The West Fargo Police Department will be purchasing a virtual reality training system through the City of West Fargo’s Public Safety Sales Tax funds.
The purchase was approved by the city commission on Monday.
Jason Anderson is assistant chief at the police department. He says the system us a head set that can be worn by officers that places them in different environments and scenarios – of which there are hundreds – to train on how to respond.
"If we were in a particular scene, such as an active shooter scene, or a mental health call for service, or really any kind of scene we would actually go to - it allows us to have a little more real life training for our officers so we can better prepare to serve our community in the best way that we can."
The system is called the Street Smart VR system, and will cost $95,000. Anderson says this is the first VR training system to be purchased in the state of North Dakota. The system is endorsed by the FBI as “the gold standard” of active shooter training.
"There's literally hundreds and hundreds of different scenario bases that we have, and we can adjust the scenario as we go through the software. The trainer can actually be the person on the other end the officer is dealing with, and we can use our past experiences in a lot of these situations to help us gauge - we never really know what we're going into - but we can use past experiences to get us through some of the situations we're seeing now."
Anderson says officers at the West Fargo Police Department be begin training with the system within 90 days.