The Police Simulator Where the Gun Almost Always Goes Off

From 2015 to 2018, anthropologist Jessica Katzenstein observed trainings at Maryland police departments, sitting through the scenarios themselves. The exercises are supposed to help officers overcome fears and implicit bias. Katzenstein found that they are still often dramatic enactments of worst-case scenarios. The design tilts the odds: as the article puts it, someone holding a gun in real life may not shoot an officer, but in the simulator they almost certainly will. That gap is the interesting part. When a scenario is built so the shooting happens, the drill rehearses an ending rather than testing a reading of the situation. Practising the worst case is not automatically wrong; treating it as the default case is a choice about what officers learn to expect.