The Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday unveiled a virtual reality training program intended to give deputies another tool to teach de-escalation in stressful situations, the sheriff said.
The technology, called Apex Officer, is a combination of role-playing game scenarios enhanced by a virtual reality headset that allows the instructor to place students in more than a dozen different locations, including suburban streets, hospitals or schools, said the authorities.
Sheriff Eric Higgins’ office is the first agency in Arkansas to use the technology for training, but Higgins said police in 44 other states use the simulated scenarios in training.
The high-tech training system cost $150,000 for enough equipment to set up training areas in two places at once and enough equipment to accommodate up to four students at a time.
The setup consists of scanners on tall poles that frame the roughly rectangular training area, capturing the trainee’s movements and feeding that information back to the simulation system. These are portable and allow the agency to be installed in almost any room.
Students don a backpack with a box the size of a wireless router and a headset that allows them to see and hear the simulated area around them. They may be in a room at the sheriff’s office, but in the simulation they may be in a school, a grocery store, or an apartment complex.
“We don’t have to go to specific buildings. We can set the stage here at the facility,” Higgins said.
This saves money, time and planning, although Higgins emphasized that this would complement, not replace, regular on-site training to respond to crime within the community.
A trainer can control all the “characters” in the simulation, whether criminal or civilian, and can speak into the learner’s headset from the perspective of a police dispatch officer or a “character” in the room with the learner, he said. Lt. Chris Ameling, who demonstrated the system for members of the media on Tuesday.
How compelling the system is to the trainee depends on the performance skill and level of technical control the instructor can wield, Ameling said, but it provides opportunities for unique interactions that scripted training programs can’t match.
“It’s hard to find people who can do that,” Ameling acknowledged.
The experience the trainers have working on police calls over the years helps them create compelling scenarios for the new recruits and other officers in the simulation, Higgins said.
Although trainee setups include dummy pistols, tasers and compatible rifles, the training never has to turn violent, Higgins said. The trainee’s ability to talk to the instructor as if he were on a call for service in the community helps him train people skills and relaxation, she said.
“This allows us to go beyond a shoot, don’t shoot scenario,” Higgins said.
At a rally led by Ameling, Deputy Josh Dunn convinced a riot “suspect” to drop his knife and go to a local shelter with him for help, all without pulling out a gun.
The system can generate scenarios with armed gunmen and hostage scenarios, Ameling said, but that’s far from the most common scenario officers face, so the ability to reproduce day-to-day police interactions is valuable.
Agency chaplains even asked the sheriff if they could use the system to help train officers on how to respectfully deliver death notices to family members, Higgins said.
Higgins said he “absolutely” can see his deputies drawing inspiration from real-world police action to recreate in the training simulators.
None of the police officers named a specific incident, but the ability to use the system to train for school shooter scenarios was touted, with Ameling showing off a large virtual map of the school that could be filled with civilians and a shooter.
When it comes to improvements, Higgins said that they would always look for more realistic models and even more varied scenarios to put their officers in, but that he is satisfied with the software as it is.
“I think it’s a great tool to help us improve our training,” Higgins said.