The Laurinburg police recently had their annual driver's training, which covers everything from basic maneuvers to high-speed pursuits.

Lt. Fred McQueen said since he went to driver's instructor school with Chief John Evans over a decade ago, they have significantly reduced wrecks.

"We had seen a lot of wrecks with the police department, a lot of simple wrecks, and we put them on driving training in 1996," McQueen said. "Immediately, we saw our accidents drop ... It reduced our accidents as a whole and started saving our cars. We've done it every year since."

McQueen said reducing accidents helps keep cars around for longer and prevents injury.

A big part of the issue was a lack of driver training for police.

"The only training people got before then was basic law enforcement training," McQueen said. "Some of the guys that had been here for five, 10, 15 years had not had any training at all in driving."

The lieutenant said few other departments had a driving program in 1996.

"We were one of the first agencies, if not the first agency our size, to do driver training."

The training covers a number of common traffic maneuvers for officers and pursuit training.

"Practice makes perfect," McQueen said. "You're not tearing up cars, you're not dropping in the road ditches. Still, we have accidents, but they aren't as frequent and they are not as severe."

McQueen says police have to learn how to handle a number of distractions

"When you're riding around on the road... you're looking out for the other guy as well as yourself. You may be listening to a CD, maybe a radio... I'm looking for violators. I'm looking for people we have warrants on, I'm looking for the other guy, I'm looking out for myself, I am listening to a police radio, a scanner, a CB radio, along with your AM/FM radio or CD player."

Perhaps the most difficult job of police officers is the high-speed pursuit.

Navigating through traffic at high rates of speed while pursuing a suspect and maintaining radio contact with other officers is taxing on officers, McQueen said.

"Once its over you're exhausted," McQueen said. "It's like you've just run a marathon."

Evans said pursuits were also very taxing on the vehicles.

"Before we started driver training, anytime we got in a pursuit with another vehicle, after the pursuit was over, we sometimes wouldn't have enough cars to finish working that night because we wrecked them," Evans said. "You run those kinds of speeds and you have all that attention taken from you, if you don't have the experience or the training, you open the door for all kinds of mistakes. Since we started this training, our accidents have just about stopped."

Evans has also enacted a policy of officers sitting out pursuits if they are distracted, in poor health or have not passed the annual training as a safety precaution.

"A pursuit takes 100 percent of their concentration," Evans said.

McQueen said the biggest hazard for officers on the road isn't their driving, but the driving of others.

Most injuries come from officers being hit during a traffic stop. either while they are sitting in a parked-car or outside their car.

In the past decade, McQueen counted at least five Laurinburg police officers who have struck by a car during a stop. The biggest cause is drivers not paying attention to stopped police cars or other emergency vehicles, something McQueen says is illegal.

The move-over law, which requires people to change lanes or drive slowly when approaching stopped emergency vehicles, was enacted in 2002 following the death of a state trooper who was struck during a traffic stop. A fine of up to $500 is issued for violating the move-over law.

The law has not fully been accepted by motorists.

"A lot of people still don't obey it," McQueen said.

McQueen said city cops are working to enforce the law. He remembered on instance where officers leapfrogged from one violator to the next, giving 23 citations in a row for people who violated the move-over law.