I'll be honest with you — I didn't arrive at police driver training through the conventional path.
Before I ever sat in a police cruiser, I had already attended racing school. I wanted to be the next Mario Andretti. That didn't work out, for reasons that had more to do with budget than talent — at least that's what I tell myself. But my love for the track, for vehicle dynamics, for the feel of a car pushed to its limits, never went away. It still hasn't.
I tell you that not as an origin story, but as context. When I say that commentary driving and hazard perception matter more than track work, I'm not saying it because I don't love the track. I'm saying it in spite of the fact that I do.
Yup - its me at racing school, a very long time ago.
What the Collision Reports Told Me
In my first year at the Ontario Police College, I was handed something that quietly reframed everything I thought this job was about.
I spent time going through two or three years of collision reports from a large police service. Hundreds of files. And what I found wasn't what I expected.
Most of the collisions involved officers who were at fault. That alone was sobering. But what stopped me was the nature of those collisions. These weren't pursuits gone wrong or red lights taken at high speed. They were rear-end collisions. Improper turns. Backing incidents. Basic errors in ordinary driving circumstances. The calls that did involve going against a red light — the ones that seemed more dramatic on paper — almost always included a bad decision by the officer that had nothing to do with vehicle control and everything to do with hazard perception.
I was barely a year into my career in police driver training, and I was already questioning the premise. If the problem is basic decision-making in normal driving conditions, why are we spending the majority of our training time on the exciting stuff?
I didn't have the data to back that instinct up. Not yet.
Fort Worth, June 2025
Last week I presented on hazard perception and commentary driving at the IADLEST national conference in Fort Worth, on behalf of the National Policing Institute. While preparing for that presentation, I came across the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training Driver Training Study — the CA POST study — published in 2009.
The room in Fort Worth included academy directors, training coordinators, and frontline EVOC instructors — exactly the people who shape how officers are trained across North America. The conversations were good. The engagement was real. People in that room wanted to be there and were genuinely looking for officer safety solutions.
And yet, sitting on the plane home, I kept thinking about those CA POST findings. Research published more than sixteen years ago. Research that, frankly, I should have been citing for years — and wasn't.
That bothers me. Not as self-criticism, but as a question worth asking out loud: how does research this significant go largely unnoticed across the training community for over fifteen years?
What the CA POST Study Found
The numbers are not subtle.
53% of officers who received traditional EVOC training — cone courses, track work, car control skills — were involved in a collision within three years of completing that training.
Officers who received simulator-based training, with a focus on hazard perception and decision-making, had a collision rate of 16%.
Read that again. Same profession. Same roads. Same vehicles. Different training philosophy. The collision rate dropped from 53% to 16%. That equates to 71% fewer crashes over 3 years.
Now here is the critical point — and I want to be clear about this because it matters enormously for how we apply this finding.
The simulator didn't save those officers. The training conducted on it did.
The simulator-based programs that produced those results were focused on decision-making. On hazard perception. On developing the cognitive skills that allow a driver to see what is coming before it becomes a threat. The tool (simulator) was simply the delivery mechanism. And that distinction changes everything about what this study is telling us.
Traditional EVOC training — the track days, the cone courses, the skid pad — develops car control. Those skills have real value. I have spent my career on that asphalt and I believe in it. But car control is not what prevented collisions in the CA POST study. Decision-making training did.
The Unsexy Truth
Commentary driving is not glamorous. It doesn't get the adrenaline going the way a skid pad session does. Nobody walks off a commentary drive buzzing the way they walk off a track day.
But it develops exactly the skill the CA POST data identifies as the difference maker. It trains the driver to look ahead, to identify hazards before they become threats, to build a proactive scanning pattern rather than waiting for something to grab their attention. It is decision-making training delivered from inside the vehicle, in the real environment, in real time.
Track and cone course training is where the majority of EVOC time is spent. I understand why. It's where the passion is. For many of us, it's why we got into this work. The track is where you feel like an instructor.
But if the data tells us that decision-making training reduces collisions from 53% to 16%, and commentary driving is the most accessible, most transferable way to deliver that training — without a six-figure simulator and without a closed course — then the question becomes uncomfortable.
What are we waiting for?
The CA POST data has been there since 2009.
It's time to use it.
The CA POST Driver Training Study (2009) is available through the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training. Alternatively, you will find it in the Below 100 resources. If you haven't read it, I'd encourage you to.
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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
