 I'm going to give you three insider hacks to improve your performance on the walk and turn. But now keep in mind, in Florida there is no DL suspension if you refuse to do the roadside sobriety test. I highly encourage that you do not perform them. Hello, my name is Jeff Lodder. I spent 13 years as a cop and now I work as a criminal defense attorney. I spent a number of years perfecting DUI as an officer and now I use that information to help defend my clients. To understand the first hack, you first have to understand the underlying theory of divided attention. The walk and turn is a divided attention test. It's designed to divide your attention between two things, mental and physical. The mental focus aspect is your ability to follow a short series of detailed instructions. The physical focus is the focus required to maintain your balance while standing and walking in an awkward position. Therefore the tests are often referred to as psychophysical. How does that apply to the walk and turn? The walk and turn is divided into two different phases, the instructional phase and the walking phase. Each one is designed to test your psychophysical abilities. During the instruction phase, the test measures your ability to comprehend and focus on instructions while at the same time focusing your attention on your ability to balance. During the walking phase, you must focus your ability to recall and implement those instructions while physically balancing as well. In the first video, I mentioned a few times that if the officers don't give the instructions properly or they don't know the clues, they undercut the reliability of the test. But in addition to that, they can also make the test substantially more easy for you to pass or even more concerning they can make it substantially more difficult for you to pass. Now keep in mind, I don't have a college degree in this stuff, but I have administered the test thousands of times in real world investigations, training in the field and classroom environments during controlled drinking exercises called wet labs and I've also been the drinker at the wet labs and been evaluated while I perform the test. I've learned that when people don't have to focus on their balance during the instructions, they perform remarkably better overall. If you think about it, it makes sense. The goal of the instruction stage is to make you focus on the balance so you can't focus on the instructions or vice versa. Even when it comes down to perform the test, you don't recall the details of the instructions because you spent all of your mental energy focusing on standing up straight. This doesn't happen only in intoxicated people, it also applies to nervous people or anyone that can't stand on a balance beam. If you have some sort of ADD problem, you've got your work cut out for you. Now how do you execute it? When the officer instructions to stand in the starting position with your left foot on the line and your right foot directly in front of your left foot, don't do it. Many officers won't say anything to you about it at all and they'll just continue with the instructions. If the officer does correct you and they appear very comfortable in what they're doing in their correction, keep in mind you might be dealing with a cop with DUI experience. If the officer does try to correct you, I would comment that you just want to make sure you get all the instructions and then stand normal. If he interrupts his instructions midstream to correct you, I would ask him to start over and repeat them all. Now if you're standing normal, this is going to cost you a point on your grading criteria, but I think it's well worth it. And every single word of what the officer's instructions are is super important. But now speaking of grading, there's eight validated clues that each officer is looking for. If you score two on the walk and turn, you've hit the benchmark for what the officer is looking for to make an arrest. The validated clues are broken down into two different stages, the instructional stage and the walking stage. During the instructional stage, the officer is looking for you to step from the line during the instructions and to start too soon. During the walking stage, the officer is looking for you to miss heel to toe, raise your arms for balance, take the improper number of steps, perform an improper turn, stop while walking, and maybe a couple of other things that I missed. I'll put them on the screen. Now there's a number of individual tips for each one of the clues, but my goal here is to stay big picture. So tip number one, to hack the walk and turn, you must undercut the balance portion of the instructional phase. Tip number two, don't lose sight of the horizon while you're walking. Keeping the horizon in view will help with your balance. The officer should instruct you to look down at your feet, but that's not one of the scoreable clues, I would simply ignore it. If you look down at your feet, you're going to restrict your perspective of the outside world and this is going to force your body to reflect its internal workings to keep you steady. This is especially bad if the world around you is distracting. On a traffic stop, you have traffic conditions driving by, you have trucks, you have flashing lights, you have wind, it's cold, it's unusual and nervous, all types of things. I'm not suggesting that you don't look down at all, because you want to see where you're going. I'm just telling you don't tilt your head all the way forward and take the horizon out of your peripheral vision. Tip number three, don't make excuses for your mistakes or the degree of difficulty. Just like when you mess up public speaking, don't comment on that mistake, it just draws more attention to it. This type of comment often leads towards incriminating statements like, I couldn't even do this sober. But if the officer screws up at some point, in a semi-serious kind of joking way, point it out and don't be too quiet with it. You want what you say about the officer screwing up to come across in the audio on his camera. Now I can say much more about the walk and turn, but if you'd like to see another video on the walk and turn, let me know in the comments below. This video is a part of a video series on variety tests. If you missed the other videos, I'll put a link to the playlist below and on the screen. In the next video, we're going to discuss the misdefined HGN and horizontal gaze nystagmus. Like the video and subscribe to the page. God bless.