If you’re training to be a police officer, you need to be prepared for anything and everything you might come across in the line of duty – from wayward emus and pigs to gun-toting troublemakers. But given that police officers often encounter dangerous, life-threatening situations, it’s tough to truly replicate that danger without putting recruits in harm’s way.
Until now.
The Arthur D. Kehas Criminal Justice Training Facility and Campus – also known as the police academy – has a state-of-the-art simulator that lets you go through dozens of real-world scenarios without taking any real slugs to the chest, which is nice.
A network of screens and projectors creates a 300-degree immersive world that police recruits use to see how they’d react to certain situations they may encounter in the field. Think of the training room from Men in Black, only real, and way more advanced, and with fewer fake aliens.
You use a real gun that’s been fitted with a CO2 cartridge instead of live rounds and that has a laser in the barrel. It’s similar to a laser tag gun, only again, this is a real weapon.
The goal is to have everything be as true to life as possible, so they don’t want to equip prospective officers with plastic Nerf guns or anything like that. Although maybe they will at some point in the future, if the police force decides to use toy guns instead of real ones.
And although I’m not planning on becoming a police officer any time soon, I was lucky enough to have a go in the simulator last week. I figured that since I already tried out the golf simulator at Beaver Meadow, I might as well try this one, too. How different could it be?
Well, a lot different, it turns out. And a lot more intense (no offense, Beaver Meadow – golf just doesn’t have the same energy level as someone shooting at your face).
Capt. Mark Bodanza loaded a CO2 cartridge into a Glock – one of the more common service weapons used in New Hampshire – and handed it to me as I stepped into the simulator. The CO2 provides blowback similar to what a live round would produce, so the gun feels and reacts the way it would in the field when firing real shots.
I had never fired a handgun before, and I was surprised at how strong the blowback was. This thing was definitely not a toy.
My first test was a basic target shooting exercise. Six round targets in a line were straight ahead of me, and the goal was to hit them all without missing in as little time as possible.
I did just fine with this part, needing only seven shots to knock ‘em all down. After all, the targets were stationary, and there was no real pressure.
The next task was hitting 16 targets lined up all around the simulator, not just straight ahead. This required some footwork and body positioning, and Bodanza taught me the proper technique.
Surprisingly, I did quite well here, too. The flash of the camera confused the system a little bit, so my results showed double-digit misses, but deep down inside I know that I nailed it. (For the record, the simulator is not designed to have photographers snapping shots during scenarios, so this error doesn’t really occur when it’s being used for real.)
The final test for me was the biggest and toughest one. I was out of the desert, full of metal, still targets, and in a warehouse.
The first thing I saw was a body on the ground with an apparent gunshot wound in the back. A woman came running in from another room – don’t shoot. I aimed the gun in the air so as not to accidentally kill the civilian.
A second later, a guy comes running into the room. Do I shoot him? No, that’s just a cell phone he’s holding. He’s probably trying to call for help.
But then, another guy comes storming in, and he’s pointing something at me that I can only assume is a weapon. Bam! One to the chest took care of that pretty quickly.
The woman, down on the ground tending to the wounded innocent I first encountered, had told me something important, but I wasn’t paying much attention. As I stand there waiting for another threat, I see something out of the corner of my left eye.
When I turn to see what it is, I glimpse the shape of a man and hear three or four quick pops.
I was dead.
Serves me right for not paying close attention. What the woman said was, “They went that way!”
The key word here is “they.” That should have been my clue that at least two bad guys were here somewhere.
Being a total noob, I completely overlooked it. In the heat of the moment, I was running on pure adrenaline. Even though I knew it was a simulation, it was incredibly nerve-wracking, especially with the watchful eye of Bodanza looking over my shoulder. I can’t shoot a civilian in front of a real police officer!
Bodanza explained to me that you always have to be on your toes and pay attention to every little thing. I should have noticed as soon as I walked in, for example, that there was a door immediately to my left. If I missed that, the woman’s clue should have told me to look for multiple suspects.
Presumably, real police recruits would know all this stuff and fare much better than I did.
And everything I have described took place in about nine seconds. It really illustrates how fast real life moves. If you stand around waiting for something to happen in situations like that, you’re often just waiting to be killed. In fact, I was killed in so short a time that Tim barely had time to photograph the ordeal. Silly him for expecting me to survive at least 10 seconds.
The environment I was in was essentially a generic warehouse, but the computer is capable of loading any images in as the background. The academy has a Merrimack County Superior Courthouse backdrop, as well as indoor and outdoor setups of the academy itself. This allows recruits to simulate a threat at an actual location they might find themselves in.
All in all, it was a pretty thrilling experience that gave me a little peek into the dangerous lives of police officers. Those guys and girls really do have to be prepared for everything – and this simulator allows them to do just that.
