Quite a few years back I went on a ride-along with a young officer who had been solo for somewhere between three and six months. Midmorning, we were dispatched to an attempted suicide call. The person had taken pills and was holding a knife. Paramedics were on scene but wouldn't enter the residence until police arrived.
Enroute, my driver didn't activate his lights and sirens. What he did do was exceed the speed limit by roughly 40%, tailgate any vehicle that got in his way, and attempt to intimidate other drivers into moving over. We arrived first up, at a fresh red light with no cross traffic. I leaned forward, looked north, looked south, pulled back — an exaggerated performance designed to will him into activating his equipment and clearing the light safely. He didn't do it.
I'll spare you every detail, but at one point he went the wrong direction entirely, catching himself only when he saw two cruisers heading in the opposite direction. His GPS was slow to catch up. Eventually we arrived. It was a non-event — most are — and the paramedics were able to do their job.
When we got back to the car, I asked him directly. All that training you received in Police Vehicle Operations— why didn't you run lights and sirens to this call?
His answer stopped me cold.
"Our platoon doesn't run lights and sirens. Our staff sergeant said he doesn't want to see us running lights and sirens to these calls — unless it's a baby not breathing or a 10-33 (officer in trouble)."
Lost in Translation
I want to be clear about something. The staff sergeant wasn't necessarily wrong to say what he said. He was trying to apply judgment — trying to prevent young officers from racing call to call with their hair on fire. That's a reasonable instinct. The problem wasn't the intent. It was the words.
What the staff sergeant meant was: exercise discretion. Don't treat every call like a life-or-death emergency when it isn't one and keep your speeds reasonable.
What the young officer heard was: don't run lights and sirens unless someone is dying or an officer is down.
An attempted suicide with a knife, paramedics standing outside refusing to enter — that didn't clear his internal threshold. So, he drove without emergency equipment, exceeded the speed limit by 40%, and intimidated civilian drivers out of his way. In his mind, he was following the directive.
That is the complete opposite of what training is designed to deliver. And it happened not because the officer was careless or the staff sergeant was negligent — but because a message that made sense in one person's head landed entirely differently in another's.
Fort Worth, Two Weeks Later
I was in that ride-along story years ago. I thought about it again recently, standing at the front of a room at the IADLEST national conference in Fort Worth.
The room was full of academy directors, training coordinators, and chiefs of police — the people who set the vision for how officers are trained across North America. The conversations were good. Everyone in that room cared about officer safety. Everyone was aligned on the importance of getting training right.
At one point we were discussing speed management — how fast officers should be permitted to travel while enroute to a call. A senior person in the room mentioned that his organization had a policy: officers couldn't exceed 15 miles per hour over the posted speed limit responding to a call. Regardless of the nature of the call.
Then he added: "But nobody really enforces that rule."
Warning bells went off in my head. I moved on. But I haven't stopped thinking about it.
Here was a room full of people saying all the right things about officer safety — and in the same breath, a quiet admission that policy and practice had quietly drifted apart. Not through malice. Not through indifference. Just through the slow erosion that happens when nobody reinforces the standard at the ground level.
Where Does It Go Off the Rails?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
Chiefs and academy directors are aligned. EVOC instructors are doing the work. Officers leave the academy with solid fundamentals — seatbelts, speed management, commentary driving, the importance of being seen when running emergency equipment.
And then something happens.
Is it the FTO who does it their way? Is it the culture of the platoon? Is it a staff sergeant who says something reasonable that gets interpreted as permission? Is it a policy that exists on paper but disappears in practice?
I don't think it's any one of these things. I think it's all of them, operating quietly and simultaneously, in the gap between the academy and the road.
Mid-level management — lieutenants, staff sergeants, sergeants — carry enormous influence over how young officers actually drive. Not through formal training. Through the daily, informal signals they send about what matters and what doesn't. A casual comment about lights and sirens. A policy nobody enforces. A culture where officers learn quickly what the platoon actually expects, regardless of what the academy or training taught them.
The academy can deliver excellent training. The FTO can reinforce it. But if the platoon culture says something different — if the daily environment signals that speed management is optional, that emergency equipment is for extreme situations only, that the way we've always done it around here is the way you should do it — the training loses.
The Question Worth Asking
I'm not going to pretend I have the answer to this. I've been in police driver training for many years and I'm still sitting with the question.
What I do know is that the conversation happening at the academy director and chief level needs to make it all the way down to the platoon. Not as a memo. Not as a policy update. As a culture.
The young officer in my ride-along story wasn't a bad officer. He was doing what he understood his environment expected of him. The staff sergeant wasn't a bad leader. He was trying to instill judgment in his people.
Somewhere between those two people, the message got lost.
That's the gap worth closing.
I'd like to hear from you. Have you seen this gap in your own organization? Is it the FTO, the platoon culture, or something else entirely? Hit reply — I read every one.
Hugh Anderson EVOC Trainer | Author of Emergency Vehicle Operation Instruction: 5 Steps to Enhancing Your EVOC Training Grab the book on Amazon
