Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/17/watch-craziness-when-man-filmi.html
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The person filming was in the truck.
No kid with them.
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The moment I saw that roadblock setup my first thought was “well what did they think was going to happen?” The police intentionally caused a vehicle traveling at high speed to lose control, and they lined up bystanders in a likely spot that he would crash!
I recall a few years ago in Ohio a pickup-truck “stopped” with spike strips rammed into a popular bar, severely injuring everyone seated at the bar and both bartenders.
I just did a brief search on safe use of spike strips, and while I must admit that I’m not that concerned about whether a fleeing driver is injured due to losing control, I’m troubled that all of the guides focus on “officer safety” and I’ve found none that even mention bystander safety.
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High-speed or slow-speed chase, if you know one is coming get out of the way.
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To be fair, the driver was not planning on swerving into him…until he caught a glimpse of how our aspiring director was framing him. 
Well, at least he didn’t have motion smoothing on. 
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WTF? Yes, and ouch was said as well.
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Cops are obsessed with “officer safety”. Everyone else are targets or collateral. Soldiers in an active war zone tend to be more conscientious of “civilian” safety than US police.
Ideally yes, but where? About ten seconds between seeing the spikes strips while sitting in the traffic jam and then being hit.
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I agree that sometimes there’s no choice. It looks like the cops pulled everyone over to the shoulder for an unspecified period of time, laid down the spike trap and waited to see what happened. It’s not a situation I’d ever anticipate, but if I’m in it I’ll take this as a lesson to get out of the car and step way to the side of the road until the drama is over.
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None of this would have happened if the police weren’t chasing him!
– Rudolph Giuliani
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Yes, you’d have to move way out of the way. You never know what will happen, maybe a car will flip and land on you. In this case, it seems it’s all wooded nearby, so hopefully the trees would absorb the impact of whatever happened.
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This is the US now. Where prudence is asking where can we take adequate shelter from the reckless endangerment by cops.
I will say that if I did have time my strategy would probably be to hang a U-turn and leave, but again there was no time for that either once they noticed the strips.
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He surely got arrested… for that vertical video.
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Hard to say where the car would go though, and there is a road on one side and probably private property on the other side, so the safest place to be might still be inside a vehicle, with crush zones, air bags and seat belts.
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The moment I saw that roadblock setup my first thought was “well what did they think was going to happen?” The police intentionally caused a vehicle traveling at high speed to lose control, and they lined up bystanders in a likely spot that he would crash!
Do US police use something like the stinger UK police use? That’s specifically designed to release the air in the tyres in a controlled way, avoiding loss of control. To my, utterly non-expert, eyes, this looks like the fleeing driver tried to avoid the spikes and lost control…
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Serious question: any EMTs or ED-docs know the official definition of “non-life-threatening injury”? 'Cause so far as I know you can lose both legs, an arm, one kidney, your eardrums, eyes, teeth, spleen… and still be alive.
(and, yeah, your naughty bits too)
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“What a fucking asshole,” is the under-statement of the day.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, and not totally related, but I often wonder why consumer cars have such high top speeds… Do they ever need to go faster than 85mph? I foresee a future when digitally-connected cars have location-based speed limits. There’s obviously a lot of security issues involved, but it could improve safety and give cops the power to remotely slow any car to a stop… Dunno, probably a bad idea for various reasons.
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Ban all police high speed chases. Make them illegal with criminal penalties for police officers who engage in them.
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The driver tries to swerve around but doesn’t quite make it. If you advance frame by frame around the nine second mark, you can see the left tires go over the spike strip, the end of which is thrown into the air after the car goes over. Then the car loses control as the left front and rear tire lose air, causing the car to veer to the left.
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Yeah I think that strip was to short for the width of the road. Maybe the police ran out of time laying it.
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It’s a terrible idea, but also probably sadly inevitable. Reliable self-driving cars are probably at least a decade away, but limited autopilot and internet connected vehicles would make it trivial for municipalities to require a police override, which privacy aside will of course combine the insecurities of IoT and backdoor access.
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