Simulators teach police and their critics when to shoot

YOU ARE 23 years old, fresh out of the academy and eager to protect and serve, out on what was supposed to be a quiet weekday-afternoon patrol. You pass a red pickup truck, which your partner recognises: it belongs to a guy with a couple of outstanding arrest warrants. You pull him over. Your partner gets out of the car and tells the guy he has to bring him in. The guy promises to come in later this afternoon after he drops off his daughter, who is in the truck, at her mother’s house. Your partner refuses—he’s heard it before. The guy gets agitated. Suddenly the door of the truck opens, and a girl, maybe 10 or 11 years old, starts shouting at your partner for taking her daddy. She steps out of the truck, pointing her father’s hunting rifle at your partner. What do you do?

That is just one of the roughly 500 scenarios on the FATS (Firearms Training Simulator), an interactive machine designed, says Raul Hernandez, a detective who puts nearly 1,000 Newark officers through their paces on the FATS twice a year, “to train our officers to survive an encounter with a person with a weapon.” Around 3,800 agencies in America, and hundreds more around the world, including the Canadian and Singaporean armies and the British Ministry of Defence, use these machines.

The training is like a high-end video game. Holding a gun loaded with...

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