On one count, until recent years and for close to a century, NSW Police pursued fleeing vehicles regardless of the risk to those who were fleeing and regardless of the risk to the public. When those who were fleeing were killed or injured the police and community response was akin to a shrug accompanied by upturned palms.

This time the media reported a senior police officer saying on the day of the two deaths, last Sunday, that the crash was an important reminder to slow down on wet roads, that it was important that people slow down and get home safely!

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On another count, the circumstances confronting the fellow associated with the allegedly stolen vehicle at 4am on Sunday were very similar to those confronting me at 2.30am one morning 35 years ago. He had been woken, it has been reported, by the exhaust note of the Holden Commodore SS being driven away, and 35 years ago I was woken by the burbling sound of my V8 Holden Premier being driven off from the front of my Cooks Hill home.

We both set off in pursuit, he in another vehicle and me on foot.

In my case the thief kept stalling the cold V8 as he tried to gun the car from the roadside, and he was using way too much throttle because I was trying to smash the driver's side window to get to him.

I gave no thought to the risk to him of shattering glass, and I know I should be embarrassed to admit that I would have tried to drag him by the head through the jagged window if I'd have been able to get to him.

He took off through the passenger door and I was in pursuit, shouting to him every 100 metres the news that I was gaining on him, and it may be that my nakedness didn't help his frame of mind. His safety in running flat out at night on a poorly lit road did not cross my mind. Eventually he jumped a wall into an enclosed garden, without impaling himself on a garden stake, tsk, and a few minutes later I was holding him on the footpath when police drove past.

The police knew him, by the way, and said he was a professional car thief who would have wanted my Holden for its V8 motor.

We had five sets of intruders in our first four years in Cooks Hill, and I gave not a thought to the safety of any of them. I wasn't the least concerned when one was hit over the head with a milk bottle by an old Greek man while hiding from me in the old man's front yard, nor when one of his two companions climbed dangerously high into a Norfolk Island pine to escape me.

Would I have been responsible as his pursuer if the tree climber had fallen?

I was at a bullet-proof age, and I caught all the intruders during or after the event, and while none would describe the encounter as pleasant they should be thankful they didn't make it into the house. Inside was the assumption, spurred by news reports at the time of children being taken from their beds, that they were a serious threat to my young family, that they may not have been there simply to steal.

Arming my assumption was a tool that had a legitimate purpose in the house, a long fire poker. Should I have been concerned about the effects on the fellow slinking around near my sleeping children of being skewered with a fire poker? I was not, not one little bit, because high in my mind was the fact that I was very likely to be my family's only effective defence.

We went from five intruders in the first four years in Cooks Hill to none in the second four years, the difference being a German shepherd.

Years later, in my current home, we were burgled by two low lives who tied our poodle to a fence presumably to stop her jumping joyously on them and who then searched our house while armed with a fishing knife they'd taken from the side shed.

Later that same day I found a fellow riding my expensive mountain bike in a nearby housing estate, and I was able to grab the handlebars and toss him off the bike, with, I admit, reckless indifference to his safety. I continued to search for this fellow that afternoon, hoping to recover a daughter's computer containing her university work, and I gave police a lead that identified the bike rider.

Turns out that I had indeed endangered his physical safety because, as the police told me later, he'd borrowed the bike from the thieves who'd burgled my house and he'd had to return to them with an unlikely story that a mad man in a van had seized it. Beautiful.

Then there was the armed robber a couple of mates and I tackled, twice, the second time crashing through a timber fence. He wasn't going anywhere in a hurry after that.

A year ago this month I made a decision that suggests that the first ray of prudence has arrived belatedly. A speeding vehicle failed to take a 45km/h bend on a country road north of Newcastle and hit the rear of our vehicle before racing off at speed.

I decided not to chase, and the reasons were that I'd be endangering my wife and other people on the road. The safety of the driver who'd hit my car and sped off was not a factor in my decision. I can't see how he qualifies for such consideration.