Chapter 6 110 This thesis focuses on the implementation and application of Virtual Reality (VR) training for police officers. VR is an emerging training technology amongst police agencies. With its flexibility in scenario creation and its independence of physical training locations and props, VR gives police agencies the opportunity to supplement and enhance current real-life training practices flexibly and safely. VR is currently being used in a variety of domains within police training; for instance, in de-escalation training, tactical training, and use-of-force training (Kent, 2022; Kleygrewe, Hutter, & Oudejans, 2023; Garcia, 2019; McAllister et al., 2022). Research has demonstrated VR’s effectiveness for training cognitive-perceptual and applied, police-specific skills. However, there is currently no evidence on how to implement VR training into existing training practices and how VR training should be applied to benefit the training of police officers. For VR training to be as effective and efficient as possible, evidence-based standards guiding the implementation and application of VR training for police are needed. This thesis investigates the use of VR in the context of scenario-based training for stressful and high-risk situations (e.g., hostage situations, armed shooter in public spaces). VR training enables the simulation of situations and environments that are difficult or unsafe to simulate in real-life training. This thesis focuses on the use of VR to create training environments that can be used to train a variety of skills (e.g., tactical procedures, communication, situational awareness, decision-making and acting) in combination with stressful or high-risk components (e.g., presence of virtual weapons or explosives). The studies in this thesis aim to capture (VR) police training from an interdisciplinary, contextdependent, and evidence-based perspective. Therefore, this thesis presents findings from collaborations with European law enforcement agencies in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, and Switzerland. In this thesis, two different VR systems for police training were used to investigate the training experience with VR. This close collaboration with law enforcement agencies and VR technology providers demonstrates the operational reality of police training in practice as well as the possibilities of state-of-the-art technology for police training. To get an overview of what current European police training looks like in practice, the first study of this thesis (Chapter 2) investigates the strengths and challenges of police training practices. We examined current European police training practices by interviewing training coordinators and police trainers from six law enforcement agencies located in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Romania, and Belgium. Based on the interviews, we determined the current strengths and challenges of European police training. The strengths include the implementation of yearly content-specific training contexts, critical evaluation of the current state of training practices, and the diverse expertise of police instructors. The challenges of current training practices
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