By Kelly Couch
The goal of Emergency Vehicle Operations (EVO) training should not be to teach officers how fast they can drive. It should teach them to drive within the limits of their abilities and their vehicle’s capabilities so they can properly react when unexpected events arise during a response or pursuit.
One of the biggest challenges I face as an EVO instructor is trying to figure out why so many officers are killed in preventable crashes and sharing those lessons with new officers. When reviewing data regarding law enforcement collisions, excessive speed frequently appears as a major contributing factor, along with the troubling reality that some officers still do not wear seat belts.
According to the National Law Enforcement Museum, who work in collaboration with NHTSA, excessive speed is one of the primary contributing factors in law enforcement collisions. Many of these fatal collisions are single-vehicle collisions that happen when officers are responding to emergency calls.
Officers are sometimes required to operate an emergency vehicle at high speeds, but understanding the limits of their skills, the limits of the vehicle and the technology working in the background to keep them safe is often overlooked in training. Making sure trainees and seasoned officers aren’t pushing themselves or their vehicles to their limits cannot be overlooked in an EVO training program.
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Understanding what the vehicle is doing for the driver
Several years ago, when I was the full-time lead EVO instructor, one of our part-time instructors proposed a new driving-course exercise to address this issue. At the time, we were rapidly phasing out the long-serving Ford Crown Victoria and replacing it with newer vehicles such as the Ford Interceptor, Ford Interceptor Utility and Dodge Charger.
That transition required us to consider how these vehicles differed from the Crown Victoria. I believe our program did an excellent job of teaching recruits how technologies such as traction control and electronic stability control (ESC) affected vehicle performance. This was a major shift from older vehicles that lacked these systems, one that many police agencies and some training centers likely underestimated.
Moving from a Crown Victoria to an ESC-equipped vehicle without explaining the technology would create a serious gap in training. These systems work so effectively that some officers may have felt their driving had improved when the vehicle was automatically correcting problems such as rear tire grip loss. In many cases, drivers were probably making the same mistakes, but the newer vehicles were compensating for them and very likely preventing crashes.
This technology is valuable and potentially lifesaving, but failing to understand how it works and what it is doing in the background can be dangerous. As effective as ESC is, it cannot overcome the laws of physics. In high-speed situations, the consequences can be devastating.
Finding the difference between 75% and 100%
Returning to our instructor’s new idea, our program has always taught recruits to drive at 75% of their ability. The problem was that we never really explored how that felt, and it varies based on each person’s skills and abilities.
When driving at 75%, an officer or trainee should still have time to correctly brake or steer to avoid hazards, properly clear intersections, respond to radio traffic and react to other unexpected conditions. Now that our training fleet consisted mostly of newer, technology-equipped vehicles, we could explore this more safely, with far fewer trips off the roadway on our driving course.
The idea was to take two laps at the recruits’ own perceived 100% level, then a lap at 75%. Running an exercise involving recruits operating at their perceived 100% does require certain conditions to be met. Adequate instructor staffing to safely manage trainees in the vehicle as they perform the exercise and a dedicated driving course in the event vehicles leave the roadway are vital. A proper briefing laying out rules and expectations is also important.
It is worth noting that we conducted this exercise near the end of recruit training, after recruits had time to develop their driving skills.
In our case, in-car instructors acted as safety officers to occasionally push the driver a little harder or, more often, rein them in when their 100% was more like 120%. The purpose of running the exercise is not to evaluate driver performance but rather to illustrate that so little time is saved by pushing themselves while safety is greatly compromised.
This turned out to be a fun exercise for the recruits, a sometimes-scary exercise for the instructors and, ultimately, a great lesson in what happens to driver safety when officers push themselves to the limits of their skills and their vehicle’s ability to maintain its intended course.
We had surprisingly few incursions off the road surface, mostly occurring with front-end push, or plowing, which ESC isn’t as effective at correcting as it is with a rear slide. Our discussions with recruits after the exercise showed that they understood how dangerous it can be to push limits without leaving room for error in real-world driving situations.
What 10 seconds really costs
The exercise disappeared for a while due to time constraints and other exercises, but it recently returned in a new format that evolved from an instructor development day.
During the instructor day, we drove three timed laps: one at 100% while staying in our lane of travel, one at 100% utilizing the entire roadway surface and one at 75%. The time difference between our 100% runs and our 75% runs on the 1.3-mile loop of our driving course was consistently around 10 seconds, illustrating how pushing the limits saves very little time.
Now, toward the end of recruit training, we run recruits on two timed laps, one at 100% and one at 75%. On our 1.3-mile loop, the difference between a recruit’s 100% lap and 75% lap is consistently only five to 10 seconds.
That slight improvement in time comes with a significant loss of the safety margin drivers should maintain. This result, along with the lack of control recruits felt at 100%, is eye-opening and leads to meaningful discussion during end-of-session debriefings.
Teaching the lesson without a dedicated driving course
The challenge of running an exercise like this is real for many training programs. Not every program or police agency has a dedicated facility or enough instructors to make it work. These exercises require both staff and space.
Even if you cannot run a similar exercise, it is still vital to teach trainees how vehicle safety systems such as ESC work, where their limits are and what can happen when physics overtakes driver skill or electronic intervention.
In smaller training areas, this can often be done by designing exercises that trigger systems such as ESC. A good example is the lane-change exercise long used in police training. By increasing vehicle speed or shortening cone patterns, instructors can create conditions that compromise rear grip and allow trainees to feel ESC automatically apply braking to straighten the vehicle’s path.
For many drivers, this is an enlightening experience because they have never felt it before. Sometimes, a little creativity and a fresh approach to familiar exercises can make the lesson more effective.
EVO programs should not teach officers to push themselves and their vehicles to their limits unless they also teach what happens when those limits are exceeded. Speed without occasional negative outcomes, vehicle technology and overconfidence can all create a false sense of driver safety.
A better approach is to train officers to drive with an acceptable buffer of both skill and technology to compensate for things the officer does not see, does not expect or cannot control. EVO trainers must also continue to innovate, keep current on emerging vehicle technologies and pass this knowledge on to their trainees and officers.
If your training exercises are designed to push your drivers to the edge of their limits and the limits of the vehicle, you might be setting your trainees up for failure and potentially a tragic outcome.
About the author
Kelly Couch is a retired California police officer from the Bay Area and a retired law enforcement trainer. He was a full-time patrol tactics instructor and the lead EVO instructor at the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training (DPSST) in Oregon for six years. He has been an EVO instructor for 10 years and still provides training in Oregon as a part-time instructor.
