How Bad Does Your Agency Neglect EVOC?

It’s one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves: if it’s something we do every day, then we don’t need to practice it. After all, we’re doing it successfully and constantly, practicing it every day, right? But does that mean we’re doing it the right way? Repetition of a task is not practicing or improvement. If it were, we’d never practice on the range and qualifications wouldn’t require a minimum score. Carrying that thought to driving, our daily “minimum qualification” is, “I didn’t have an accident today.” That is not emergency skills training or practice.

Statistics show that roughly 25% of all line of duty fatalities in the first half of 2025 were on or related to traffic stops. Traffic-related fatalities account for a significant portion of Line of Duty Deaths each year. While it’s easy to think that officers being struck on roadside or while assisting motorists is the big danger, the reality is that officers drive a patrol vehicle for a significant amount of time and if we’re not doing it with an “aggressively defensive” posture, we’re putting ourselves at greater risk.

What does aggressively defensive mean? It means being vigorous in our preparation and training, and being equally vigorous in looking for the threats that can create accidents; accidents we can avoid if we see and mitigate the threat circumstance. To successfully do that requires training both in the classroom and behind the wheel with an instructor in the passenger seat.

Each year we qualify with our duty firearms to ensure proficiency, and we review use of force laws and general orders, hoping that our compliance with both will reduce potential liability. Why aren’t we doing the exact same thing with our patrol vehicles? We drive far more than we shoot (thank goodness) and the potential risk is commensurate with time spent behind the wheel.

In a great many articles on conflict survival, you’ll read about Boyd’s Cycle, commonly called the “OODA Loop.” This human decision-making cycle is one that every driver (hopefully) repeats thousands of times as they drive along. Observe, orient, decide, act, REPEAT. It’s one thing to discuss the cycle and see how it applies (i.e. approaching a four-way stop. Observe who gets there first; Orient yourself in whatever order of precedence; Decide when your turn is; Act, take your turn when it’s time.) But how often is the cycle analyzed in performance? At least one agency we’re aware of has road training as part of their Emergency Vehicle Operations Course (EVOC). On the road training, the trainee drives while the instructor rides along, and the trainee/driver is required to constantly articulate what they observe and how it impacts them as they drive. By doing this, the instructor can evaluate how far ahead the trainee/driver is looking and how s/he is interpreting potential threats or circumstances. Yes, it’s a tedious process, but it’s also one of the few ways a trainee/driver can be evaluated on their observation and judgment behind the wheel. And here’s the kicker: If their observations and decision-making are too slow as they drive along at the speed limit, you are almost guaranteed that they’re too slow when the trainee/officer is driving at a higher rate of speed under emergency conditions. Judgment based on the data available is what’s being evaluated, not driver skill. Driver skill matters, but doing the wrong thing in a highly skilled fashion is still doing the wrong thing.

And that’s not to say that we shouldn’t focus on driver skill, either. The beneficial part is that judgment applies no matter what vehicle is being driven, provided the driver knows the characteristics of the vehicle. Good judgment is good judgment whether the officer is on an electric scooter-type vehicle or in an armored personnel carrier. What’s different is the power, weight, turning radius, center of gravity, etc.

The recommendation, therefore, is to schedule driver judgment evaluation training at least annually, just like we do with firearms. This might mean increasing your EVOC training staff and allowing for more training time. The good news is that the judgment training can be done as part of a regular duty shift, with the EVOC instructor riding along for a couple of hours. A single EVOC instructor could evaluate four to six officers in a given shift, depending on how much time is spent with each officer. The need for remedial training could be easily documented and then those officers scheduled for the necessary training time.

The emergency driving skills training, however, can’t be done on patrol. It requires dedicated time, space and vehicles; preferably vehicles that have already been decommissioned because when you’re training to push the edge, accidents will occur. Further, those emergency driving skills are vehicle specific so while the judgment evaluation can be easily done, skills training will have to be scheduled for a single officer for each vehicle they might have to drive. That would be anything from those aforementioned electric scooter type vehicles to electric bikes, motorcycles, patrol vehicles, utility vehicles, rescue vehicles, armored vehicles, command vehicles, etc. Needless to say, officers assigned to SWAT should have more emergency driving skills training than almost any other officer in the agency. Oh, and those officers assigned to any type of executive protection detail? (Think about those state troopers assigned to protect the governor or similar) They should attend and successfully complete special courses for emergency driving. They get taught how to use the vehicle as a weapon if necessary — and that takes us right back to use of force and firearms training.

Liability is always (and obviously) a big concern for any agency. If your agency isn’t paying attention to EVOC once you’re out of the academy, they may be creating or accepting a large potential chunk of liability. In your most professional and diplomatic fashion, you might want to suggest up your chain of command that some time be spent on emergency vehicle operation training to include that judgment evaluation section. In fact, if the agency leadership sees the value in just that judgment evaluation part, it opens the door to the need for all the rest of emergency skills training on a regular basis.

In the words of the U.S. Army at the end of their defensive driving course, “Drive on.”