An inside look at how police officers are trained to drive under high stress

PALM DESERT, Calif. (KESQ) – After a pursuit crash injured a family in Indio late last month, police training and tactics related to vehicle pursuits are under scrutiny.

This comes as a San Bernardino County Sheriff's Deputy was killed and a bystander was injured in a vehicle pursuit last week, too.

College of the Desert's Public Safety Academy is where officers in training are first introduced to foundational skills they use when driving under high stress.

"It's a very complicated thing because what if you let that bad guy go and then he or she goes on and does something bad to somebody else? And how do you make that determination? These are all very difficult decisions and they're all made very quickly under very high stress," says Walt Meyer, the Director of College of the Desert's Public Safety Academy.

Meyer says it all comes down to critical-thinking skills, which starts in the classroom.

"When you look at police training as a whole, the whole everything that we do in police training is geared towards critical thinking," Meyer says.

Students are drilled each day to build discipline. "The goal of that is to instill in them that, look, if you make a mistake on the drill, on drill and command, you know, you can't do that."

"What we do at the academy level is we teach them how to follow orders and critically think so when the sergeant says, ‘stop that pursuit,’ you'll stop that pursuit," he continues. They also try to "remove emotion" from students' decision-making process so they can think clearly during a high-stress situation.

College of the Desert offers two of the three modules that students are required to take before they become a police officer: Module Three and Module Two. Students begin slow-speed driving training, as well as the critical-thinking emphasis, among other skills, in Module Three.

Once they complete those two modules, students enroll in the Module One program, which is hosted by the Sheriff's Department. It's here that they undergo high-speed driving training, like EVOC training, to learn how to handle their vehicle at high speeds.

Meyer acknowledges that pursuit policy varies from department to department, but again, emphasizes that students are encouraged to make the judgment call to continue pursuing a suspect themselves.

"There's a lot of times the supervisor is not available," he says. "What we teach them there is that until the supervisor shows up or starts taking control of something, they are the supervisor, they are running that operation, that incident."

According to Meyer, pursuit policies are often the most detailed and thorough policies at each department. They typically cover the traffic conditions officers are allowed to pursue suspects in, if officers can pursue nonviolent suspects, among others. He says while he doesn't influence policy in his role at College of the Desert, he encourages those who wish to see change in their communities to contact their elected officials and local law enforcement leaders.

"Different communities have different standards. And so you can tailor those policies to meet those standards of what the community wants."