A story from http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/about/driving_e.htm
	Photo by Max Wickens

Driving with the RCMP ~ Story by Max Wickens

A century ago, red-coat recruits learned how to ride, tend and work with the horses that were destined to become their trusty workmates over the months and years ahead. Today’s Mountie cadets do much the same — except that they learn to care for, work with, and get the best out of their “mobile offices” — training in cars like the cruisers in which they’ll spend countless eight- to 12-hour shifts throughout their careers.

This is particularly true of those Royal Canadian Mounted Police graduates assigned to uniform or “contract” duty in various parts of Canada. Such contract work means that a province or municipality pays for the RCMP to serve as local police. Contract policing is often the first rung on the career ladder for the 1,500 cadets who undergo six months of basic training each year at “Depot”, Regina's historic Royal Canadian Mounted Police academy.

While at Depot, recruits spend 52 hours at the driving unit, acquiring many of the same advanced driving skills that civilian schools teach to would-be race drivers. Cadets also learn much more, though, like how to patrol a neighborhood with keen curiosity, the all-seeing eyes of a hawk, and an instant-playback memory. Even more significantly, they discover the need to control the rush of adrenaline and the stress that comes with the intensity of modern policing. They also learn the requirement that officers be able to “multi-task”, even in a crisis, and even at the wheel of a speeding cruiser.

It wasn’t always this way. Fifteen to 20 years ago, few police recruits across Canada got any special driver training. They learned instead by trial and error. As one female officer once told me: “Heck, when I started out, my first pursuit — my first chase — was the real thing. I learned out on the streets and so did virtually all of us….”

Today, by complete contrast, police driver training is set out in detail, and in black and white. In fact, cadets start by discovering that for the rest of their careers, they mustn’t even head out on patrol until they have completed a systematic 38-point check of their vehicle, its condition and equipment.

Once on the street, trainees face a relentlessly increasingly workload. It builds from basics like proper posture, seat adjustment, and hand position on the wheel. After that it moves to vision skills — seeing as far down the road possible, constantly scanning ahead and to the side, always using mirrors, and gradually learning to monitor everything within 360 degrees around their cruiser.

Before they graduate, cadets must make this second nature, being able to drive fault free whilst correctly answering instructors’ questions about radio messages they’ve heard. They must also be able to “monologue” or narrate their drive and what they’re seeing on the radio, describing occupants and licence numbers of vehicles they’ve encountered, and detailing activities happening a block or two ahead, or down nearby backalleys.

We took a drive like this on the streets of west-central Regina and I found the new workload positively daunting. I habitually focus on driving, yet here we were, introduced to a far broader approach that incorporated multiple new tasks into the activity.

In fact, this is only the initial stage of the exercise. Next came a patrol drive nicknamed “BOLF” or Be(ing) On the Look Out For specific vehicles or people while driving on patrol. Test criteria include a student’s effective use of the radio while driving, 10-4 fluency in the glossary or jargon of radio “10 codes”, being able to team up on tasks with other cars, and being poised to respond calmly to any emergency.

This is where it is imperative to know where other emergency vehicles are, and in which direction they are travelling. It has been known for two such vehicles to collide at a blind intersection simply because each driver didn’t know where the other was, and because their own sirens had rendered each driver unable to hear the other.

Such high speed driving isn’t as common as many civilians think — particularly those who get such ideas from American “reality” television shows. In fact, wild, uncontrolled driving is essentially forbidden in Canada. Even skillful, controlled pursuits are strongly discouraged.

Cadets are taught to consider every safe alternative and to remember that some potential chases needn’t even begin. They also learn to weigh the need to initiate a chase, to enlist backup from other cars, and how to share the workload — for instance, with the lead car delegating radio communications to the next in line.
Then, too, procedures are set out for calling off a pursuit.

Team members in our car, Tango 7, worked their way through a series of simulated emergencies, each time with siren blaring and lights flashing as we pursued a fleeing “rabbit car”. Such high-risk scenarios ranged from major domestic violence with a suspect speeding away to a call about gunfire, a car theft involving a high-value cargo, and a face-to-face encounter with a bank robber already wanted for multiple homicides.
The bottom line in each instance became clear after debriefing sessions at which cadets and instructors examined whether or not some, or any, of the simulated pursuits might have been justified. Ultimately, the only case passed that test — pursuit of the bank robber, as he posed an imminent threat to human life.
Even so, we in Tango 7 were lucky it was all an exercise because we might never have lived to learn the outcome of a real robbery. We wheeled up to the front of the bank during the heist and were crestfallen to find ourselves facing the robber and his gun.

Some also questioned the additional burden and complication of having to drive while broadcasting a narration of the chase. Veterans were quick to explain that such monologues are taped by dispatchers, and transcripts can serve as key evidence in subsequent court cases or boards of inquiry. Nonetheless, it definitely calls for “multi-tasking” at speed. For example, imagine wheeling a big Detroit sedan through narrow streets while narrating details of a crime and chase and making life and death decisions such as whether to chase or not, or to shoot or keep firearms holstered.

	Photos by Max Wickens

The students who learn these lessons and skills start with an astonishing spectrum of experience. Some are seasoned drivers; however, their classmates may have held a driver’s licence for barely a week or a month. Some Inuit recruits may only have driven a snowmobile; other cadets may never even have ridden in a car — always in their family’s pickup truck.

“We see them all,” says Corporal Vogan West, who oversees Depot’s driving unit and routinely fills in as a spare instructor. “In some ways, it’s easier to teach novice drivers because they’re less likely to have attitude, they haven’t learned bad habits, and they approach the course with an open mind, like a clean sheet of paper.

He and his 16 instructors tend to ratchet up the workload they place on their students. Even as they do this, the instructors are openly enthusiastic about their work and pursuit of driving excellence. Also, they’re proud of their track record of having taught virtually any and all of their students to drive with precision, speed, and always to the very letter of the law.

“We teach our students that we, and they, must lead by example,” West says.
Along the way, cadets also learn how to manoeuvre their two-ton patrol cars with the speed, precision and agility of a Musical Ride horse. They develop such skills on a dedicated tarmac pad, passing through a series of five coned work stations. Each entails repeated and tightly timed runs — backward and forward — through obstacle courses, offset lane changes, into and out of a multiple coned “garages”.

Demerits — and ultimately pass/fail scores — are racked up for erratic or timid driving, poor times, cone hits, or for failing to halt accurately in each and every “garage”.

Achieving a pass is particularly tough at the wheel of a full-sized sedan. I quickly discovered that tight performance school steering techniques don’t work on any big sedan that requires several turns of the wheel, lock to lock.

This has prompted instructors to make “push/pull” steering an essential to the course. It’s somewhat similar to the “wheel shuffling” that seems taboo among performance-driving gurus. Push/pull demands smooth co-ordination.

Track exercises put all of these lessons together. Each timed run covers a three-kilometre serpentine course, outlined by fluorescent cones like an autocross track. Cadets must negotiate its length in fewer than three minutes. That’s not dramatically fast, but hot-shot and lead-foot drivers quickly discover a surprise pitfall — that some of the fastest sections end in sudden and tight 90-degree turns to the right or left.

They can’t be negotiated successfully without finesse: skillful braking, precise push/pull steering, and an ability to balance and stabilize the big car as it turns, and at precisely the right moment.

It all comes together with a calm approach and plenty of practice.

“A smooth car is a fast car. A stable car is a fast car,” says Corporal Vogan West - a 28-year veteran who currently overseas the advanced driving school at the RCMP’s national academy.

West’s in-car mantra is essentially the same advice I’ve also heard over the years from motorsport stars like Jackie Stewart and Stig Blomqvist, and from Canadian driver training experts like Charlie and Brett Goodman, Gary Magwood and John Powell.

Even the academy’s “vision” training lessons follow the same strategy — in this case coaching cadets to, “Get your eyes up from the nose of your car. Look as far down the road as you can see."

“The further ahead you look, the smoother your car will be. That’s because if you’re only looking at the hood, you’re suddenly wondering where [the abrupt] corner came from and you react and jerk the [steering wheel].

“You have to look to where you want [the car] to go…. and it will go there. Don’t get fixated on nearby obstacles like the hood, or [red slalom] cones, a tree, or the tail-lights of the vehicle ahead. If you let that happen, you’ll end up going there — likely hitting them.”

That’s all familiar advice to anyone who’s attended racing school. However, the RCMP demands the same caliber of driving and much more from its cadets as they strive to qualify as patrol-car drivers.Hairy pursuit-style driving, as depicted on television, is taboo. West says his instructors always try to set an example.

“If we’re out of control and wild with the cars, then the cadets will be out of control and wild. We emphasize a smooth car, a stable car. Our biggest push is [an approach] we call SIPDE which is our style of driving. It means Search or Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute. We emphasize this through vision: if you can see it, you can react to it.

“I have a four [and] 12 second rule when I’m driving in Regina — I need to see four seconds ahead of me because that’s where I’m going to be in four seconds; that’s my immediate danger zone, it’s where I may have to take some sort of evasive action. I might have to stop, I may have to do some sort of object avoidance. I also look 12 seconds ahead of where I am because if there is a vehicle at the side of the road or some other obstruction, I may want to shift my vehicle out of the way to get around them, and I need to know if anything is beside me.

“I’m always looking: to the future — that’s what’s ahead, to the present — that’s what’s around me and to the past — that’s what’s behind me. I’m always looking 360 degrees around my vehicle.

“… I am a big advocate of the rear-view mirror. Some people talk about checking mirrors every three to five seconds or five to eight seconds. I teach that [you should] check all [around] all the time and take a really good look. If you’re just doing a quick check you’re never going to absorb what you’re looking at.

“If I’m coming to a stop sign … I’m going to be checking my rear-view mirror because I know I have to stop … but the individual behind me — on the cell phone, not paying attention — may not stop. If I see them in my rear-view mirror I can take evasive action to save the back end of my vehicle.”