Major Travis Yates has famously said, “More cops are being killed by trees and poles than by psychopaths.” I use that quote frequently to illustrate the severity of the consequences of many of our driving habits. We drive too fast too often, for no sensible reason. We exceed the capabilities of our vehicles, our own driving abilities, and the laws of physics. Sometimes killing us, and permanently traumatizing our families as our existence fades into oblivion, leaving a legacy that helps no one.
As a young officer, I committed more than my share of aggravated stupidity in patrol cars. But I hope that you will learn from my experiences and research. More importantly, learn from the experiences of those who died in unwarranted high-speed crashes.
We know the problem: too many officers drive way over their heads, and many die doing it. Why do we do this? When we’re sitting in a classroom, or talking with other officers about the problem, we all acknowledge it and we all know better. Then why do we floor the accelerator under conditions that go directly against our better judgment and logic? I want to stop talking about the symptoms and examine what I believe is a critical overlooked factor of the problem.
Okay, I admit it. I’m not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or PhD, and I don’t play one on TV, but I’ve done my research, and actual PhDs have reviewed the following and confirmed its validity.
Type T Personalities
The root answer is that many officers are Type T personalities. If you ask most people, personality types are either A or B. Often described as aggressive, assertive, and goal oriented people — Type A personalities dominate the police culture. Without the Type A traits, few people would go rushing into situations where everyone else is running away.
Type T is an emerging personality classification now recognized — it’s defined by the McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine as a “psychology A personality type that takes risks. Type Ts tend to be extroverted and creative and crave novel experiences and excitement.”
The sometimes insatiable craving of a type T personality can be described in two words: adrenaline rush.
Type T people not only enjoy the rush of adrenaline, but they will actively seek ventures and conditions that create it. For a type T, it is a powerful, sometimes addictive feeling of ecstasy. The cocktail of hormones (mostly adrenaline and dopamine) that flood the brain during Sympathetic Nervous System arousal, creates this euphoria.
High speed driving creates an adrenaline rush. The higher the speeds and the longer the exposure, the adrenaline level increases. According to one study cited in the Discovery Channel’s, High Speed Chase, “Officers involved in extended pursuits have adrenaline levels that exceed soldiers in combat.”
For police officers, this creates a conundrum of epic proportions. We all know the performance-hindering effects of an adrenaline overload on the fine and complex motor skills necessary to control a car. Not to mention tunnel vision, target fixation, and auditory exclusion, all of which can also be synergistic factors to a car crash.
Nevertheless, I believe a more critical component is this: when the pleasure centers of the type T brain are flooded with this intense, pleasure-inducing, adrenaline/dopamine overload, the logical, reasoning, cognitive part of the brain yields control to the emotional center of the brain. With the emotional center of the brain in control, and under the euphoric influence of the adrenaline overload, what are the chances that it will command the body to do anything other than to drive even more hazardously to increase the adrenaline level?
Add sleep deprivation to the mix, and the effect is even greater. Should it surprise us that our type T officers are crashing at high speeds — likely trying to feed an adrenaline rush euphoria — that they’ve never been warned about and probably don’t understand?
What Can We Do?
I think the first thing we need to do is to understand the reality of what can happen. We must fully comprehend that our brain can experience an involuntary, physiological change when under the influence of an adrenaline overload. It’s not just excitement. We are talking about an actual alteration in the way the brain functions, which is likely to encourage us to do things that have a high probability of getting us killed.
