Experience shows eager, young police officers forget caution

The ex-Metro cop is gray-haired now, but he was a young officer once. Riding solo on patrol, he caught a hot call and responded with quick reflexes and a youthful rush of adrenaline.

Flipping a quick U-turn, he neglected to check his side-view mirror and turned directly into the path of another vehicle. Instead of getting to the call first, he was stuck in the middle of the road filling out an accident report. He knows he was lucky that day. His fate could have been much worse.

"I was in such a hurry, I never made it to the call," he recalls, sounding a little embarrassed decades after the fact. He learned a valuable lesson that day.

The old cop was reminded of his youthful indiscretion recently after learning the details of the death of young Metro officer James Manor. In the early morning hours of May 7, Manor caught a domestic violence call and went racing into the night on Flamingo Road. Moments later, Manor's patrol car hit Calvin Darling's pickup.

Manor, 28, was killed. It has since been learned the officer was driving without lights and sirens at 109 mph, 90 mph upon impact. Sheriff Doug Gillespie, in an impressive display of openness, called a news conference Wednesday to announce the painful details that pointed to the officer's culpability in the fatal accident.

But Gillespie surely knows this is nothing unique. Young cops kill themselves and other people each year in high-speed traffic accidents. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, in 2007 more cops were killed by car crashes (81) than bullets (69).

(It's that way for the nation's firefighters, too. Almost as many were killed last year in traffic accidents going to and from the scene as died in fires.)

This isn't meant to diminish the tragic loss to families, friends and departments, but it speaks to a troubling and quantifiable aspect of the dangerous duty.

Following the emergence of some embarrassing details implicating Manor in the accident, Gillespie said he's forming a committee to study whether Metro has the proper procedures and training in place. Previous Sheriff Bill Young in 2003 made changes to department high-speed chase policy following several fatal accidents that mostly involved less experienced officers. But the fact is it won't be easy for Gillespie to improve a system that already features advanced driver training, lecturing and supervision.

A lot of good training has been in place for decades. Metro patrol cars were even outfitted with a "punk in the trunk," a black box that logged the car's speed.

"We hated them," a retired cop says. "It was like riding around with a snitch on your shoulder all night."

Sound regulations were on the books back in August 1979, when officer Clark Wooldridge, 22, took a call of a fight in progress and raced his car into the intersection at Lamb Boulevard and Bonanza Road at 2 in the morning and struck another vehicle. The civilian was killed. With just 11 months on the job, Wooldridge never regained consciousness and died a few days later.

This past week, I interviewed several retired Metro cops on the condition of anonymity about the Manor incident and others like it.

Not all high-speed traffic accidents involve inexperienced officers, but plenty do, and it's not difficult to spot a pattern.

"Your first few years you don't even want to go on your days off you love the job so much," a retired cop tells me. "You want to be on the job. You want to answer every call."

He explains: You draw a late shift, ride alone, and strain to hear the slightest crackle on the radio that might be a big call.

That's likely what happened on May 7.

By all accounts, Manor was a good young cop with a bright future. He was rolling at 12:48 a.m. on a call that a 14-year-old girl was the victim of domestic violence.

He paid for his mistake with his life.

Officers I spoke with said only a fear of getting on the wrong side of their supervisors kept them from red-lining their patrol cars.

Perhaps Gillespie's committee will determine young officers need to be watched even more closely than they are now.

They can make the rules tougher, but unfortunately experience is something no committee can teach.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.