A creative way to learn about de-escalation for local law enforcement.
Windsor Police became one of the first police service organizations in Ontario to adopt Virtual Reality Mental Health Crisis Response Training in 2022.
The program is developed by the educational software company Lumeto for the Ministry of the Solicitor General.
Staff Sgt. Chris Werstein says Lumeto partnered with Wilfrid Lauier and the University of Toronto, along with a number of other stakeholders, which is when word started to really spread about the program.
He says there's a number of components involved.
"First part is a teaching component where officers first learn signs of mental health, strategies of de-escalation, different types of communication," he continued. "And then you're able to actually observe a scenario that is pre-determined that is out there and once that scenario happens you can critique it based on what you've just learned."
The program was developed by people with lived experience in dealing with mental health, so someone on the other side who has been through a similar scenario also provides feedback to officers.
Sgt. Werstein says trainees wear VR goggles and use hand controllers to enter a digitally-constructed world, as part of the program, where they then deal with a number of scenarios.
"The instructor has so many controls where they can control the environment from traffic, time of day, are you inside, are you outside, what the actually scenario is dealing with. These scenarios can go and morph into something that's huge or be something that's very simple."
He says it's not black and white as an assessment tool, because the master instructor is looking for quite a few competencies as part of the training.
Sgt. Werstein gave an example of building a rapport with someone.
"At the very start you might not have achieved that, but throughout the entire scenario you might get that at the end. If the officer is not connecting, and the subject isn't being de-escalated and they're not changing their tone, well the scenario doesn't have to end. The instructor can send a message into that officer's headset just giving a prompt of maybe consider this, maybe consider that," he said.
Sgt. Werstein believes this program will become more widely used across the province in the future, with the Ontario Police College recently agreeing to sign up and use it.
- with files from AM800's The Dan MacDonald Show