This clip showed up in my YouTube feed yesterday:

This was totally cool when I first saw “Bullitt” when it came out in 1968: cool guy, cool car, super cool chase. Now that I’m old with children and grandchildren, it hits me:

What the hell was the city of San Francisco thinking when it allowed this? Turns out, despite the chaos, everything was under control (from Tunnelram.net):

The BULLITT chase scenes were shot around Easter of 1968. When city officials were first approached about shooting in the streets of San Francisco, they balked at the proposed high speeds and the idea of filming part of the chase on the Golden Gate Bridge. Eventually, it was agreed to keep the chase within only a few city blocks.

Thank god! I lived in SF the past few years and had I seen anything like this happen, I would have freaked and said, “What a bunch of assholes.” I’ve walked on some of the streets that are featured in this chase. Can you imagine being in a wheelchair here crossing the street when some idiot cop decides he’s going to do a high-speed chase? Look at those hills!

But as I look at the clip more closely, a couple things jump out.

That green VW Beetle was able to keep up with the Mustang and the Charger. Look at the 5:02; 5:11; 5:33 and 5:42 minute marks, and the Beetle is trapsing along, then it appears ahead of the speedsters.

The second thing is, what kind of asshole cop would drive like that in the middle of any city? Someone could have been killed. Then I realized that city car chases in movies are true pornography.

Look at this from “The French Connection”:

The most horrendous part of this is that they did it, in the middle of New York’s Brooklyn boroughs, without permission. I grew up in Brooklyn. I’ve been in Bensonhurst. It’s dangerous driving there on a normal day, and then these idiots come along!

That’s the director. He admits they did this without letting the city know. The fools in the audience laugh when he says it. This isn’t funny. If the car lost control, people would have died. The driver and the director should have been thrown in jail and should have died there instead of in their cushy mansions. The studio, 20th Century-Fox, should have been bankrupted. Instead, this got the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Then you have another cop as asshole chase scene through Manhattan in its sequel “The Seven Ups.”

They are zooming through a crowd of children. What kind of sociopath thinks that’s entertaining?

Someone reading this is probably thinking, “Lighten up. It’s just a movie.”

Well, a lot of real cops have been inspired by these films. Those are fiction, the following is reality:

And some idiot cop in Arkansas used the maneuver on a kid who was racing her sick mother to the hospital:

So what does this have to do with Kentucky?

The San Francisco Chronicle did a series of stories on how high speed chases are not only killing stupid drivers but also killing innocent bystanders. The headlines on one part of the series (linked above), focusing on a chase in Louisville’s West End, say the following:

Across the country, police chases claim nearly 700 lives a year, but members of one group are far more likely to die.

Black people account for roughly one-eighth of the U.S. population.

But they make up more than one-third of fatalities caused by police pursuits, a Chronicle investigation found.

So pervasive is the racial disparity that more than 1 in 4 bystanders killed in these incidents are Black.

Among those bystanders: 22-year-old Trevon Mitchell.

Thrown from his moped by a car fleeing police: One man’s death reflects a shocking disparity.

This is the kid who died because some asshole cop decided he was going to be the next Steve McQueen, or Gene Hackman or Roy Scheider.

Enjoy your popcorn.