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Just like a lot of cities in the US, Mesa and others in the metropolitan Phoenix area have been struggling with stamping out street takeovers. The Arizona Department of Public Safety has stepped in to help with the problem and troopers use a variety of methods. One of them is the Grappler Police Bumper, as demonstrated in this video.
Learn how one city in Georgia has stopped street takeovers before they even started.
Police were alerted to multiple takeovers at intersections in the valley back on the night of June 10. One of the vehicles involved allegedly struck a pedestrian, something that happens way too often during these illegal takeovers, then sped off to avoid facing consequences.
Members of the Street Racing Task Force, which includes different police departments in the area, along with troopers spotted the suspect’s vehicle. The trooper with the Grappler took the lead, deployed it, and stopped the pursuit in just a moment.
We’ve seen the Grappler Police Bumper used before, but it’s been a while. While some departments love using spike strips, Stop Sticks, or a good PIT to bring a police chase to a close, we’re curious why this invention hasn’t become more common.
Motor Trend back in 2019 said the cost to install one on a cruiser was $5,000, which apparently included training the officer on its use. We wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t other hidden costs in its use and it’s likely the price of it, like pretty much everything else, has increased since then. But that still seems miniscule compared to the risk and cost or other takedown methods.
With the Grappler device it seems there’s a lot more control involved. While we’ve only seen it used in the wild a few times, none of those have involved the suspects’ vehicles rolling, hitting anyone else, or otherwise wrecking out gloriously. Maybe there are some drawbacks to how the device works, but we don’t know what those would be.
Check out the video for yourself. It’s short and shows how rapidly this device brought the chase to a halt.
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