Fully Retracted
It was a Saturday a few years ago. My phone buzzed with a text and a photo.
One of our cruisers, front end destroyed.
It had already made the news. The officer was in hospital with serious injuries. More texts came in through the day: leg injuries, possibly a broken arm, wrist, elbow. A long road to recovery.
At first glance, it looked like the kind of crash I've talked about for years. Early morning, responding to a call for service, an intersection, another vehicle.
It bothered me all weekend.
I couldn't have told you why. Something about the injuries didn't fit the photo.
Monday morning, I went to our garage and found the car in the yard.
The front end had taken a beating. But when I opened the door and looked inside, the cockpit was fine.
No intrusion. The footwell hadn't collapsed. The steering column hadn't collapsed. No engine or transmission pushed up into the cabin. Other than the airbags hanging out, the inside of that car had done exactly what it was designed to do.
Then something caught my eye that was out of place.
The seatbelt.
It was fully retracted, sitting neatly in place, like the car had just rolled off the lot. I reached over and pulled on it.
Locked.
Everything in that car told me the same story. The belt was never on. At impact, with nothing holding the officer in the seat, the body slid forward and down, underneath the airbag. Submarining. All that energy went into the legs and the footwell.
The car did its job. The airbag did its job. The one piece of equipment that holds you where the rest of it can work was sitting in its housing the whole time.
The officer recovered and returned to duty. I'm grateful for that.
I never had the conversation with them about the belt. I've thought about that more than once.
The biggest safety improvement
Ask a room of drivers what the greatest safety advancement in the history of the automobile is. You'll hear ABS, airbags, stability control.
It's the seatbelt.
Every other system in the car assumes you're sitting where the belt keeps you. The airbag is designed to meet a belted occupant. The crush zones and the cockpit are built around a body that stays in the seat. Take the belt away and a survivable crash becomes a gamble.
In law enforcement, it's a gamble we keep losing. Nearly half of the US officers killed in motor vehicle crashes were not wearing a seatbelt. *
Nearly half.
None of this is new. "Wear your belt" has been the first of Below 100's five tenets since the program began. I'm a Below 100 instructor, and I've delivered that message more times than I can count. We all agree with it.
And yet.
The commitment
Why has this been on my mind? Two conversations.
The first was in Atlanta at ALERT. An officer and I were talking about body armour and making sure he had the best available. He said, "I promised my wife that I would do everything in my power to stay safe."
A few weeks later, back home, a different officer had a similar conversation with me about armour. He called it "a commitment to my wife."
I'm not reading anything into either one. Both were talking about their vests, and both meant it.
But it stayed with me. Two officers in two countries, each willing to research and invest in the best protection available to keep a commitment made at home.
The belt costs nothing. It's already in the car. It takes two seconds.
Wear your belt. Wear your vest. They sit side by side in Below 100 for a reason. One feels like protection against a threat. The other feels like an inconvenience on a routine drive.
The crash I described happened on an ordinary morning, on an ordinary call.
What we can do as instructors
We don't need another poster. We need the belt built into how we train, every time.
Buckle before you're rolling. Pulling out of a parking spot or creeping up to the start line before the click is one thing. Doing 15 or 20 without it is another. Hold that standard every session, every exercise, every demo, instructors first. If you unbuckle to hop out and reset a cone, then drive back to the start without it, your students saw that.
Train the unbuckle. The objection we hear most is getting out fast: an ambush, a foot pursuit. Don't dismiss it. Drill it. Let officers prove to themselves how quickly they can get out of a belt under pressure, and the excuse loses its weight.
Check the belt first. In every collision you review, look at the belt before anything else. It will tell you more than you expect.
Teach the why, don't just enforce the rule. Most officers have never seen what an unbelted body does in a crash. Here's one way to show them. Take them to the yard. Show them a wrecked car, the footwell, the belt that was worn and the one that wasn't. Ask the room why officers don't buckle, and let them give the real answers. Then work through each one. A rule gets followed when someone's watching. Understanding gets followed at 3 a.m. on an ordinary call.
Look for the workarounds. Belts buckled behind the seat to kill the chime. Chime defeats. If they're in your fleet, that's the culture talking.
Tell this story. Use it at your next session or briefing. You have my permission.
Those are a few of my ideas. I'd rather hear yours. Are there other ways we can train better? Hit reply and tell me. I'll share the best ones in a future issue.
That officer made it home and back to work. Not everyone does.
Most of the officers in your classroom have made a commitment to someone. They may never say it out loud in front of their peers, but it's there.
Keeping it doesn't start with the best vest money can buy. It starts with a click, every time you put it in gear.
Because the last thing any of us wants to find in the yard on a Monday morning is a belt that's fully retracted.
*Sources: NHTSA's review of 733 fatal law enforcement crashes from 1980 to 2008 found at least 42% of officers killed were not wearing a seatbelt. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund found that from 2015 to 2019, 47% of officers involved in fatal crashes were not belted.
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Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon
