ATLANTA — Starting this year, new law enforcement officers in Georgia are getting high-speed driving training aimed at making our roads safer.
Channel 2’s Michael Seiden got an exclusive look at the training that could lead to fewer deaths, injuries, and crashes.
If you travel about an hour south of downtown Atlanta, you will find hundreds of recruits who are training for some of the most dangerous scenarios that law enforcement can face – including high speeds on the interstate.
“The criminals out here are driving Camaros, Mustangs, Corvettes, Hellcats – 500, and 600, and 800 horsepower cars,” said Brian Stokes, an instructor at Georgia Public Safety Training Center in Forsyth.
Challenges are also found on congested suburban streets.
“They can be people, they can be mailboxes, they can be other vehicles,” said Kevin Angell, another instructor at GPSTC.
Instructors are now teaching new officers how to drive safely in any environment.
“We want to prevent or help lower the incidents of officers being injured in the line of a vehicle crash. That’s a very high statistic across the country. And also, the citizens that are involved in those as well,” said Ara Baronian, Director of Basic Training at GPSTC.
He said since the Georgia Peace Officer Standards and Training Council voted last year to increase the minimum training requirements to become a certified police officer, recruits are now required to log at least 56 hours of drive time.
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In April, Seiden got the opportunity to play recruit for the day.
The training starts with the basics: how to navigate the roads when you are dealing with obstacles.
Seiden started on the cones course, with each cone representing a person, mailbox or even another car.
“They’ve got two minutes and 40 seconds to move their way through this course and really the skills that it’s focused on is turning left, turning right, braking, backing up, being able to accelerate and being able to decelerate safely,” Angell said.
But it didn’t take long before Seiden got into some serious trouble.
“Once we get around them. Oops, I almost hit them. I gotta go back up. I feel I’m 16 again. Yeah, it’s pressure,” Seiden said.
Ultimately, Seiden failed the test.
“If this were a real-life situation, I’d be in a lot of trouble right now,” Seiden said.
Channel 2 Action News also took a ride on the urban track where recruits are forced to make split-second decisions in real-life scenarios.
“What we wanted to add to that was the additional variables, like manipulating a high-priority call through traffic, right through a city street,” Baronian said.
Seiden also rode along for a couple of laps around the high-speed course.
“Wow! Wow! We’re going over 100 miles per hour right now,” Seiden said.
This is a vital part of the training because it teaches the recruits how to maintain control of their cars as they fly around curves.
On this day, we also found several recruits practicing their pit maneuvers, a law enforcement tactic that is used to force a fleeing car to stop.
The state is only 16 weeks into this new training, but so far, the feedback is positive.
In fact, instructors believe that these tactics are going to make Georgia roads much safer.
“We’re not rushing to any conclusions yet, but so far, we’ve had a lot of success,” Baronian said.
Seiden asked them how they are going to measure success and they told him that they don’t track outside statistics, but they stay in constant communication with local, state, and federal partners and use it to tweak their training programs.
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