70 MPH
Last week I left you with a line: "due regard" is a standard most officers can recite but very few can point to and say, "that, right there, is what it looks like." I've been pondering that all week, and here's where I've landed.
Teaching officers the definition of due regard isn't doing the job justice. We can put the legal language on a slide, quiz them on it, and send them out the door able to recite it word for word. None of that touches what's actually happening in their head three seconds before they enter that intersection.
What's happening is this: we want to be the hero. We want to get there fast, because someone might need us. And in that moment, sound risk analysis is the first thing that gets sacrificed.
That's not a character flaw. It's chemistry, and it's predictable enough that I think we've been teaching this wrong.
What Urgency Actually Does
I'm a big believer in lights and sirens. They do real work: they tell the driver next to you that something's different, that you're not just another car in traffic, and that gives them a chance to react before you're on top of them. They may still pull out in front of you. But at least you told them you were coming.
The problem isn't the equipment. It's what happens in the officer's head once it's on.
When lights and siren activate, your body changes whether you tell it to or not. Stress hormones spike. Studies put that spike at roughly 30% higher during an emergency run compared to a normal one. That's not nerves. That's your body reading the situation as urgent and reacting accordingly, before you've consciously assessed a single thing about the intersection ahead of you.
Perceived Risk vs. Objective Risk
Here's the tension underneath all of it, and it's one I've talked about for years in the NRA framework: perceived risk against objective risk.
Perceived risk is the voice in an officer's head saying, if I don't get there fast enough, someone could get hurt, or worse. Objective risk is the actual, physical risk sitting in front of them right now: the intersection, the cross traffic, the person who hasn't seen them yet. Both are real. Both matter. They're supposed to be weighed against each other.
They almost never are. When an officer is racing against time, perceived risk wins every time, and objective risk gets short-changed. Not ignored outright. Short-changed. The intersection scan that should take a full second or two gets cut to a glance. The stop that should be a stop becomes a slow-and-go. The officer isn't choosing to skip the risk analysis. The clock in their head has already decided it for them.
There's a term for this in the research: goal conflict. A study out of Monash University, looking at a large emergency service organization, named it directly. Emergency drivers are chasing two goals every time they run a call: get there, and get there safely. Under time pressure, the "get there" goal wins, and higher speed tracks directly with crash frequency and severity.
Put the stress chemistry and the goal conflict together and you get an officer whose body is primed for urgency and whose mental math has already tilted toward speed before the intersection is even in view. That's the exact moment due regard is supposed to kick in. It's also the worst possible moment for it to be relying on a definition memorized months earlier in a classroom.
The Assumption That Gets People Killed
Here's the piece I think matters most. A lot of officers running lights and siren believe the equipment itself buys them the right-of-way. It doesn't. Other drivers still have the right-of-way at a green light until the emergency vehicle actually gets there. That's not a flaw in the equipment. It's the same perceived-versus-objective gap showing up again: what the officer believes is happening versus what's legally and physically true.
The fix I keep coming back to is simple to say and hard to do: visually confirm that the vehicles around you have actually stopped and yielded before you go through. Not assumed. Confirmed, with your eyes.
You cannot do that from a vehicle that's still rolling through at speed. You can only do it from a stop.
Most jurisdictions in North America only require an emergency vehicle to slow down as necessary before proceeding through a red light. No mandatory stop, no forced moment to actually confirm anything. A smaller number of jurisdictions require a full stop before an emergency vehicle can proceed, full stop meaning exactly that: wheels stopped, then a judgment call made from a stationary position. That's not an outlier being overly cautious. That's the model that actually lines up with what the safety research recommends. The rest of us are the ones behind.
I know that's not a popular idea in a country where most jurisdictions only require slowing down before proceeding. But it's basic human factors: you can't verify what you haven't actually looked at long enough to see.
Not Theoretical
I keep thinking about a recent Ohio case: an officer ran a red light responding to a call, at speed, and struck another vehicle. The driver died. Watching the footage, there was no visible slowing, no pause, nothing that looked like risk was actually being weighed before that intersection.
That's not one bad officer having one bad day. That's the pattern: perceived risk winning out over objective risk, stress chemistry along for the ride, and an assumption that the intersection was already his. Stack those together at speed and this is what it looks like.
Training Alone Won't Fix This
Here's the part I've had to ponder. Teaching the definition of due regard, over and over, doesn't touch any of what I just described. If we never address what urgency actually does to the body and the assumptions it creates, the definition stays a slide in a classroom instead of a habit at 2am.
I'm not saying due regard as a legal standard is broken. (Maybe I am.) I'm saying teaching it as a phrase to memorize isn't preparing anyone for the moment it actually matters.
Where This Leaves Us
"Due regard" isn't going through a red light at 70 miles per hour because you had your lights on and you were pretty sure it was clear. That's not due regard. That's chemistry making the decision for you, and calling it "due regard" after the fact.
Further reading, if you want to go deeper: Muir, Newnam, Newstead & Boustras (2020), "Challenges for safety intervention in emergency vehicle fleets: a case study," Safety Science, 123. And Hsiao, Chang & Simeonov (2018), "Preventing Emergency Vehicle Crashes: Status and Challenges of Human Factors Issues," Human Factors, 60(7). Free full text via CDC/NIOSH: stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/211588/cdc_211588_DS1.pdf
Next week: what happens when the brain is trained to look for the threat before it's even there, and why some drivers never see the sniper coming.
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