Actually, I should've posted "is often likely to be completely inappropriate", based on the observation of police pursuit policies over the years both in the media and in public. There was a case just recently of a motor police officer who was killed (ironically during a funeral procession for another officer) when he crazily gunned his bike, colliding with another motor cop. (The incident also underlined a growing, and somewhat disturbing, tendency to hold massive, costly funerals for peace officers no matter what the details of their demise. In the above case, the officer died from cancer in circumstances very unlikely to have been related to his job).
So I thank you for the correction, as I did not mean to imply that ALL such crashes are the result of negligence--I just wanted to show that a great many of police deaths are of this nature (and do not involve criminal attacks).
I do think it is very telling how the perception (your claim of hundreds of police murdered on the streets) and the reality (a tiny fraction of that number) lives on in the public imagination.