Virtual Reality Training for Police Officers: A Comparison of Training Responses in VR and Real-life Training 3 49 INTRODUCTION Police officers respond to complex on-duty situations on a regular basis (Anderson et al., 2002; Gershon et al., 2009). For instance, when engaging in a domestic violence dispute, police officers are faced with a variety of demands: they have to establish the context of the situation, evaluate the risk of harm to themselves and others, communicate with dispatch, the possible perpetrator, the victim, and each other, and make decisions regarding the appropriate interventions (e.g., the need for use of force, arrest, medical services, etc.). While most routine police tasks, such as administrative duties or traffic respondence are likely to be non-violent (Famega, 2005), police officers also have to be prepared to respond to high-risk incidents such as escalating situations with armed perpetrators (MacDonald et al., 2003). Consequently, police officers have to be prepared for numerous situations ranging from regulated and routine tasks to complex, ambiguous, and potentially life-threatening encounters. Through training, police agencies equip their officers with the knowledge and skills to respond to the wide range of situations encountered on duty. An established method to prepare officers for a variety of situations in training and replicate realistic and life-like on-duty incidents is scenario-based training (Baldwin et al., 2021; Di Nota & Huhta, 2019; Renden, Landman, et al., 2015). Real-life scenario-based training (RL SBT) aims to simulate on-duty incidents by constructing training environments that closely resemble on-duty situations. It incorporates immersive role-plays (e.g., actors that play the perpetrator and/or victims) and other props (e.g., a suitable training location mimicking a living room, sounds such as loud music) to replicate the on-duty situation as realistically as possible. By engaging in interactive and dynamic training scenarios, trainees learn to execute verbal, cognitive, and physical skills concurrently under representative conditions and can explore a variety of behavioral strategies to resolve complex situations in training (Di Nota & Huhta, 2019; Rajakaruna et al., 2017). Implementing RL SBT that repeatedly exposes police officers to the stress they experience during complex on-duty tasks helps officers to gain familiarity with stress and may enhance performance under those conditions (Nieuwenhuys & Oudejans, 2011). Although RL SBT enhances officers’ performance of on-duty tasks under stressful circumstances (Andersen & Gustafsberg, 2016; Andersen et al., 2016; Baldwin et al., 2021), several issues with the implementation of realistic RL SBT into practice remain, such as inadequate delivery and resource- and labor-intensiveness (Cushion, 2022, 2020; Rajakaruna et al., 2017). For example, police instructors require suitable locations that fit the training scenarios (e.g., an apartment building for a domestic violence scenario), actors, experienced instructors, or well-instructed trainees that play the role-player (e.g., to play the victims or perpetrator), functional gear that
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw