Feb. 07--BROWNSBURG -- Tucked away on the north end of Brownsburg is one of Indiana's hidden law enforcement training gems. The facility's state-of-the-art training has law enforcement professionals, including federal agents from throughout the nation and beyond, coming to hone their abilities in Hendricks County.
It includes some of the foremost tactical training aids aimed at providing scenario-based training, so officers know how to react in every situation and even how their bodies respond in such events.
Sgt. Andy Watts said the officers of the BPD take full advantage of what is available to them.
"The state requires 24 hours manually and ours are pulling about 117, or between 117 to 120 per officer," he said.
That comes out to 6,451 hours of training for the department last year, exceeding their required goals by nearly 500 percent. The facility sports a unique training situation that Watts thinks may be the only one of its kind in the state. It's an actual housing unit, built indoors, so officers can go through thousands of scenarios in a controlled environment.
"This is one of the things that makes us kind of unique in terms of the training facility," he said. "This was a house that was donated, along with lumber and materials, and we built the house in here and
put a catwalk on it."
The catwalk exists so a training instructor or team leader can walk above the scene and see where each of his people are going, as well as what is and is not being done correctly.
Here, officers go through real-life potential calls, using simunition technology.
"What it allows us to use is what we call simunition rounds, which in layman's terms are really a primered paintball," Watts said. "You know when you get hit, because it hurts. It'll leave a mark or a welt, and it allows us to replay an event so you can look at what you did do, what you didn't do, ask yourself if you made an error, or really give a different perspective for an officer that might not realize how they did something or why they did it."
The facility hosts a reserve academy, which takes place every other year. Last year, five agencies were in the academy where they were able to do anything from domestic scenarios to hostage barricade scenarios.
Watts said the facility is so unique that officers routinely come from out of state to train. One recently came all the way from Vancouver, he said.
"I don't know that there's another one in this state that's set up this way," Watts said. "We're very fortunate that everything is set up under one roof in one location. It was originally a Little League training building where they had batting cages and pitching cages and that sort of thing."
Outside the housing unit, the entire area can be matted for physical tactics training, which Watts says federal agents routinely use.
"The bottom line is, the more training you do, the less thinking you'll have to do when the scenario arrives," Watts said. "Because the scenario will arrive, it's just a matter of where you are and what your thought process is, so what we want to do is make sure you've played out the vast majority of these scenarios before they happen. I think our officers do a fantastic job."
Officer training is constantly evolving as studies show extreme spikes in violence against law enforcement.
"There are a lot of different bases for that," Watts said. "A lot of it attributes to our culture and what's acceptable and what's not. You think back to when you're in high school, did it ever really cross your
mind to steal a car, fight with a teacher, or spit on an officer? It didn't when I was growing up, and even if it did, I'd have gotten it handed to me and I knew that. Nowadays it seems like your typical crimes are committed between ballpark ages 18 and 30, and it seems like they were raised differently. You're not getting the same type of parental involvement and respect. You get so many of these things attributing toward one facet and you end up getting a different behavior."
All of that means that officers must use the facility in ever-changing ways to create scenarios that are applicable to the potential actions of today's criminal. One of those areas is the firing range.
Watts said that the goal for officers is to get on the range monthly.
"The computer controls all 12 targets at the same time, so we can make them advance, come back, turn around, and we can put different targets on there with an actual photo, so we can have photos of people with guns so when it turns, the officer has to make the judgment call. Does he have a gun, radio, cell phone? The officer has to react quickly."
All of the training is not merely scenario based, Watts said, pointing out that officers are also charged with keeping up on legislative updates.
"There's a lot of lecture material that comes along with the hands-on material," he said. "I think a lot of people have the misconception that cops are doing nothing but hands on stuff, but that's not the
case. Any type of legislative updates, we have the prosecutor's office come in and explain. We have to stay on top of everything, because the reality is we have to enforce the law and we better understand how it works, what's applicable, and what's not."
Tucked in the back of the facility is one of their training crown jewels, a revolutionary technology that brings scenario-based training to an entirely different level.
A projector attaches to the ceiling with a computer to control settings and scenes where officers use handguns that fire lasers in a variety of instances that can be altered and controlled, and then reviewed to pick up on what was missed. It is also able to give an idea of how an officer's thought process responds to stress.
"We have what's called a Laser Shot System, where the guns fire a laser, and from the laptop to the projector the camera picks up that laser and correlates it with a picture displayed on the screen," Watts said. "So you might have a video of a guy and he may get out of a car ranting and raving, coming toward the officer, and the officer has to react to that, so we can alter the scenario on the laptop so maybe the assailant complies, or maybe he becomes aggressive."
All in all, the training facility has allowed officers to prepare themselves for everything they might face in an ever-changing field.
Copyright 2012 - Hendricks County Flyer, Avon, Ind.
