Jim, I do not think this is the right way of conceptualizing it. You seem to assume that a person who willingly breaks the norms of the society and puts others at a considerable risk for a personal gain is still entitled to the protection by these norms. In plain English, this seems to give a criminal the protection that he denies to others. I do not think it is ethically justified.
To see that, let's conduct a little thought experiment. Imagine, if you will, that the criminal in question is not a two-bit prick (revered by the bleeding-heart populists), but a wealthy business owner. Would you still uphold this persons "right" to pursue his fraudulent scheming protected by legal technicalities until he "runs out of gas?" If so, Enron would still be in business, and you would not make enough money to pay for your utility bill.
The way I prefer to conceptualize the problem follows the Pascal's wager. In this wager the risks are weighted by potential loses and rewards, and a nearly sure loss of a relatively small magnitude is outweighed by a risky pursuit whose potential payoff is incomparably greater (Pascal used it to justify to religious faith, but that is another story). From that point of view, the main risk of a police taking whatever action it takes to stop a criminal is, in essence, a violation of a few legal technicalities and perhaps the criminal receiving a somewhat harsher treatment that he would have, had he been apprehended, tried, and sentenced by a court of law. That risk is minuscule comparing to the potential loss caused by his criminal activity, which may entail the loss of innocent life, people loosing their life's savings, sustaining grave bodily and emotional injuries, etc.
Assuming that one should act on the principle that one would want to become a universal norm, it is therefore, ethically justified to place a smaller risk on the perpetrator of that risk, than placing a larger risk on the innocent people or society at large. Stated differently, the interest of the public being put at risk should prevail over individual interests of the perpetrator of that risk. The opposite of that principle, individual interest of the perpetrator prevailing over public interest is, in fact, a variation on the capitalist theme of privatizing profits while socializing risks. Would you like that be the universal norm?
Wojtek