General Introduction 9 1 With the benefits that VR offers to create immersive, safe, and adaptable training environments, VR offers opportunities to adjust the (instructional) training design. The training scenarios can be designed specifically in accordance with the objectives of the training, the need of the trainees, and the available training time (Zechner et al., 2023). Entirely different or the same scenarios can be repeated, increasing amount of repetitions within a training and active time in scenarios (Giessing, 2021). The complexity of the scenarios can be adjusted prior to and during the training with in-action monitoring and on-the-fly steering of the scenario (Nguyen et al., 2021). Once the training or single scenario is finished, VR systems offer the opportunity of an after-action review — a training performance review enhanced by VR (Raemer et al., 2011; Giessing, 2021). As the VR system recorded the scenario(s), the training scenario(s) can be reviewed from a variety of perspectives (e.g., bird’s eye view, police officer view, or suspect view) and enhanced by relevant performance indictors (e.g., shots fired, and targets hit). Thus, VR technology can support the training of police officer from the beginning of a session (e.g., scenario design), through the training execution (e.g., on-the-fly scenario adjustments), to the end of a session (e.g., VR enhanced performance feedback). In the context of police practice, VR is used across many areas in training: VR is currently being used for use-of-force training (Garcia, 2019; McAllister et al., 2022), tactical training (e.g., disaster preparedness and response, Murtinger et al., 2021; Mossel et al., 2015), de-escalation training (Kent, 2022; Kleygrewe, Hutter, & Oudejans, 2023), cultural sensitivity training (Kishore et al., 2022; Doan et al., 2021), medical emergency training (Schrom-Feiertag et al., 2022), mental health awareness training (i.e., recognizing and responding to individuals with mental health conditions, Kent & Hughes, 2022), and personal professional development training (e.g., stress regulation, Brammer et al., 2021; Michela et al., 2022). The application of VR training in police has been shown to be particularly effective in improving cognitive-perceptual skills (Harris et al., 2021) and retaining and applying police-specific knowledge (Saunders et al., 2019). Specifically, research has demonstrated that the learning transfer from VR to a complex real-life situation is similar to the learning transfer from scenario-based training to the same complex, real-life situation (Bertram et al., 2015). These findings indicate that VR training is an effective training tool to prepare police officers for on-duty incidents. Research and practice have established that VR provides an immersive, flexible, and safe training tool that appears to provide benefits to current real-life training practices (Nguyen et al., 2021; Murtinger et al., 2021; Saunders et al., 2019; Zechner et al., 2023; Kleygrewe, Hutter, Koedijk, et al., 2023). The flexibility and safety of VR as a training tool makes it particularly suitable for training specific objectives such as the preparation of police officers for complex situations in stressful and high-risk settings. Due to these benefits, more and more police agencies invest
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