You're looking at a screen and seeing an angry and disturbed man who is shouting irrationally as he points a gun at the woman he is keeping next to him and threatening to shoot.
It's the type of life or death crisis that society expects a law enforcement officer to handle.
But now it is your quandary, because you have entered the new high-tech scenario simulator at the Los Angeles Sheriff's training center, and this is the situation now unfolding around you.
The goal of running the simulations is to help deputies hone their decision making abilities in situations that may require use of force, according to to Assistant Sheriff Todd Rogers. It falls under the Tactics and Survival Training Unit.
On average, there are about 40 deputy involved shootings a year.
"It would be great if we could reduce that," Rogers said.
When there are mistakes or misperceptions, the results can be tragic, as happened last April in West Hollywood. Deputies responding to a hostage situation and stabbing attack mistakenly shot to death a neighbor they mistook for the assailant.
"We're going to exercise every option we have with training to make sure we can avoid that situation in the future," said Rogers.
The simulation scenarios go beyond shoot/don't shoot drills and cover a wide range of emergencies
deputies may face, including felony traffic stops, active shooters, and ambushes.
"It's not just shooting scenarios," Rogers said. "It's emphasizing the command presence, the escalation to less lethal options, and ultimately, lethal force if they have to."
Interactive video simulators have been used in training for decades. The new system, a VirTra V-300, takes advantage of advances in video technology and computing power to immerse the trainee in 300 degrees of virtual reality.
It cost $201,336, and is already in use by a number of other agencies.
The VirTra system is installed at the Sheriff's Biscailuz Regional Training Center east of downtown Los Angeles.
The department hopes to acquire a second system, and share a third with another training program, Rogers said. Simulation training will also continue in individual sheriff's stations using a single screen system that is more easily transported and set up at different locations.
When the department unveiled the VirTra installation Friday, news media representatives were invited to try their hand -- which is how your reporter found himself clutching a 9 mm handgun, immersed in the scenario of responding to a call of domestic violence inside a home. The point of view video takes you into the kitchen area, confronting the crisis of the gunman threatening to kill the woman.
"Put the gun down," you hear yourself telling the man, trying your best to assert "command presence." With adrenaline pumping, soon you are speaking more forcefully. "Step back from the woman," you shout, but the man just yells back and keeps the gun pointed at her.
There is a complication in the scenario that not everyone catches.
On the kitchen counter behind and partially obscured by the gunman, there is a baby in a seat carrier.
If you listen carefully, you hear the baby's cries on the soundtrack. But if you are focused on the gunman, and untrained in the skill of situational awareness, you are liable to miss it.
With the gunman in the scenario posing an imminent deadly threat to the woman, using deadly force against him would be justifiable, perhaps even demanded by the circumstances. Perhaps somewhat naively, your reporter continued shouting commands, trying to persuade the gunman to back off.
When the scenario showed him shooting the woman, it came as a jolt. The gunman was already
whipping around his gun to fire at a new target when your reporter opened fire, taking him down.
It was only role-playing, a drill, and yet your reporter was filled with regret that he had not done more to save the woman, that he had not tried to take down the shooter sooner.
"It's a difficult, difficult decision in a split second, said Sheriff's Detective Fernando Gonzalez, now assigned as a trainer in the Tactics and Survival Training Unit that operates the simulator.
The system has a library of more than 100 scenarios, each of which can branch down multiple paths depending on the actions of the trainee. The computers react to shots fired and detect where they would strike; the computers also recognize use of two nonlethal weapons carried on a deputy's belt, a Taser stun gun and pepper spray.
The guns fire only beams, but have carbon dioxide cartridges to cause them to recoil when they are
fired, so you have to re-aim. What's more, the trainee wears a small device called a "Threat-Fire"
that simulates incoming gunfire with a jolt of electricity.
At low setting, it stings, your reporter discovered. And at higher settings? "It's very painful," said Deputy Thomas Aragon, who got a few jolts running through a scenario involving an active shooter situation.
It is enlightening to watch experienced deputies maneuver through the simulations, which often
try to distract you. When a driver failed to pull over on the street and instead drove to a driveway,
and an angry woman emerged from the house with a baseball bat, Aragon's partner, Deputy Chad Wagner, dealt with her, while Aragon kept his eye on the driver. When the driver started to leap out with a gun, Aragon fired. When the woman then moved forward raising the baseball bat as a weapon, Wagner stopped her with a nonlethal Taser.
"We're going to try to stop her with the less-lethal first," Aragon said.
"It's all about options," Gonzalez said.
In another scenario, involving a man menacing a woman at the back of an empty lot, the man draws your eye. But Aragon noticed the woman was holding a hypodermic needle, and when she lunged forward with it as the man bolted, Aragon took a step back and stopped her with pepper spray.
After a testing phase, by next spring, the Sheriff's Dept. intends to incorporate the VirTra simulator into the regular in-service training that all of its some nine thousand deputies undergo on a two year cycle.
