6 down, 12 to go, and time to drive
16 Sep 2008 
around evening time 
Matt Winckler
One-third of the way through, and time can’t fly fast enough.
Yesterday we began the practical portion of our EVOC training with the skid car and some post-PIT maneuvers. The post-pit procedures are designed to prevent things like this from happening. In that video (at 01:50 or so), it seems to me that the suspect should not have been able to get away if the police had executed good post-PIT maneuvers. As we were taught yesterday, the second police vehicle (the one that comes after the actual PIT vehicle, which correctly drove on past) should have swept around left and come in on the suspect’s right rear bumper at a 45-degree angle while the third car should have done the same thing on the right front bumper, thereby pinning the suspect vehicle in place. Another fine example of a good PIT but horrible follow-up is this video, where the second vehicle does hit the front right bumper correctly (and spins his tires trying to pin him!), but nobody else comes in on the front left–so the suspect just drives away.
As you might imagine, this post-PIT stuff was great fun to practice, since it involved both driving fast and ramming a vehicle (albeit at very low speeds). We were not taught the actual PIT technique, since some agencies do not permit it–we were only taught post-PIT procedures because the State Patrol utilizes PIT. Even so, it was fun–moreso than the skid car, since I’ve already driven on ice and snow before.
Today we spent the entire day at the Spokane Raceway Park doing more EVOC–a low-speed skills course involving precision maneuvering (including a lot of backing up), an “observation drive” where we followed a suspect vehicle and communicated various details to dispatch. All the while we were trying not to let the suspect dictate our driving patterns–the suspect driver was a Spokane officer with a stellar sense of humor and managed several times to actually get behind and follow the recruits instead of vice versa (but not me!). I did make the instructor riding with me a little nervous about the mechanical condition of the training car when I took it off-road a little fast.
However, I later saw that my off-road maneuvers were nothing compared to the standard exercises set up on the raceway. One instructor indicated that most cars would probably burn through one full set of tires by the end of our three-day course, and I’m starting to believe him. There are a variety of exercises, ranging from lower-speed tight corners to high-speed lane changes and obstacle avoidance. Many exercises involve sudden movements at 40-50mph followed by hard (as in gas-pedal-to-the-floor) acceleration immediately thereafter, interspersed with periods of braking. Today alone we put two cars out of commission (though I don’t know why; they just stopped running). By the end of the day the cars had begun reeking of various burning or overheated components–transmission fluid, brakes, rubber, exhaust. Many of them sounded pretty bad, too. (Of course, none of these were in stellar condition to begin with.) This course is probably as hard and brutal as I’ll ever drive any vehicle–certainly I’d never drive any of my vehicles this way, but then I don’t plan on responding to emergencies in my vehicle either. The actual track time was a little disappointing; apart from the low-speed skills stuff and observation drive I probably only spent 30-40 minutes in the car. The rest of the day was spent resetting cones knocked over by other student drivers.
We’ve got one more full day of this tomorrow, and then night driving starting late Thursday afternoon and running until about 23:30. Following that we’ve got a horde of testing on Friday–between EVOC and Criminal Law, two major tests and two quizzes, plus we must have a speech ready–some cheesiness on “what law enforcement means to me”. The idea is to be good but not too good because evidently the top three have to give their speeches again at graduation. It is a fine art, writing a speech good enough to convince the instructor that you’re not “throwing” your speech while not sufficiently good to garner any student votes.