I don’t disagree about the truly egregious judgement of that guy(nor would I be against him being on the hook for medical expenses, wrongful death suits, etc.); but I find his atrocious judgement less of a concern in the sense that he isn’t somebody in a position of power and trust, charged with law enforcement and public safety.
Given the unfortunate(but pretty well known) fact that someone dumb enough to run will typically just keep driving more dangerously as you chase them more intensely, the cops aren’t ‘responsible for his actions’ in some moral sense; they didn’t ‘make him do it’; but they could be reasonably expected to know that initiating a chase was likely to involve some egregiously dangerous driving, even if it was a different moral agent that actually flipped the switch on it.
Since a different moral agent was the one who pulled that particular stunt, the cops involved don’t bear any direct moral responsibility; but that doesn’t absolve them from the more technical flavor of responsibility that comes with “If I do X, I can reasonably expect bad things to happen based on what I know of human nature; and I also have reasonable grounds to expect that I can create a situation where somebody else doesn’t do something egregiously dangerous by choosing differently.” sense of causal control.
This doesn’t imply an open ended ethical imperative to Neville Chamberlain your way around every dangerous person in the world, lest they get upset; but if you know that police-chasing people often causes them to do very dangerous things; you are arguably being pretty irresponsible if you decided to chase them anyway for reasons that aren’t serious enough to match the danger you can expect. Especially given how modernity makes slipping off the grid indefinitely so difficult. Unless the suspect is doing something fairly high on clear and present danger; or will actually give us the slip if we don’t catch him now; the additional justice value of taking him into custody today, at the cost of a chase, rather than enduring a modest delay until he next bumps into a state agent isn’t necessarily high, or even positive.
