Rogers County Sheriff's Office Expands Active Shooter Training With New Simulator

Rogers County Deputies can now train for nearly 1,000 different real-life scenarios like active shooters, traffic stops, or dealing with armed suspects, with a new simulator.

The sheriff's office says this training is needed more than ever after three children and three adults were murdered inside a Christian School in Nashville earlier this week. The technology used to be for "shoot or don’t shoot" training. Now it focuses on the use of force decision-making with 875 different scenarios, the officer may use a gun, a taser, or no weapon at all.

The Rogers County Sheriff's Office is the latest agency to get this real-life training system that puts deputies in situations they would face out on the street.

“There's no do over, it is unforgiving out there, so being able to train our officers to look at those situations completely and not get tunnel vision or not get sucked into the situation and keep a broader view is important,” said Lieutenant Bronson Smith with the Rogers County Sheriff's Office.

The deputies can talk to the system and the system will react, which will give deputies different scenarios to figure out. Ray Minor with Ti Training says their system is designed to be as real as possible.

"We encourage them to train and do everything here like they would on the street because if they do something wrong and mess up, we correct it here and we can hit the restart button,” said Minor.

The training isn't only focused on shooting or not shooting, there are scenarios where less lethal options like a taser are needed or scenarios where a deputy is dealing with a person who is mentally ill.

Deputies say sometimes lethal force is needed, but this training also teaches law enforcement how to try to de-escalate situations. The goal is to offer this training to people in the community and other agencies in the area.