A call crackles over a radio, alerting me to an active shooter situation in a school. A set of nearly 360-degree screens takes me into the building, and I hold a handgun lowered but ready. Children lie in the hallways, bloody and begging for help.

The screens eventually take me into a classroom where a shooter, who looks no older than 14 or so, holds a terrified hostage at gunpoint. He doesn’t obey my initial commands to drop his gun, so I’m faced with the decision whether to continue trying to de-escalate the situation verbally or shoot. 

In this instance, the suspect eventually lets the hostage go and lowers his gun. 

Although police receive de-escalation training and have other, less lethal weapons at their discretion than just firearms, an entrenched mentality to treat an uncertain situation as a potential threat until otherwise known has led to a reality of police at times quickly resorting to deadly force if their verbal commands aren’t immediately effective.

The instances that have led to the deaths of civilians who turned out to be unarmed or otherwise didn’t pose a threat have raised questions about police training and bias in policing. 

The active school shooter situation was a scenario in a shooting simulator called VirTra V-300 used by the the Denver Police Department, a training tool for decision making in high-pressure situations. It’s mainly used by the DPD in continuing education for officers and in community academies.  

The sensory immersion of the simulator is designed to be so realistic, participants aren’t allowed to have actual weapons on them in case the pressure prompts them to have an instinctive reaction. Each scenario begins with a call for service crackling over the radio, giving basic information about the situation. Otherwise, the participant goes in without knowing what they might find. 

In late March during a community academy for women, I went through a few scenarios myself: The active school shooter and one featuring a man refusing to leave the job he had just been fired from and walking toward the building while pointing a gun at his own head. The “handgun” I used was a mock weapon the simulator responds to when fired.  

Each scenario I saw gave the options of either using verbal commands to de-escalate the situation or shooting. I later confirmed with a DPD spokesperson the VirTra V-300 simulator allows the trainer running it to choose “branching” options in the scenarios to make different elements come into play or change the outcome. He also said some versions of the simulator come with “attachment” options other than handguns, such as Tasers and pepper spray.

As a civilian who has seen very little police training firsthand, the alien feeling I had facing the binary choice presented to me by the simulator – verbal de-escalation or deadly force – stuck with me. Having extreme lethal force as the only option after verbal de-escalation felt uncomfortable and paralyzing. All this got me wondering if it risks working counterproductively to a de-escalation tactics and reinforces a mentality of quickly moving to using extreme force if verbal commands aren’t immediately effective.

I brought this question to Kaylee Widener, a graduate student at the University of Denver who researches the use of simulators by law enforcement to see how they affect training on responses to mental health situations. One upshot I took away from our conversation is no matter how advanced the technology in a simulator or how many fancy accompaniments it has, the decision-making tactics it instills mold to the training techniques and culture of the department using it.

“That’s the way it is with any training. I can give you the best training model ever. But if you don’t use it correctly, or it’s not being used in an informed way, it’s not going to work,” Widener said. “So even though the technology is great … It really comes down to, there’s still a human element of that, and there’s still a human element to all the trainings that they do. So they just need to be mindful about how they’re presenting that information and how they’re talking about it.”

To be clear, the simulator’s scenarios I went through all involved suspects who were unquestionably armed, and two were active-shooter situations. But understanding the implications a training tool such as the simulator has for actual use of force in the field seems especially relevant in a day and age when demands for accountability for use of force by police in all kinds of situations have reached a fever pitch and the DPD is working to implement systemic changes based on scrutiny of how the department handled early days of protests last summer.

But I also saw the simulator’s usefulness as a training tool. After the end of each scenario the technician running the simulator, Andrew Richmond, talked about how participants handled the unpredictable contingency factors that sprang up. One scenario I watched another reporter go through rather than participating in myself involved an active theater shooting that ended with the participant facing a suspect outside the theater, with his companion in the car appearing to urge him to surrender but then drawing a gun of her own. Factors springing up throughout the scenario that the participant had to make quick decisions about included an armed man in civilian clothes claiming he was an officer off duty, and a woman suddenly standing up among a group of crouched theater goers to scream for help. 

“The call changes greatly just depending on circumstances,” Richmond said. 

“And the second time through, they’re probably going to see something that they didn’t the first. And then the next situation that they go through that’s similar to that, they’re going to remember that they went through that experience, and that there’s something else that they may need to be paying attention to that they didn’t think about, before being put through that actual scenario.” 

Richmond and Officer Lynnea Vento, who participated in the simulator scenarios with me and another reporter, talked about the usefulness of “freezing” a situation to reduce as much as possible the number of volatile factors that need controlling. For example, at the end of the theater shooting scenario, they advised us to make sure the female suspect stayed in the car. 

After each scenario, Richmond asked us to talk through why we made the decisions we did and whether we believed shooting a suspect at a given moment would be legally justified: Do they match the description of a suspect others in the scenario gave us? Are they armed? Are they responding to verbal instructions? 

“This is where we want to take those tactical breaths, and what you’ll find is the more you communicate, the more your brain opens up and you’re able to” process the relevance of bits of information, Richmond said.  

I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger, literally, to end either situation. In the school scenario, I was too worried about aiming at the shooter but hitting the student he held hostage instead. And though I only figured out how to articulate this part of my thought process later, in an instance of playing armchair psychologist, I also instinctively sensed the shooter – a child himself – would give up as soon as he thought he no longer had the upper hand, and facing police officers armed to the teeth arguably fits that description.  

And in the workplace scenario, though I understand the need to be prepared for a situation involving someone with a gun to escalate quickly, I just couldn’t consider a man walking away from me with the gun pointed at himself rather than me to be an immediate threat.  

Which was the opposite of the self-preservation mentality that seemed inherent in the tactics the DPD aims to instill with the simulator. Richmond noted risk of me going through much of each scenario with my “gun” lowered instead of raised. He emphasized a few times that a fraction of a second can make the difference between an officer gaining the upper hand in a potentially dangerous situation or losing control, saying it can take a half-second or less for an armed suspect to raise a gun and shoot. 

“You think of safety. An unknown is a threat until proven otherwise,” Richmond said. “It doesn’t mean you shoot them; it means you control it.”