The Baton Rouge Police Department is building a training simulator in Zachary to prepare officers for active shooters, domestic violence calls, hostage cases and other high-stress scenarios.

The building, which will be more than 6,000 square feet, will have modular walls that can be structured to create hundreds of different configurations allowing for a variety of training situations. The building can be set up as a living room to practice handling domestic disputes or configured as a classroom to learn how to handle a school shooter effectively.

“It’s really up to your imagination. Use real live role players or paper targets and how many instructors you have to watch, it’s really just manpower-dependent,” said Police Chief T.J. Morse.

Morse said the training facility will be large enough to conduct multiple simulations at the same time.

“You could have a full 30-man SWAT team doing up to three or four simulations at the same time. They can hit this thing from multiple angles and practice different things from breaching doors and windows,” he said.

Morse said he hopes the new simulators will bring agencies from across the state and the country to participate in training exercises. He said the department will try to recruit SWAT teams to bring their agents down for a week-long training event.

“My big thing is being the capital city and having something where other people can come and do this extensive training is definitely going to get a lot of use,” he said.

In addition to helping law enforcement officers fine-tune their training, Morse hopes the facility can generate a small profit that will go back into their general budget. Because the facility can house a large number of officers at one time, the plan is to charge a flat-rate usage fee of a couple of hundred dollars per day.

The building is located on Irene Road in Zachary where the department has a joint firearm range with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office. Currently, the land has several firearm ranges and a couple of small training classrooms.

Morse said they have broken ground on the new building and expect it to be finished by the end of the year or early 2027.

The money to build the training facility came from leftover funds from the American Rescue Plan Act that gave the state more than $3 million in 2024. The money for the facility was originally approved two years ago but because of changes made to the design it was stalled.

The building permit issued by the city-parish puts value of the building at $750,000. The cost is about $100,000 less than the original plan because Morse said they had to eliminate one classroom building.

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