St. Cloud Police debut immersive training simulator

Whenever there are life-or-death moments, involving someone willing to do harm to another, it’s law enforcement’s sworn duty to swoop in and diffuse the situation.

When a life is hanging in the balance, responding officers are forced to make split-second decisions to save that life, or many of them.

The only way to reliably make the decisions that provide a positive outcome is through reliable training.

While police can rehearse things like active shooter or hostage incidents, they are still rehearsals, and can probably only be done once or twice a day.

Members of the St. Cloud Police Department now have a way to train in a variety of scenarios, including de-escalation, judgmental use of force, and active shooter response nearly whenever they want, and get instant feedback.

The department held an event to debut its new VirTra training simulator, which cost the city $315,000. It is a 300-degree, 4K-quality immersive experience that allows officers to interact with virtual suspects and respond to real-world threats.

Police Chief Doug Goerke said experience is the only way to improve such important decision-making skills.

“Live environment training is awesome, but with this we can immerse into things we can’t recreate,” he said.

It comes programmed with over 300 scenarios, like school shootings and other active-shooter incidents, domestic violence and other high-leverage episodes, and new ones are uploaded all the time; Georke said he trains on new ones himself as they come out.

“We want our officers to be ready for, unfortunately, anything. It’s unparalleled. With the push of a button we can put officers into de-escalation dialogues with people in mental health crisis, or active assailant, workplace violence, anything of that nature.”

Those who use it — civilians got a chance to gear up and be immersed in a police situation — use the same types of ammunition like guns and tasers they would in the real world. They just shoot compressed air. If they get ‘shot’, they feel a ‘shocked’ sensation from what looks like an AC adapter attached to their weapon belt. While a person is in the simulator, another is running it, with the ability to “throw curveballs” at them based on their dialogues, actions and reactions.

SCPD soft-launched it in March, and has been using it to train officers to be sharper in those critical moments. City leaders have seen it and all officers have trained on it thus far.

“We can put officers through this 24 hours a day. We turn it on often at night,” Goerke said. “We expect the best and most professional officers who know how to speak to the public. It’s all about public safety.”

There are scenarios about how to process and de-escalate interactions with those with dementia, autism and dealing with protestors.

“They recreate environments based on what they’ve seen,” Goerke said. “It also teaches that we have to talk through what’s going on, where you’re moving and how to secure an area to bring on more rescue units.”