By Benjamin Hardy
On September 20, 20235:27 pm
A dashcam shot from Hubbard's vehicle as he performed the PIT maneuver.
An Arkansas State Police trooper made a dangerous error recently when he performed a controlled-crash maneuver on the wrong vehicle during a high-speed chase on Interstate 40, KARK reports. Apparently, no one in the car was injured.
It’s the latest example of the state police’s tremendous enthusiasm for so-called PIT maneuvers, often deployed at high speeds. (PIT stands for “precision immobilization technique,” though now law enforcement is rebranding the practice as a “tactile vehicle intervention,” or TVI.) It entails an officer nudging his or her own car into the rear side of a target vehicle, causing it to spin out and ideally come to a stop.
Dashcam footage obtained by KARK shows the trooper, Cpl. Thomas Hubbard, was parked on an I-40 on-ramp near West Memphis on the night of Sept. 10 before he began pursuing two vehicles speeding down the interstate, one of which was a light-colored sedan. As he attempted to chase down the speeding vehicles, he encountered a white sedan in the right lane.
The footage shows the car’s brake lights, and the car appears to slow down as Hubbard approaches it from behind. But the trooper PITs it anyway, sending it spinning across both lanes of traffic.
Hubbard has been off duty since the Sept. 10 incident and is retiring from the force, according to state police officials.
The incident took place near mile marker 265, not far from West Memphis. In July, another PIT maneuver by a state trooper near West Memphis killed a speeding driver on the approach to the bridge across the Mississippi River. The crash injured another trooper whose vehicle was struck by the suspect’s car as it spun out of control; it also shut down bridge traffic for hours.
A Lonoke County man was killed by a state police PIT maneuver in July after another high speed chase. In 2021, state police settled a lawsuit with Janice Harper, whose car spun out of control and flipped over in 2020 when an officer tried to stop her near Jacksonville using the controlled crash method. Harper was pregnant at the time.
KARK also has an interview with the attorney who represented Harper in the lawsuit, Andrew Norwood. As part of the settlement, the state police agreed to change its policy on PIT maneuvers to put in place standards for when the procedure should be used. But, Norwood said, that doesn’t come into play in an incident in which the trooper simply failed to check he was crashing into the right vehicle.
ARTICLE: https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/...-off-i-40-with-pit-maneuver-near-west-memphis
ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/h2LBl
DASHCAM VIDEO:
On September 20, 20235:27 pm
A dashcam shot from Hubbard's vehicle as he performed the PIT maneuver.
An Arkansas State Police trooper made a dangerous error recently when he performed a controlled-crash maneuver on the wrong vehicle during a high-speed chase on Interstate 40, KARK reports. Apparently, no one in the car was injured.
It’s the latest example of the state police’s tremendous enthusiasm for so-called PIT maneuvers, often deployed at high speeds. (PIT stands for “precision immobilization technique,” though now law enforcement is rebranding the practice as a “tactile vehicle intervention,” or TVI.) It entails an officer nudging his or her own car into the rear side of a target vehicle, causing it to spin out and ideally come to a stop.
Dashcam footage obtained by KARK shows the trooper, Cpl. Thomas Hubbard, was parked on an I-40 on-ramp near West Memphis on the night of Sept. 10 before he began pursuing two vehicles speeding down the interstate, one of which was a light-colored sedan. As he attempted to chase down the speeding vehicles, he encountered a white sedan in the right lane.
The footage shows the car’s brake lights, and the car appears to slow down as Hubbard approaches it from behind. But the trooper PITs it anyway, sending it spinning across both lanes of traffic.
Hubbard has been off duty since the Sept. 10 incident and is retiring from the force, according to state police officials.
The incident took place near mile marker 265, not far from West Memphis. In July, another PIT maneuver by a state trooper near West Memphis killed a speeding driver on the approach to the bridge across the Mississippi River. The crash injured another trooper whose vehicle was struck by the suspect’s car as it spun out of control; it also shut down bridge traffic for hours.
A Lonoke County man was killed by a state police PIT maneuver in July after another high speed chase. In 2021, state police settled a lawsuit with Janice Harper, whose car spun out of control and flipped over in 2020 when an officer tried to stop her near Jacksonville using the controlled crash method. Harper was pregnant at the time.
KARK also has an interview with the attorney who represented Harper in the lawsuit, Andrew Norwood. As part of the settlement, the state police agreed to change its policy on PIT maneuvers to put in place standards for when the procedure should be used. But, Norwood said, that doesn’t come into play in an incident in which the trooper simply failed to check he was crashing into the right vehicle.
ARTICLE: https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/...-off-i-40-with-pit-maneuver-near-west-memphis
ARCHIVE: https://archive.ph/h2LBl
DASHCAM VIDEO:
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