The Sniper
I can still remember the Monday morning I walked into the office and found out one of my students had been in a serious collision.
Saturday night, a cruiser was running lights and siren to a call, a party getting out of hand. Green light, busy four-lane intersection, two lanes north, two lanes south. A vehicle heading north was turning left, west, directly into the cruiser's path. Silver Honda Accord. Chevy Caprice. Five people went to the hospital that night, all five occupants between the two vehicles. Not a walk-away, and I want to be honest about that. Every one of them was transported, examined thoroughly, and eventually released with bruising, swelling, and sprains. Nobody was killed. Nobody was seriously injured in the sense of a hospital admission. But nobody walked away clean either.
I can still see the photos from that crash.
Why Neither of Them Saw It Coming
At a busy intersection like that, the vehicles queued up in the turn lanes block sightlines in both directions. The cruiser can't see past the cars waiting to turn. The turning driver can't see past them either. Each one is hidden from the other by the very traffic sitting between them, right up until the moment it's too late to do anything about it.
In my book I call that turning vehicle the sniper: a vehicle hiding, or camouflaged, behind other traffic, waiting to turn left across your path. It's not necessarily waiting for you specifically. It's waiting for a gap, and it's ready to pick off whichever vehicle happens to be coming through the intersection when that gap appears. That night, it was the cruiser's turn.
This is a scenario I've seen play out more times than I'd like across my career, and it's rarely because anyone involved was being reckless. It's a geometry problem before it's ever a decision-making problem. The sniper is invisible by design, not by accident, and that's exactly why it needs to be trained for on purpose.
What You Actually Do About It
You can't always see the sniper coming. But you can train for the fact that it might be there.
Start by actively looking for it. Is there a gap in that turn-lane queue where a vehicle could be sitting, waiting? Can you see all the way through to the far side of the intersection, or is your view genuinely blocked? That's not a rhetorical question you ask yourself once. It's a question that should be running continuously as you approach.
If you can't get a clear answer, don't guess. Offset your position - Ideally change lanes. This change can open up a sightline that wasn't there a second earlier, and it costs you almost nothing to do it. Reduce your speed, because the less clearance you have if the sniper does move, the less time and space you have to react. And cover your brake, not because you expect to need it, but because if the sniper does appear, the half-second you save by already covering the pedal might be the only half-second you get.
None of that requires special equipment, a policy change, or anything beyond what's already sitting in the vehicle. It requires an officer whose eyes are already looking for the thing they can't yet see, instead of an officer who assumes a green light has already done that work for them.
What I Took From That Crash
A few days after it happened, one of the senior instructors in our office came by my desk. He could tell I was upset, frustrated, maybe a little angry, I honestly couldn't have told you which at the time. He sat down across from me and said, "Hugh, did you really think that none of your students would ever be involved in a crash?"
I've never forgotten that line, because he was right, and I didn't want him to be. I had been naive. Somewhere in my head, I'd convinced myself that if I trained well enough, if I covered every scenario, none of my students would ever end up in a crash on my watch. That was never a realistic standard, and holding myself to it wasn't doing me, or my students, any favors.
No matter how well I do this job, some of what happens on the road is out of my hands the moment my student pulls out of the lot. That doesn't mean the training doesn't matter. It means the training has to be honest about what it can and can't prevent.
What it changed, practically, is how relentless I've been ever since about teaching officers to actively search for the sniper, not just glance at a green light and go. That search shows up most clearly when we're doing commentary driving together, but it starts long before that, with an officer who's decided the intersection isn't safe just because the light says it is.
Next week: back to due regard, and why we may be putting our officers at risk.
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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