State trooper presses incorrect car off I-40 with PIT maneuver near West Memphis

A dashcam shot from Hubbard's car as he carried out the PIT maneuver.

An Arkansas State Police trooper made a harmful error just recently when he carried out a controlled-crash maneuver on the wrong automobile throughout a high-speed chase on Interstate 40, KARK reports. Obviously, nobody in the car was hurt.

It's the current example of the state cops's tremendous interest for so-called PIT maneuvers, typically released at high speeds. (PIT represents "accuracy immobilization method," though now law enforcement is rebranding the practice as a "tactile lorry intervention," or TVI.) It requires an officer pushing his/her own car into the rear side of a target automobile, triggering it to spin out and ideally pulled up.

Dashcam footage gotten by KARK shows the cannon fodder, Cpl. Thomas Hubbard, was parked on an I-40 on-ramp near West Memphis on the night of Sept. 10 prior to he began pursuing 2 lorries speeding down the interstate, one of which was a light-colored sedan. As he tried to chase down the speeding vehicles, he came across a white sedan in the best lane.

The video footage shows the vehicle's brake lights, and the vehicle appears to decrease as Hubbard approaches it from behind. The cannon fodder PITs it anyhow, sending it spinning across both lanes of traffic.
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Hubbard has actually been off task given that the Sept. 10 occurrence and is retiring from the force, according to state police authorities.

The event occurred near mile marker 265, not far from West Memphis. In July, another PIT maneuver by a state cannon fodder near West Memphis killed a speeding motorist on the technique to the bridge throughout the Mississippi River. The crash injured another trooper whose car was struck by the suspect's cars and truck as it drew out of control; it also shut down bridge traffic for hours.
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A Lonoke County male 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 attempted to stop her near Jacksonville utilizing the regulated crash technique. Harper was pregnant at the time.

KARK likewise has an interview with the lawyer who represented Harper in the suit, Andrew Norwood. As part of the settlement, the state authorities accepted change its policy on PIT maneuvers to put in location requirements for when the treatment should be used. But, Norwood said, that does not enter into play in an event in which the trooper merely stopped working to inspect he was crashing into the best automobile.