‘Best I've ever seen': New simulator offers state-of-the-art training to all Illinois police departments

Yahoo

07-04-2025

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (NEXSTAR) — There's no replacement for the real thing, but officials at the Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board are hoping a new training simulator will be the next best option.
The state just finished installing a state-of-the-art simulator for training police officers across Illinois. The VirTra simulator puts officers through a long list of scenarios, and each situation can be altered based on how the officer responds to what's happening. The huge screens wrap almost entirely around the officer in an attempt to fully immerse them in the situation, and the screens react to the guns, tasers and pepper spray that officers are given for the scenarios.
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'I can't understate the importance of this,' Chatham police officer Dave Leach said. 'I didn't get this 20 years ago.'
Several police academies have simulators like this in the state, and larger police departments have their own simulators that don't have as many bells and whistles. This one, however, is going to be different, and it's all because of who can access it.
'I think the primary objective when we started looking at virtual reality training or simulation training in this manner was to close the gap on opportunities from large departments down to our smallest departments in the state,' Paul Petty, Manager of in service training at ILETSB said. 'Obviously, this offers both hands-on opportunity, but it also offers the opportunity to do individualized training with officers as we enhance certain skills. They can be soft skills, they can be more advanced skills, de-escalation skills.'
Any department in the state can schedule trainings at the Springfield location for no cost, and officers can go through the training at any point in their careers, unlike at most academies. The state bought this simulator to meet some of training standards laid out in the SAFE-T Act.
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'What the SAFE-T Act did, namely, was identify deficiencies in law enforcement's training, one of them being providing hands on scenario based training that's boots on the ground,' Petty said. 'This virtual reality system will allow an officer to be immersed in a situation that is very real. You saw downstairs heart rates go up, anxiety goes up, voices go up there. There are variable factors in this scenario base.'
The goal of the simulation training is to give officers the best idea of any situation they can be in. That way, they can learn from mistakes without real-world consequences.
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