BANG. YOU'RE DEAD.; REALISTIC SIMULATOR TEACHES POLICE WHEN TO SHOOT

These people are extremely angry. They're coming from behind the couch, from the hallway, crossing the carpet, assembling in the foyer to scream at Jackson police sergeant Chris Mouser.

"Nobody called for the police here," a man snarls.

"We don't want you here," one of the women shrieks.

Their ferocity is unnerving set against the ordinariness of the middle-class suburban home. With all the shouting, it's difficult to think. Mouser is trying to serve a felony warrant. The family is not happy to see him.

Suddenly, one of the men darts for the kitchen. The sergeant orders him to stop, to turn around, to move his hands where he can see them. But the man disobeys, ducks behind the counter. Mouser goes for his holstered sidearm.

It is a good instinct. The subject reappears with a revolver, is swinging it around, aiming.

Mouser is a half-second ahead of him, raising his matte black Glock into a firing position. The men are at near point-blank range.

And then Mouser pulls the trigger and nothing happens except the impotent, metal-against-metal snap of a jammed round.

The subject opens fire, the muzzle of his weapon erupting into a white flash. Pop. Pop.

Then the image on the screen freezes. The scenario ends.

There is a silent, somber moment in the FireArms Training System (FATS) room of the Southeast Missouri State University Law Enforcement Academy.

The voice of training coordinator Tom Beardslee cuts the darkness: "That's why you wear a vest." For Beardslee, his face lit in the faint glow of the command terminal, this is a often repeated maxim.

Deciding the scenario

The instructor controls the FATS with godlike ability, deciding with the punch of a key which branch of the scenario to load off the laser disc. In one, the irate trucker can go quietly, or he can advance with balled fists, or his girlfriend can appear from the opposite side of the truck cab with a pistol.

Lasers installed in a canister of mace, the Glock, and a Remington pump-action shotgun register hits on the screen.

After the rest of his training scenarios, which go well, Mouser does not want to talk about how the jam felt. The FATS system, he says, sidestepping the question, "is good training. This is the next best thing to real life."

It's a simulation that effectively hammers home to officers the seriousness of a jam at a critical moment or the necessity of learning like second nature how to clear a jammed weapon. Or, like the man says, to wear a vest.

The scenarios can be tricky. At times, impossible.

But for $75,000 a system, FATS provides law enforcement professionals and professionals-to-be with something to chew on.

Sharing the system

The Southeast academy shares its system in a six-month rotation with the Mineral Area Community College in Park Hills, Mo. When the bulky apparatus lives here, SEMO law enforcement students are joined by officers from police departments such as Cape Girardeau, Scott City, and Sikeston to take their turn at honing use-of-force skills on the big screen.

"Just about every department around here has shot on it," Beardslee explains.

The computer grades officers on responding to threats with an appropriate use of force.

For example, a male subject comes out the front door of the building with a pistol to the head of a female hostage. A second, unidentified man is following the subject, and everybody is creeping in the direction of the getaway car. Should you continue issuing verbal commands? Or should you use your mace or your sidearm on one or both of the men?

Michael Brown, director of the academy, opts to pull the Glock when he spots the unidentified man drawing a pistol. He shoots twice. In the replay, the lethal hits will appear as red dots, the non-lethal hits as yellow. He opts to let the subject with the hostage go.

"With him holding a hostage like that, it would have been extremely difficult to make a shot like that with a handgun," says Brown, a former police officer.

"Everything we teach here applies directly to something an officer would have to deal with on the street," says Beardslee, a former deputy in the Scott County Sheriff's Department. "Foremost, so the officer can survive his shift."

Sgt. Ryan Dooley of the Jackson Police Department drops the irate trucker with a blast of mace. A gray circle on the screen tracks the spray of the simulated chemical agent. The FATS laser disc whirrs, and the trucker falls to his knees on the asphalt, clawing at his eyes and spitting expletives.

Then he pulls a snub-nosed revolver from his waistband and opens fire.

"That's why you wear a vest," sounds out from the back of the room.

"On this scenario, I let my guard down," Dooley observes. "It will only happen once."