The Anchorage Police Department is buying a virtual reality system to supplement its officers’ training with an emphasis on de-escalation.
The Anchorage Assembly approved the federally funded contract on Tuesday for up to $202,000. The vendor is a Toronto-based startup called ChimeraXR. It markets its products as “modern, realistic and immersive tactical training systems.”
To promote its use for de-escalation training, ChimeraXR posted this video to its social media accounts.
It shows the first-person perspective of someone wearing a VR headset, and it looks like a video game. Chimera says the scenario was based on a real police encounter in 2022 involving a suicidal man. The virtual de-escalation doesn’t go well, and the user ends up shooting the man.
The Anchorage Police Department is moving forward with buying these virtual reality headsets with simulations like this as it’s under scrutiny for its own police shootings, seven since mid-May. But that timing is just coincidental. The federal grant for APD’s VR system was created as a result of federal legislation stemming from George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020.
Police departments across the country, including the Alaska State Troopers, have also turned to virtual reality in recent years to train officers for real-life scenarios.
Troopers spokesperson Austin McDaniel said his agency has demoed many systems, including ChimeraXR’s. To train on use of force, he said his agency primarily uses a system made by a company called VirTra. Instead of headsets, that system uses big screens that wrap around the trainees.
Lt. Marc Patzke works at APD’s training center, and he worked on the city’s federal grant proposal to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services that it won in 2022, and other steps that led up to the contract with ChimeraXR.
The Justice Department says the system can’t be used solely for tactical firearms training or use-of-force training. It must fit into a larger program that covers de-escalation, implicit bias and the duty to intervene when another officer uses excessive force. Patzke said those elements are continually reinforced in training for new and experienced officers.
“We're gonna baby step it into our training to kind of see where it fits, where it does well, and where it comes up short,” he said. “And so a little bit of that's going to be experimentation on our part, right? And our first philosophy is we can use it in the police academy during our reality-based training blocks, what we refer to as RBT.”
New hires start off with about six months of training at the department’s police academy. Patzke said reality-based training is key so they develop a range of appropriate reactions to different people in different scenarios, which includes de-escalation.
It requires a lot of repetition.
“Practicing that skill in a virtual environment or in a real environment is how you really ingrain that skill into their job set,” Patzke said.
Right now, they’re primarily done live, in person.
“And that's a very labor intensive type of training, because we need role players, we need volunteers,” he said.
The virtual reality system that APD is buying can help reduce the labor and logistics, and make repeatedly running specific scenarios easier, Patzke said. He said the department wants a system with four headsets that can operate simultaneously in the same scenario, so officers can work together. Chimera also offers replica guns and Tasers the system can track.
“Is it going to solve all our problems? Absolutely not,” Patzke said. “It's just one more tool in our toolbox, one more thing we can attempt. And if it's unproductive, then we don't have to use it. There's no mandate to use it. So I think it provides us a lot of benefits for no cost, for very little risk.”
He said the system can also be used to create scenarios to fit a given training need in augmented reality – that is, adding virtual elements to real spaces – or in entirely virtual environments.
“So we can create the scenarios,” Patzke said. “Our instructors can do voice-overs in their head and be role players if they need to.”
After the police academy, trainees have another five months of field training before they’re on their own.
“The first time you're a police officer and you do a traffic stop, it is terrifying for the person we're pulling over, but it's also terrifying for that officer to have that first time they're actually doing something in the field,” Patzke said. “So as much as we can reduce that stress, give them some patterned responses they can use that are professional, polished, make them more comfortable in the field, then hopefully we'll get a better product in the community.”
Patzke doesn’t know what the timeline is yet for incorporating the system into APD’s training. Next steps include finalizing the contract, bringing ChimeraXR here and training the trainers.
