BU Police Department Adds Virtual Reality as a Training Tool
State-of-the-art program guides officers through dozens of scenarios to help make real-life decisions in the field

A Boston University Police officer demonstrates a virtual reality scenario where a routine traffic stop turns into a lesson about a driver who is hearing-impaired and cannot easily obey the officer’s simple commands.
BU Police Department Adds Virtual Reality Training Tool to Better De-Escalate Conflicts
State-of-the-art program guides officers through dozens of scenarios to help them make the right real-life decisions in the field
Boston University police officers have a new training program where they can learn better ways to de-escalate a conflict with an emotionally disturbed person, avoid confusion with a hearing-impaired driver, or, because this is virtual reality, take target practice at a bunch of floating triangles.
The state-of-the-art Axon VR training program includes a virtual reality headset that puts an officer right inside a wide variety of scenarios with both video and audio, even though they’re still in BUPD headquarters in the real world. It’s like a powered-up Nintendo or Wii, but with serious real-world activities.
“The biggest thing with this kind of cutting-edge technology is really starting to look at the science behind training, how the brain doesn’t realize if it’s training or if it’s real life,” says BUPD Captain Lawrence Cuzzi, a de-escalation trainer and a member of the Defensive Tactics Executive Committee for the Massachusetts Municipal Police Training Committee.
Cuzzi did some research about the program after hearing about it, then led the effort to bring it to the department. “The more repetitions we give officers, in community engagement, in de-escalation, in dealing in a mental health crisis, in dealing in use-of-force issues,” he says, “when they’re placed in a real life situation, their memory bank is going to fall back on what they’ve already experienced and give them more options and more confidence.”
The system is made by Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, Inc., which manufactures Tasers, body and dashboard cameras, dispatch software, and other technology products for law enforcement.
“I recently went to a conference, and out of 51 different police departments, there were only 2 others that use this,” says BUPD Lieutenant Mike Vanaria, the department’s training coordinator. “But everybody wants to get it.”
The person experiencing the scenario controls their experience by moving their body, by speaking, or by focusing their eyes on what we’ll call in-game menus. In scenarios involving weapons, officers are given a plastic sensor device to point.

Vanaria or another training officer can also control the scenarios from a tablet computer loaded with Axon software, choosing from an array of variables to alter how it plays out.
Try it out, and you’ll quickly find the scenarios can raise your pulse. The system, which BUPD began using this month, includes dozens, such as:
- A man despondent over problems in his personal life paces back and forth on a helipad atop a building—he seems to be thinking of suicide. You are the officer who responds, and you see the scene unfold in front of you as you try to talk him into coming away from the edge.
“This is stuff that anybody can come across in the course of duty,” Vanaria says. “Not every call requires a use of force. It’s important to be able to de-escalate situations.”
Officer Peter McCarron, who demonstrated this scenario, is not fond of heights, and the scene inside the headset was realistic enough to make him queasy. Vanaria, watching on the tablet, told him to turn away from the edge.
“That’s how real it is,” McCarron says with a chuckle. “Whoa!”
McCarron did turn and managed to talk the man away from the edge.
- An officer pulls over a car for a minor traffic violation, but the woman driving is hearing-impaired. Their inability to communicate at first scares the woman and makes the officer wary. You can be the officer or the woman, which gives you a chance to understand their interaction from both sides.
- And then there is the shooting range, where you find yourself standing in a large open room with a vaguely futuristic appearance. A couple of dozen geometric shapes in different colors float in the air around you—and you are told to shoot, say, all the triangles. Can you do it accurately in an allotted number of seconds, without shooting any of the innocent squares and circles?
“They call out different targets, so they’re not always the same,” Vanaria says. “Virtual reality builds memories within your brain. If you can do something like this between going to the range—we go twice a year to qualify—the officers are more confident when they get there.
“Some scenarios require movement, and some you can do statically, like this. I can sit behind my desk, put it on, and you don’t have to move other than your head a little. So you can literally do this anywhere.”
Even a state-of-the-art VR system provides the occasional surreal moment, though. When this writer put on the headset and was ready to try the shooting range, Vanaria’s disembodied hand entered the “room” to hand me the device to point with.
We can do this basically throughout the day with officers, over and over and over again, and set them up with the confidence to actually go out there and perform under stress and duress in a real-life situation.
About 30 scenarios came with the system initially. Each month more and different scenarios are offered, and departments can pick and choose which ones they want to download. Each BUPD officer will eventually have a chance to try it out.
The immersive reality and the potential to alter the scenarios helps officers improve decision-making in critical situations and improve accuracy under stress, Vanaria says. Officers can train anytime and almost anywhere, meaning short, repeated sessions are easier to arrange.
“This is just to kind of collaborate with the training they’ve already received,” Cuzzi says. “We can do this basically throughout the day with officers, over and over and over again, and set them up with the confidence to actually go out there and perform under stress and duress in a real-life situation.”
McCarron says BUPD officers often train together with other departments, including Brookline, Boston, and the MBTA, and he hopes they will be able to share the system with them.
“The new generation officer is engaging more with the technology aspect of training than some of the other kinds,” Cuzzi says. “We’re getting more engagement, more interest, and a stronger desire to perform better.”
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