Leadership in Police Driver Training

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This issue was originally planned around the results of our recent survey but they’re not quite ready for compiling — and while getting that survey out in a readable format proved more challenging than expected, something interesting happened in the process. Even the early responses that did come in pointed clearly in one direction: leadership support for driver training matters, and people in this field feel it deeply when that support is present and when it is not. That theme is worth its own conversation. So this issue takes a different path, one shaped by those early responses and by a topic that has sat in my notes for some time. I hope you find it thought provoking and worthwhile.

When I was first offered a position at Peel Regional Police in 2000, one of my mentors — the very person who had founded the driver training unit at Peel — sat me down for a frank conversation. "If it were any other police service," he told me, "I would be very cautious."

"Why is that?" I asked.

His answer has stayed with me ever since: training programs within policing, he explained, are often subject to the whims of inspectors and captains. As leadership changes, so too might the fate of the driver training program within that organization.

I joined Peel and was proud to be there. The commitment to driver training was genuine and well-entrenched — not an afterthought, but a foundational part of how the organization operated. Once I began talking with colleagues across North America, I realized just how fortunate my situation was. During my first ten years at Peel, I became aware of another police service that had built a Police Vehicle Operations unit from the ground up — only to disband it shortly after, leaving a single full-time employee to carry the entire program to this day.

And yet, if I am being honest, I have not been entirely immune to the very dynamic my mentor warned me about. Even at Peel, I have experienced a version of that same roller coaster. Each time inspectors changed roles, the level of emphasis — and the depth of support — given to the driver training unit shifted with them.

The years between 2010 and 2017 stand out as a high point. During that period, I had the backing of strong leaders who genuinely believed in officer safety and who trusted and empowered their mid-level supervisors — or was it because we had experienced an officer's death in 2010 and the spotlight was on us? That support opened doors. In 2015, I was given the opportunity to write a proposal to the Deputy Chief making the case for hosting the ALERT Conference in Canada — the first time it had ever been held outside the United States. Peel Police hosted it, and it was a milestone I am proud of to this day.

Since then, the management landscape above me has shifted repeatedly. Some leaders have been engaged and supportive; others have tolerated the driver training function at best; and a few have shown little interest in hearing about it at all. The roller coaster, as my mentor predicted, is very real — even at Peel.

When I think back to that conversation in 2000, I find myself wondering what my career would have looked like had I ended up somewhere else.

Despite the inconsistency that defines leadership support for driver training across most agencies, there are individuals who have stood apart — leaders who recognized a problem and had the courage to act on it. Three in particular deserve to be acknowledged here.

On March 1, 2010, Constable Artem Ochakovsky was involved in a collision at Airport Road and Steeles Avenue in Brampton. He died of his injuries two days later. It was the first line-of-duty death at Peel Regional Police in 25 years, and the investigation would later reveal that he had been travelling well over the speed limit and was not wearing his seatbelt.

Chief Mike Metcalf's response was not limited to the public statements and the funeral. He showed up. At a driver training seminar I was hosting, Chief Metcalf walked into the room and issued a direct challenge to everyone present: find out why officers are not wearing their seatbelts — and fix it.

The reaction was immediate and revealing. Several participants pushed back, insisting their organizations did not have a seatbelt problem. At least two people said exactly that with confidence. Within a week, both had called me back with the same message: once they looked, the problem was very much there.

That is what leadership in a room looks like. Chief Metcalf did not commission a study or wait for a working group. He walked in, issued a challenge, and trusted the professionals present to do something with it. The fact that two people reversed a confident position within seven days says everything about what the right voice in the right room can accomplish.

In 2009, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department lost two officers in separate vehicle crashes. Sheriff Doug Gillespie's response was unusually direct. He publicly stated that at least one of the crashes was "predictable and preventable" — a remarkable thing for a senior law enforcement leader to say out loud, and a statement that carried real weight precisely because it came from the top.

Gillespie followed his words with action. He announced stricter accountability standards around officer driving behaviour and, by mid-2010, Las Vegas Metro had launched a department-wide safe driving and seatbelt campaign — a direct response to what had now become three officer fatality crashes involving vehicles.

"Predictable and preventable" is not the language of condolence — it is the language of accountability. It signals to every officer and supervisor that leadership is not willing to accept these deaths as an unavoidable cost of the job. That framing changes what people believe is possible, and it changes what they are willing to address.

Captain Larry Cecchettini's story stands apart from the others in one important respect: he did not wait for an officer to die before acting. After attending a P.O.S.T. Safe Driving Symposium in October 2012, he went back to his agency and looked hard at what the data was already telling him.

What he found was sobering. Yolo County had recorded 616 incidents of deputies driving over 90 miles per hour. The agency was averaging 1.5 deputy injuries per year from vehicle incidents, with two deputies forced into early retirement. Liability losses had exceeded one million dollars over ten years. These were not abstract numbers — they were the accumulated cost of a problem that had been allowed to persist.

Cecchettini built a data-driven fleet safety program to address it. The results were striking: 91 and 94 percent reductions in unsafe driving behavior across key metrics, and ultimately zero at-fault crashes. The data to justify action was already there. What it took was a leader willing to look at it honestly and do something about it.

Chief Metcalf, Sheriff Gillespie, and Captain Cecchettini each came to this issue differently — one through grief, one through public accountability, one through data. But each made the same fundamental choice: to treat driver safety as a leadership responsibility rather than someone else's problem.

I'd genuinely like to hear from you on this. Two questions worth thinking about:

(1) Have you ever had a leader — at any level — whose support meaningfully changed what you were able to do in driver training or road safety? What did that support actually look like in practice?

(2) And on the flip side: if leadership support for driver training in your organization disappeared tomorrow, what would be the first thing to go — and would anyone outside your unit notice?

Reply directly to this newsletter or reach out through the usual channels. This is a conversation worth having.

Stay safe out there.

Hugh

P.S. If you missed it, here is the Survey. I would really appreciate if you took two minutes to help shape the direction of this newsletter. Please click on the logo to open it.