A distraught man walks along the edge of a high-rise parking garage, waving a gun and threatening to cause himself harm.
In this virtual-reality scenario, he tells a police officer to get into his car and go about his business, and he’ll go about his. As the officer tries to deescalate the situation, there are numerous ways this scenario could play out.
That particular scene is one of thousands a law enforcement officer might encounter on any given day while on duty. To help officers to be better prepared for whatever they may face in the field, local law enforcement departments are embracing virtual-reality training.
“I believe virtual reality (VR) will dominate law enforcement training in the next 10 years,” said Lebanon County Sheriff Lt. Brad Seyfert during a two-day training session with the county’s sheriff’s office at the county building in Lebanon.
Thanks to the proximity of Fort Indiantown Gap and their Northeast Counter Drug Task Force Center, law enforcement officers in Lebanon County have easy access to VR training through their departments. The training program, which is administered by Pennsylvania National Guard personnel, is paid via a federal grant, meaning the training comes at no cost to county taxpayers.
Earlier this week, members of the county’s sheriff’s department were undergoing scenario training via virtual experiences in a classroom setting of similar encounters they may face in real life. Next on the guard’s training schedule this week was the Lebanon city police.
Virtual-reality training is a digital simulation of lifelike scenarios for training purposes. Trainees enter a 360°, active learning environment, experiencing sights and sounds that dissolve the barrier between virtual and actual reality.
Sgt. Nicholas Derea, U.S. Army and Pennsylvania National Guardsman, said the training simulator has thousands of scenarios for officers to experience in the virtual world. And, within a given scenario, there are various ways for that situation to go.
“There are 50 different scenarios for drug training alone,” said Derea about the computerized InVeris system, which consists of two laptops that transmit the scenario virtually through a headset worn by the trainee. “These various scenarios are done in a safe manner.”
Derea said departments can tailor their training to the kinds of on-the-job scenarios they are most likely to face. For example, the county’s sheriff’s office does not conduct traffic stops, so that’s one training module they bypass during their session.
“We literally have thousands of scenarios so we do stuff we commonly come across: PFAs (Protection from Abuse orders), custody disputes, fugitives,” said Seyfert. “We encounter drugs in our job a lot, so we do a lot of that stuff.”
Lebanon County Sheriff Jeffrie Marley Jr. said the VR training complements the department’s policy on use of force, a topic that is discussed at nearly every training session held by his office throughout the year. (His department has an eight-page manual that is part of the sheriff’s office general orders governing the use of force by department personnel.)
VR training is interactive,” Marley said, “so it allows people to actually put this (policy) to the test. And what we try to do in the simulations, the scenarios are the kind of things that have occurred over time and that we could be confronted with.”
The department’s general orders includes a definition for use of force, covers the Control Continuum, which are seven steps along the spectrum from an initial officer encounter to the use of deadly force, factors to determine the reasonableness of force, and other policies that focus on when and how to use force.
“The continuum is from the most basic encounter and as it escalates, how and when an officer should react,” said Marley, who also noted that each encounter is unique and could already have escalated up the continuum spectrum by the time a deputy arrives on the scene.
Although Marley asked LebTown not to get into the specifics of the department’s policy manual for safety purposes, he did share one point of emphasis from talking points given at a training session: “The only reason a law enforcement officer may use force is to gain CONTROL of the suspect or situation.”
LebTown asked Marley if domestic disputes are the most dangerous situations his officer may face, to which he replied many other encounters are considered to have the potential to be just as dangerous. He also noted that his department has three main functions.
“We provide security to the courthouse and county buildings. We serve the paperwork of the courts, whether it be civil process or criminal, and we transport inmates throughout the commonwealth and even out of the commonwealth (to other facilities),” said Marley.
A VR scenario that Deputy Sheriff Mike Conz experienced during his training on Tuesday involved an active shooter in a school setting.
Derea, speaking through a microphone to Conz’s headset, set the scenario, including the clothes worn by the shooter. As Conz moved through the building by what he saw on the screen inside his headset, he encountered the shooter hiding behind a classroom door a few feet from him. That scene ended with Conz disabling the shooter in two shots.
While Derea said their responsibility is to provide the hardware and results of a given training session, Seyfert says it’s the job of management to review the results with the deputies.
“When a mistake is made, they already know what the mistake was and why they made it,” added Seyfert.
LebTown was afforded the opportunity to experience several training sessions with Derea leading that particular scene. In the scene used at the beginning of this story, it ended with the distraught man laying down his weapon and asking for a bottle of water.
In a separate scenario involving a traffic stop for a driver running a stop sign, that scene ended with the driver complying with the police officer.
However, in a second run of that same scenario, the driver eventually exited the vehicle without being asked to do so, stood near the officer, and then pulled a weapon from behind his back and fired in the officer’s direction.
What amazed the reporter was the speed at which this scene went from a mere traffic stop to a shooting incident.
“I would say that there is no such thing as a routine call/traffic stop in law enforcement,” said Marley. “We can handle the same calls and make the same stops over and over and nothing happens. People become complacent, and complacency can get you and others injured or killed. Incidents can go sideways very quickly. We review policy and train constantly/consistently to assist our people with making quick decisions in rapidly evolving incidents.”
Any police department in Lebanon County interested in using the VR training program can register for it online here.
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