Cookeville To Consider VR Police Training System

Cookeville will consider the purchase of a virtual reality training system for its police department Thursday.

Police Major Scott Winfree said they can use the system to train officers for essentially any kind of law enforcement situation such as those involving use of force, de-escalation, or traffic stops. Winfree said the system features over one hundred thousand different scenarios it can simulate.

“It’s interactive,” Winfree said. “Because the instructor, he’ll have a boom mic on and as the officer is talking, of course the officer doesn’t see anything ’cause they have the VR goggles on. And we can set it up in an area thirty-three by thirty-three. And they can walk, they can be clearing a house.”

Winfree said the system comes with a headset, headphones, and mock equipment like a pistol, rifle, taser, and pepper spray. Winfree said the system will greatly reduce the amount of employees and volunteers required to carry out various kinds of training.

“Let’s say you were doing crowd control,” Winfree said. “You could put forty or fifty characters in this that the officer would see. And one of these characters would be the instructor and so the instructor is maybe saying things, the officer hears it. And again, it’s a three-dimensional type environment so they may hear gunshots over here so they look.”

Winfree said they plan to have officers do portions of their required training with the system during their shifts as the simulations can take as little as fifteen minutes to go through.

“It can range from anything from firearm training to active mass casualty events, anything,” Winfree said. “We can train new officers on just traffic stops and how they approach the vehicles and whatnot. It’s basically whatever we can imagine.”

Winfree said they plan to use money set aside in their drug fund to pay for the $69,000 system.

“I think it was like twelve weeks (to be delivered),” Winfree said. “I want to say it was right around eleven, twelve weeks. It’s not very long. But we have an area, of course, there at the PD that we are setting up. And if you want to set it up outside, you can set it up outside, too. So it’s very mobile.”

Vice Mayor Luke Eldridge said incorporating the technology into the police department would be a pivotal move for the city to take.

“A lot of things are going this direction in the work force,” Eldridge said. “We’re getting ready to launch this and train people with this as well.”