LEWISTON — There’s something suspicious about the green van parked outside the prison. But the young lady who steps out of the driver’s side is pretty and sweet so maybe everything will be all right.

Then that pretty, sweet girl opens the back of the van and suddenly it’s calamity. A burly bald man is reaching for a gun. Others are in there twisting around in the shadows. In the split second since the back of the van was opened, it’s hard to tell exactly what the situation is.

The bald man brings up a gun. From your view, there is less than that split second to make a decision. Do you shoot? Or not?

On Friday afternoon at Kaplan University, the decision was made. Shots were fired and both the bald man and the pretty girl fell to the ground, mortally wounded.

The good news for everyone is that it was all a simulation. The bad guys were nothing more than pixels on a screen, the cop who shot them was giving a demonstration of the university’s Firearms Training Simulator.

“It’s unbelievable how realistic it is,” said Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Capt. Ray LaFrance.

He ought to know. He’s been a police officer for 30 years and a firearms trainer for 20 of them. He knows that in the world of law enforcement, every situation is different and things can change in a heartbeat.

Many police officers have died in that heartbeat. Those at Kaplan University on Friday — cops, politicians, students who hope to become police officers — took time to mourn those who have fallen. Then they turned their attention to how to make all police officers safer.

“Hopefully,” said Lewiston police officer William Rousseau, “The number of casualties will be down.”

Students are going to train on the simulator. So are officers from area departments. Two from the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department will be trained on the equipment and then begin training others.

Nobody said how much the simulator costs. But most agreed that Kaplan making it available will mean more officers get state-of-the-art training. And not just the new recruits.

“Not just the young officers starting out,” LaFrance said, “but the seasoned veterans as well.”

Seasoned veterans never had the opportunity to step into virtual reality to test their shooting skills. Back in the day, you shot at stationary targets, got out onto the streets and hoped for the best. If you did learn to shoot in high stress situations, it meant something had gone terribly wrong.

“Training was almost non-existent,” said Lewiston Mayor Larry Gilbert, a former police officer who first put on a badge in 1969. “I had one week of training with the deputy chief.”

And so after a ceremony to honor the dead, the groups at Kaplan were led into a small room where images were projected onto a screen.The computer software contains 300 scenarios and of those, there are 4,000 possible outcomes. Program operators can make it snow, make it rain, make gunmen appear out of bushes. 

“Exit the vehicle!” criminal justice major Aaron Hatch hollered at the screen. “Driver, exit the vehicle now!”

That’s when the pretty blond stepped out and things got crazy, the kind of crazy police need to be prepared for every day.

“It really brings to life what that means,” said Kaplan President Christopher Quinn.

Only this time, the man in the back of the van didn’t have a gun, he had a hammer. The tone of the situation changed entirely. A different set of rules needed to be applied to the decision-making process and it had to be done in a very short span of time.

Just like the real thing.

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