DENVER -- When the police on stretches of country road want to stop a high-speed chase, they reach for their spike strips. Long and spiny like the tail of some steel porcupine, the strips are hurled into the road to flatten a fleeing suspect's tires, ideally ending a dangerous pursuit in just moments. The devices sit in thousands of patrol cars across the country.
But they can also put law enforcement officers and bystanders into deadly cross hairs. At least 30 people have been killed in the two decades since spike strips became popular, some victims intentionally run over by drivers trying to evade capture at any cost and others struck by cars moving wildly on punctured tires.
In September 2012, after a spate of fatal crashes, the FBI put out a bulletin urging law-enforcement agencies to explore other ways to handle chases. And this May, the deaths of a police officer in Houston and a State Patrol cadet in Colorado renewed concerns from law enforcement groups and some police officials that the devices are too risky for adrenaline-fueled chases where drivers can be drunk or high and hurtling down the road at 100 mph.
To deploy them, officers positioned ahead of a chase have to climb out of the relative safety of a car, pull the spikes from the trunk and toss them into the road. As the cars approach, they wait like fishermen to yank the spikes across at precisely the right moment so they hit the suspect's tires but not those of the patrol cars screaming behind.
"It's a dangerous thing to do," said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a policing research group. "You're taking this thing and physically throwing it out into the street. You've got to get to a place of safety right away, and if you don't, the results can be tragic."
In Houston, Officer Richard Martin was struck and killed May 18 while trying to throw out spike strips to stop a burglary suspect who had woven through traffic, fired shots at the police and stolen a woman's car at gunpoint. The police say the suspect, Jeffery Ryan Conlin, intentionally hit Martin and sped away. He stopped a short time later and fatally shot himself.
Days later, Taylor Thyfault, a 21-year-old State Patrol cadet in northern Colorado, was killed after he and another trooper laid out spike strips to try to stop a fleeing suspect, the police said. They said the driver, Christopher Gebers, had swerved to avoid the spikes and struck the two officers, killing Thyfault and seriously injuring Trooper Clinton Rushing. Gebers was charged with first-degree murder.
The crash happened near the bedroom town of Longmont, and four days later, Deputy Chief Craig Earhart decided to pull spike strips out of his officers' trunks.
"This was the last straw for us," Earhart said. "We just didn't feel like it was worth the risk of our officers."
The Dallas Police Department eliminated spike strips in 2012 after examining a tally of the officers across the country, many from small-town police departments or rural sheriff's offices, who had been killed trying to use them. Some officers complained, and other police departments called to ask if they could have Dallas' unused spikes. Michael Genovesi, the assistant police chief in Dallas who oversees patrol officers, said the balance between risks and benefits was clear to him.
"They can be an effective tool, there's no denying that," he said. "The bottom line is these people in chase scenarios don't play by the rules, and it's difficult to predict what they're going to do."
Other police and sheriff's agencies -- even those that have lost officers -- say spiking cars, while dangerous, is no riskier than ramming into a suspect's car to knock it off kilter, or simply getting out of a cruiser to write a traffic ticket on the side of a busy highway.
"It's a resource we have to bring a long-distance pursuit to an end," said Rob Madden, a spokesman for the Colorado State Patrol. "There's got to be a way to end something."
The Ohio-based company Stop Stick, a leading manufacturer, said its spikes had stopped more than 21,000 chases over the past two decades. The company makes what it describes as the safest tire deflation spikes available -- a lightweight row of sharp spikes encased in a plastic core. Still, its training videos provide a range of safety warnings, telling the police to find cover when they deploy them, stay out of the road and never use them when pedestrians are around.
"Ours is not a last-minute product," said Andy Morrison, the company's president.
But high-speed chases are unpredictable events that are dangerous both to officers and bystanders, said Bueermann of the Police Foundation. Beyond spike strips, many law enforcement agencies have put restrictions on their pursuit policies, setting speed limits, allowing them only after felonies or requiring them to end once the police know the suspect's identity and can apprehend the person later.
"Are you going to apprehend all offenders at any cost?" Bueermann said. "Most of the time they're running for very benign reasons -- they have warrants, or it's a stolen car. And is chasing a stolen piece of metal worth it?"
A Section on 07/05/2015