Page 413 - NIXBOOK

All of the mock pursuits included a part where one of the officers would drop out of the chase and go set up a tire spiking area
somewhere, and when the “bad guys” got to that area, the tire spike set would be thrown out across the road and the tires would
be spiked. Actually, it was a training spike strip set with nothing actually pointy in it, so no real tires were harmed during the
trainings. It was mostly just to teach all the officers about how to throw the things out and communicate with the other chasing
officers about what was going on. Which was important, because occasionally during actual real chases out in the county some
officer would deploy the spike strip and the get the bad guy and then the next police car or two in the chase would also run over
it. When the bad guy blew out all his tires that was good; when the police cars lost their tires, that was bad. So it was pretty
important to coordinate and communicate about when and where the spikes were being deployed, and most importantly, when
they were then yanked back off the road hopefully after the bad guy just ran them over.

Our tire spike stripes were called Stop Sticks, because that was the brand name. They were a three- part folded up plastic thing
that has hollow spikes inside and there’s a rope and handle and in a best case scenario an officer up ahead of a pursuit can lay
the thing out by the side of the road, run across the road with the string, and when the bad guy car approaches at whatever
speed, the officer can use the string to pull the tire spike set up across and into the roadway just in time to hit the tires. We
practiced that a lot. Like I said, we used an inert training model that was identical to the real ones, but with no actual spikes
inside because, well, tires are expensive. One time, when it was my turn to deploy the stop stick during a mock pursuit I had the
training model in my car but in the heat of the excitement I grabbed my real one from my trunk and threw that out into the
road, oblivious to my colossal mistake but fortunately one of the instructors supervising me called a time out on over the radio’s
training frequency and managed to stop everybody on the course before they got to me. I think he didn’t know if he wanted to
yell at me or just laugh. I actually felt pretty good about that; it was a fast stressful situation and I didn’t hesitate for a second to
just brag the official real spike strip from my trunk and deploy it.
I never wound up actually using the spike strips on a real life bad guy car. But I knew plenty of other officers who did. Sometimes
they were successful in throwing the spikes out at just the right time and place and they were able to deflate some tires.
Sometimes they’d also deflate the tires on the chasing police cars; one of my coworkers spiked a sheriff’s deputy and got all four
the tires on his crown vic; required three other guys to get out their spare tires so he could get his car back in service. Not
surprisingly, the Sheriff sent the bill for 4 new tires to our police chief, who was not super thrilled about that.