The Legislature earlier this year agreed to put the bond proposal on the November state ballot. DPS officials say the training would help prevent some of the hundreds of collisions that troopers are involved in each year.
The DPS training facility would be built on state land near Florence, about 40 miles north of Austin. It would include a highway response course to simulate rural driving conditions and permit high-speed pursuit training. It would have specialized areas to allow instruction on precision skills, skid prevention, control and recovery, urban and tactical driving and off-road driving on surfaces such as dirt, sand and gravel.
DPS officials said the course could also be used by local law enforcement agencies. The department said its survey of local agencies found that nearly 80 percent of them felt they had inadequate driver training.
“Driving has been identified as one of the critical skills, just like the use of deadly force,” said Albert Rodriguez, commander of the DPS training academy. “We want to provide the best training in that area, obviously for public safety ... (and) for the safety of our officers.”
More than 3,480 DPS officers have been involved in collisions since 2001, according to the department. Forty-three percent of those accidents were preventable, meaning the officer failed to do everything he or she possibly could to prevent it.
The wrecks tend to involve officers with less experience. More than 60 percent of DPS wrecks have involved troopers who have been with the department for 10 years or less. In the past 6½ years, wrecks have killed six DPS officers and eight people who didn’t work for the agency.
Rodriguez said the department can’t provide the best preparation for officers on the borrowed spaces that it uses for training, such as the parking lot of a sports complex in Austin.
“In our present situation, the first time that our police officers drive over 100 miles an hour is a real, true-life situation,” he said. “How do you learn about your limitations, or the vehicle’s limitations, if you’ve never been there? How do you know if you’re getting close to the limitations if you don’t know what the limitations are?”
