| Résumé | The growing training and operational needs of law enforcement and public safety personnel can no longer be met efficiently and effectively through existing infrastructure and resources. While the demands of day-to-day operations are constantly changing, the training of law enforcement personnel and certification process has largely stayed the same. While several technological solutions exist for enhancing training, widespread adoption of current approaches and solutions, such as virtual training, is hindered by significant cost barriers and by lack of scalability and reach. This creates challenges for smaller geographically disconnected units, which characterizes most rural police departments in North America. This paper presents MINT-PD, a technological solution for multimodal virtual Course of Fire (COF) training, along with field observations and validation of the technology. One specific application of MINT-PD is to help to increase the rate of success among the trainees who failed a first COF certification round. Success in this context represents significant cost savings by reducing active-duty officers' down-time due to the remedial training and reducing the need for the use of the live firing range. MINT-PD is based on the Multimodal Interactive Trainer (MINT) simulation platform developed by NRC, specifically adapted to address user needs in training and certification for a typical municipal police department. MINT-PD technology allows users to modify training scenarios, incorporate different types of laser guns and a flashlight, add avatars, and expand the training to include Use of Force scenarios. The conditions and parameters implemented in the virtual COF simulator have been derived from field observations and validated by COF trainers within a medium-size police department. This process of technology development and validation will be described in the paper. |
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