by Mark Kiesling, Associated Press
HAMMOND, Ind. - Joe Grisafi works in an office that goes 140 miles per hour.
Grisafi, a corporal in the Hammond Police Department’s patrol division, puts in his eight hours behind the wheel of a Ford Crown Victoria police cruiser. Like all patrol officers, Grisafi does everything from writing tickets to responding to emergency calls.
He also is one of three members of the department who is trained to teach an emergency vehicle operations course. Grisafi, Sgt. Mike Danko and Sgt. Paul Dancer all teach at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Plainfield.
Of the last four police officers killed in the line of duty in Lake County, three have been victims of traffic accidents, underscoring the need for driving training.
“Driving is a skill, and skills dissipate over time,” Danko said. “It’s easy to pick up bad habits, which have to be unlearned. It’s like shooting; if you don’t train, you lose the skill.”
All of Hammond’s driving is in an urban setting, which lends itself to a different driving style than that of a county or state police officer who must respond to emergency calls over larger, less populated areas.
“You can lose control of a car in one second, and you’re not going to get it back until the car wants you to,” said Grisafi, who has been teaching seven years.
Although Hammond exclusively uses rear-wheel-drive Crown Victorias, other departments have switched to front-wheel-drive cars such as the Chevrolet Impala, said Dancer, who as an instructor must be familiar with both.
“We didn’t know some of these vehicles could do the things they do,” he said.
The chance of an officer being involved in an accident is 90 percent greater than a civilian, Danko said, because of the amount of time they spend behind the wheel.
The courses are for rookies and veterans, and reinforce mostly defensive and evasive maneuvers. “People get the idea we’re teaching high speed, zoom. That’s part of it, but a small part,” Danko said.
Aside from teaching the physics of how a car operates - and police-package equipped cars operate differently than standard cars - they also teach the psychology of police driving.
“A pursuit gets the adrenaline pumping, and when it’s over they want to jump out and put the cuffs on somebody, but we teach them this is a felony stop. If someone’s running, they’ve got a reason to run and you’ve got to get backup, get the situation under control. You don’t just jump out and run up to the car,” said Danko, who has taught for five years.
Sgt. Patrick Gannon of the Lansing Police Department in Michigan has spent a good number of his 23 years on the department behind the wheel of squad cars and now maintains the department’s fleet.
He knows what goes into making a squad car tick, from the standard “police package” equipment that comes from the factory to the customized, in-house tailoring of each car to Lansing’s needs - which saves the village some money to boot.
He holds up a gold-colored rotor, the round piece of metal that rotates with the wheels.
“We use the same rotors as a NASCAR driver uses,” he said of the police car equipment. Unlike the standard rotor, this one is drilled with more than a dozen holes to dissipate the heat that quickly builds when the brakes are pumped at high speeds.
It’s not the only thing that makes a squad car different from the average car, though. Lansing also uses Ford Crown Victorias, the rear wheel drive, full-size sedan that sits on a full frame. It is one of the last of the breed.
But it’s not the same Crown Victoria that’s on the showroom floor.
For starters, it has a heavy-duty alternator and battery that take on the duty of providing power to the lights, on-board computer and radio.
“At an accident scene, for example, the car can sit idling for an hour with its lights on - and that’s a negative drain,” Gannon said.
Indeed, squad cars today are bedecked with strobe and conventional lights in the front, rear and on top - even on the side view mirrors.
Although the Ford’s engine is the same size as the standard Crown Victoria, Gannon explained the police versions have a different computer chip that allows better performance. “I can’t say how fast we can go,” he said. “That’s something we just don’t want to tell the bad guys.”
But even with all the equipment that separates a police vehicle from the average vehicle, the driving skills taught to police officers can be used by anyone, said Portage Police Department Cpl. John Ryan, who helps teach the department’s emergency vehicle operations course.
“Anyone in general can use evasive maneuvers, say if a deer runs out in front of them or a kid runs into the street,” Ryan said.
The Portage department has a combination of rear-wheel-drive cars like the Chevrolet Caprice and the Crown Victoria, but has bought front-wheel-drive Impalas since 2000.
“It’s a whole new ball game,” said Ryan, adding that officers assigned to one car do not switch back to another. “You can make corners a lot tighter with a front-wheel drive, but you’ve got to go slower into the curve - then you can accelerate out a lot faster.
“Personally, I liked the ‘turtle’ Chevys, the Caprices. But the Impalas are a lot cheaper, maybe $3,000 a vehicle. And in an urban area we don’t really need the power of the V-8 like the state police do on the highways,” Ryan said.