new guidelines still rely on subjective interpretation and the ability of officers in adrenaline-fuelled situations to carefully weigh the danger to the public and police. In the coronial inquest into Harri’s death, Deputy State Coroner Rebecca Hosking again recommended a clear mandate that police may pursue only if they are first convinced of a serious risk to the health and safety of a person – and that the risk must be identified. This provision would not allow pursuit for minor offences.

The lack of an objective mandate places an unreasonable burden on officers to assess risk. The NSW Police Force are blinded by a perceived need to apprehend, which overwhelms their ability to assess the potential cost.

In any other workplace, a policy without objective guidelines would be unacceptable. This is a psychosocial risk. Each officer carries the psychological burden of making an entirely subjective decision, with potentially traumatic and life-threatening consequences. These may result in long periods of leave, post-traumatic stress disorder and early departure from the police force. Seven officers were involved in the operation in which Harri was killed; two have exited the police force.

There is also the risk of legal action. NSW police sergeant Matthew Kelly was found guilty in April 2023 of negligent driving occasioning death during the pursuit of Jack Roberts three years earlier. An appeal was unsuccessful. Last month, a 27-year-old police officer was charged with driving recklessly and with dangerous speed.

This week, the police are due to provide their response to the state government regarding Harri’s coronial inquest findings and recommendations. Asked by the ABC this month why police pursuits in NSW are much more frequent than in neighbouring jurisdictions, a spokesperson said, “Pursuits in NSW are conducted in accordance with policy and operational guidelines. The dynamic nature of pursuits requires an ongoing risk assessment by the personnel involved and those managing them. The safety of police, the public and offenders are a priority.”

Yet Harri’s coronial process found that the second pursuit, which led to his death, was not in accordance with police policy and operational guidelines. The recent comment displays a culture that shies away from accountability. It is unacceptable that the NSW government and NSW Police Force have failed to act on the advice of multiple coronial inquests over the past decade. They are out of step with surrounding jurisdictions and continue to ignore the evidence.

Seven people have died during NSW police pursuits this year. The safety of the public, the police and offenders is clearly not a priority. Just this week, police officer Benedict Bryant was found guilty of dangerous driving that led to the death of Indigenous teenager Jai Kalani Wright – a verdict Bryant is likely to appeal.

For the people affected by this sort of tragedy there is no advocacy group – most have neither the means nor the influence. Many are isolated in their grief with no support. I ask the police and NSW state government: don’t let the costs and the trauma of the coronial process have been for nothing. To save other precious lives, please heed the repeated recommendations.

Elisabeth Adamson was the partner of the late Harri Tapani Jokinen. She is grateful for a diligent and respectful coronial process.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 29, 2025 as "A police chase killed my partner".

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