Renton’s Firearms Training System provides ‘decision-making’ practice

Officers are also trained in de-escalation tactics, environmental awareness, first-aid and more.

By Benjamin Leung • July 11, 2023 4:00 pm

Jim Gould hands participants mock .45 caliber ACPs. Despite the handgun firing lasers instead of bullets, the gun still holds a realistic heft.

Amy Cresswell, a first-grade teacher, steps into the center of five panels, surrounding her in 300 degrees of images lasered from multiple overhead projectors.

She will run through two simulations of conflict scenarios a police officer might face out in the field.

Gould controls the simulation from an interface capable of increasing the interactivity of a scenario to respond to voice commands from participants and offer narrative branching paths within a scenario.

The first scenario involves a recently fired coworker holding one of his colleagues hostage with a handgun in an office.

She raises her handgun but doesn’t shoot as the man screams at his colleague and points the gun in his face. The man starts firing at his colleague and then aims the gun at her before she finally starts shooting back.

After the simulation ends, Gould asks Cresswell why she didn’t shoot the man despite him threatening his co-worker’s life.

Cresswell says he hadn’t fired any shots yet.

Gould asks whether she would have shot him if he had been aiming at one of her family members.

Simulations

The Firearms Training System, FATS 300LE, stationed on the fourth floor of the Renton City Hall, provides Renton police officers the opportunity to train in scenarios mimicking the potential realities they face on the job.

“It’s not a marksmanship device,” Gould said. “… What these (really) are (are) decision-making exercises.”

Officers train in de-escalation tactics, environmental awareness, first-aid and more.

Ryan Toledo, an attendee of the Renton Police Department’s One Day Community Police Academy, runs through a home invasion scenario where a man sprints into his bedroom waving a machete.

Gould provides a demonstration of a scenario involving a robbery at a store.

Cresswell’s second scenario involves her arriving upon the scene of a mass shooting.

In the past, the department has incorporated dummies and live actors in the simulation to train officers in using first aid techniques in scenarios.

“Maybe you had a shooting … and now you’ve got to make the scene safe. That’s the first thing you have to do,” Gould said. “Now (you) can treat people. … Maybe somebody needs a tourniquet on (the) leg, … maybe somebody needs a chest seal.”

Gould said an important part of training and developing critical thinking within officers involves having officers verbalize their decision-making processes following the simulations.

After an officer engages in a scenario, they recall and reflect upon the exercise.

“There might be five wrong ways and five right ways (to act),” Gould says. “… We try and make them go through the whole scenario … and tell us, ‘Why do you think that or why did you do that?’”