4/16/2008 – 4/17/08 If you think you know how to drive, try telling that to the New Mexico State Police. They wrote the book about what it takes to be a good driver.
The driving tests they’re required to pass put to shame the notion of civilian driver ‘training’
Eliminating bad driving habits and learning motoring skills good enough to be prepared for anything is so important to the state police — a patrolman’s car is his office — that fully one of the 20 weeks of recruit training is devoted to teaching correct behavior behind the wheel.
Why the emphasis? Why can’t a recruit just go with what he or she learned in driver’s ed?
Because the difference between what law-enforcement personnel must learn to be rated as good drivers and what civilians must learn to get a driver’s license is like the difference between driving a race car and sailing down the interstate on cruise control.
Indeed, some techniques used in the teaching of good driving are taken from the world of racing, where the driver must remain fully alert to avoid injury or death.
“There’s always the unknown,” said Senior Patrolman Scott McFaul, 36, a driving instructor.
New Mexico’s 350 to 380 uniformed state cops in the force of 530 — authorized strength is 640 — spend between four to eight hours of each eight-hour shift in their vehicles, depending on their districts, performing duties that range from traffic enforcement to narcotics-related crimes to homeland security, said Capt. Patrick Werick, 41, of the Special Operations Bureau.
“Driving is very important because we spend a lot of time in our cars,” he said. Most officers drive their cars — or units, as the police call them — about 20,000 miles a year.
In the civilian world, driving is often taken for granted.
“Driver training as it exists today among civilians is extremely poor at its very best,” said Tim Sharpe, 59, who wrote the original driver-training manual for the New Mexico State Police from 1979 to 1980 and now teaches driving at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia. He’s been a driving instructor for 32 years, 14 of them at the state police.
“What does it take to get a driver’s license?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s pretty rudimentary stuff. It’s a very substandard approach to driver training.
“We take drivers and vehicles up to the limit of their ability. Civilians never get close to that. They’re never given emergency-type situations. … It would be ideal if drivers had the opportunity to feel the real dynamics of a vehicle. They never do. They don’t know how to respond because they learn in a perfect world.”
Not so at the state police, where an officer is regarded as “an army of one,” said Lt. Eric Garcia, 36, the lead driving instructor at the Law Enforcement Training Academy on Jaguar Drive.
“The idea is to train people so that [good driving] becomes like habit,” he said. His day job is operations supervisor of District 1, the Santa Fe area — one of 12 state-police districts.
“This kind of course gives you an idea of the [safety of the] public — you just can’t blow through an intersection,” said Bryan Waller, 26, of Carlsbad, one of 17 recruits relearning how to drive recently. “The class makes you more aware of your surroundings.
“There’s a million things going through your mind when you get that [emergency] call. You’ve got to be composed. You get that hot call, you can’t just stomp on the gas. If you don’t get there, what good does it do?”
State-police vehicles include two basic modes of transportation: 500 rear-wheel-drive Ford Crown Victorias and 90 front-wheel-drive Chevrolet Impalas. They’re all equipped with engines more powerful than civilian models as part of the “police package” that’s put together by the manufacturer.
The $21,000 Crown Vic interceptors come with 4.6 liter V-8s that put out 250 horsepower and the $17,000 Impalas are powered by 3.9 liter V-6s that produce 233 hp, Werick said. The department is experimenting with two Dodge Chargers with 5.7-liter Hemi V-8s that top out at 340 horses and cost $23,000 each, he said.
The state police try to retire the units when the odometer hits between 94,000 and 100,000 miles after four or five years of hard use. But that’s the ideal because, as with almost everything else, much depends on how much money is available. The budget for vehicle replacement is between $1 million and $3 million a year, but the department could use $4.2 million, Werick said. “We need to replace 200 cars a year,” he said.
Though most American police sedans come in three flavors — Fords, Chevys and Dodges — Werick said his force also has 12 Ford Expeditions, six Chevy Tahoes, including one for a K-9 unit, and 25 Ford F-150 pickups.
But it’s the Crown Vic — the black-and-whites so familiar to everyone who’s been on New Mexican roads — that’s the workhorse of the force.
“The Crown Vics work best for us because of all the highways” officers have to travel, Werick said.
The recruits drive white ones for practice, zooming over an asphalt track laid out behind the academy.
The trainees make tire-punishing twists and turns through narrow sets of orange traffic cones designed to simulate sudden lane changes, sometimes accelerating up to 35 mph. They brake to full stops at intersections and at one point start from a full stop after turning on their flashing lights as if they just received an emergency call from a dispatcher. Screeching brakes are a no-no, a sign of bad driving.
They’ve got to do it under a strict time limit without knocking over any of the cones. The penalty: lying on their backs as a group and doing flutter kicks.
“You’ll hit more cones if you think about hitting the cones,” said Garcia, the chief instructor. “The idea is to do it” without thinking. “We teach them the skills and techniques here, and they have to use them in the field.”
“I drive a lot of different cars, and I prefer the Crown Vic because of its reliability, creature comforts and because it’s well built and well designed,” McFaul said. He smoothly twists through gut-wrenching turns on a practice run at speeds above 40 mph. He doesn’t hit any cones.
The sharp swerving and weaving, the lean-in on the curves that can twist a driver’s body and the sudden braking look like amusement-park fun. But it’s serious stuff adapted from racecar driving so that recruits learn new steering techniques and are prepared mentally for the rigors of emergency responses and pursuits.
The idea is to prepare an officer for any eventuality on the road — for a child suddenly appearing on his bike from between two parked cars, for someone backing into a street, for avoiding debris, for swerving away from an animal darting across the highway.
It’s to train for what recruit Waller, the third in his family to join the state police, termed the “what-if situation. It makes you more aware that you’re not the only one on the road. You have to have a proactive attitude.”
The state police take driving so seriously that officers receive an annual refresher course that includes up to three hours in the classroom and up to six hours on the track, Garcia said.
Seven instructors, drawn from districts around the state, focus on eliminating the bad habits that civilian motorists might not even realize are common to their daily driving — see the sidebar below.
“What we look for in recruits are bad habits and to correct them,” Garcia said. Their vehicle “is their home away from home. We want to teach them their limits. We want to teach them control.”
It’s something that Sharpe, who wrote the book for the state police on good driving, said could be learned better by young civilian drivers.
“Statistically, the young, inexperienced drivers are the most dangerous out there,” he said. “They’re just not mature enough in some ways and don’t understand the concept of what it takes to stop a 4,000-pound vehicle.
“These cars have gotten so nice, so comfortable, you have no sensation of movement. People don’t understand that they can overdrive these vehicles. It’s hard to get people to slow down.”
Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.
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