Patrol Officer Andre Lee sees a suicidal woman staring off the edge of a building with a bright desert-like landscape behind her; he hears the woman’s melancholic voice and the sound of whipping wind. I see Officer Lee standing alert in the middle of the Princeton Police Department (PPD) training facility, the cloudy mid-morning February light streaming through blindness windows into an otherwise empty room; Lee wears a VR-headset and headphones, with his arm outstretched in a pleading reach towards nowhere in particular. 

 

Sitting in an office chair at the edge of the room is Patrol Officer Chris King, the man in charge of the PPD’s training program. He navigates a computer monitor — on it, we see Lee’s perspective. The suicidal woman looks back, her feet dangling off the building’s edge. 

 

“I won’t be getting closer, but I’m asking that you come down here and see me, OK?” asks Lee. King turns back to his monitor, to the maze of blue buttons that control the actions of the virtual character. He clicks his mouse, and the woman shouts, “I’m such a loser!” For Lee, a PPD officer with 9 years of experience, the voice feels real. 

 

The PPD’s VR program reflects a trend towards modernization in law enforcement training; the violence and power dynamics of police-civilian relationships are filtered through a surreal videogame-like medium, with the intention of changing how police act in the real world. Over the course of two minutes, Lee and King–through the proxy woman on the building–play out the de-escalation of a suicide attempt. The room is tense. When Lee takes off the VR equipment and hands it to me, he wipes the sweat off his forehead. 

 

Captain Matt Solovay, the Princeton Police Department media-relations officer, told me that multiple versions of law enforcement VR training software exist across the country. But in 2021, the PPD elected to use Wrap Technologies – a company focused on “developing and providing innovative non-lethal policing technologies,” according to their website. 

 

Wrap’s VR software offers a variety of training situations: from aiding an elderly man with dementia in a restaurant, to disarming an active bomber in a courtroom, to de-escalating a student protest in a school bus, officers can practice for situations that are nearly impossible to simulate. “God forbid they’re ever placed in a situation like that,” said Solovay, referring explicitly to the active-shooter scenario, “they would have some type of training, and the skills to try to overcome the challenges.”

 

VR doesn’t act as a replacement for regular training, Solovay and King repeatedly say. From police academy to probationary applied training, recruits have to go through over a year of training before they become full PPD officers.

 

“Training never stops,” says Solovay. Under the direction of Officer King, members of the PPD are routinely brought in for weapons practice, role-playing exercises, and implicit-bias training. One of the advantages of VR, King says, is that it allows him to incorporate training into the daily routine. With Wrap, he’s able to pull an officer off the road for 15 or 30 minutes of training, without disrupting their day. 

 

Wrap’s VR software had only recently been launched when they started conversations with the PPD. Together, they struck a deal: if Princeton made a new space for VR training, and allowed other police departments to demo the equipment, the PPD would get Wrap’s software for free. 

 

The PPD was already looking to convert the old Hook and Ladder fire station facility into a new training center, so at no cost to taxpayers, they obtained Wrap. On the morning of February 27th, I met Solovay, King, and Lee at that facility; they told me I could try a run-through of the VR equipment for myself. 

After an initial orientation, Solovay and King bring me into weapons training. With my visual field fully taken up, I’m in a virtual shooting range with targets of concentric paper circles and metallic humanoid outlines at varying distances. Solovay hands me the Wrap gun; when I lift it in real life, I see the same gun rising in the VR world. Though the graphics are bad, I almost recoil in fear. I recall, with disdain, the book Ready Player One.

 

It takes a while for me to understand how to aim–just like the guns that PPD uses in real life, the simulated weapon has a red-dot sight on top. When I finally manage to hit one of the steel targets, there’s a satisfying ping. 

 

“Actually good shooting,” says Solovay. 

 

I don’t hear him, so I keep shooting at the metal targets. “What?” 

 

“Actually good shooting,” he repeats. I don’t say anything. I keep shooting. We all stand quietly while the pings ring out. 

 

The system is impressive, and there’s a perverse feeling of joy that I got from it. I recall an early adolescent obsession with marines and warfare. I remember my grandpa’s BB-gun, the rock-filled soup cans that I shot from increasingly further distances. While I unloaded the VR gun, conscious of its resemblance to the real weapon that New Jersey police carry, the gamification of violence wasn’t on my mind. All I thought about was hitting the metal targets, a boyish jolt of excitement and energy coming back with every connecting shot.

 

Police officers aren’t the first ones to use VR for shooting-simulations. Games like the first-person shooter SuperHot VR (initially released in 2016) made VR weapons “fun” before police departments began incorporating them into official training.

 

Parents and lawmakers have been concerned about the gamification of warfare and violence for even longer than that. From a 1997 lawsuit calling video games “murder simulators” to senators linking video games with the Parkland school shooting, cultural sentiment has consistently associated real violence with mature video games. While the American Psychological Association reaffirmed, as recently as 2020, that “there is insufficient scientific evidence to support a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior,” others argue that simulated violence can cause desensitization–a concern that feels especially relevant for enforcement training.

 

But research reflects that police officers don’t experience VR training like a video game. “For them, it’s training,” said Dr. Olivia Zechner of the University of Salzburg. “They are at work–they know it’s serious.” Zechner spent three years running a study on the relationship between stress and law enforcement VR training, and her work found the training to be a useful tool. 

 

During her study, Zechner received feedback that younger police officers were more comfortable with virtual weapons, and tend to act in riskier ways when dealing with potential suspects in VR; while she said that “probably, the more you now move into a generation that is used to gaming, and that is also using VR for gaming, the more that will probably become a problem,” she didn’t see the blurred line between training and gaming as something to immediately worry about.

 

“Police officers need to learn how to act in stressful situations,” she explained. With the potential to introduce extra stressors–barking dogs, children bystanders, and passing cars–VR can simulate anxiety-inducing conditions that officers perceive as similar to those in the real world. Her study identified VR as a helpful tool for practicing de-escalation, communication skills, and active-threat events.

 

Zechner said that VR is likely to rapidly improve in the future, with the integration of AI and better graphics. Even now, she said, it takes only a short time for participants to forget that the experience isn’t real. 

 

 

I n one scenario that King and Solovay load me into, I’m on a busy street with two characters in front of me–a cop, who’s identified as “Sergeant Henderson,” and a civilian in handcuffs.

 

As I begin to walk over, the simulated sergeant pushes the handcuffed man onto the ground and says, “Get in the damn car.”

 

A crowd gathers around us. One NPC pulls out his phone to record the incident. I laugh, because I’m not sure what else to do.

 

I reach for the man on the ground, while the simulated sergeant above continues a barrage of insults. The man on the ground tells me that he’s hurt.

 

I’m turning between the sergeant and the man on the ground. To my side, the civilian holding his phone screams out, “I’m going to show this video to your boss!” and the sergeant begins screaming back at him. For a moment, my immersion overpowers the understanding that it’s all fake. Turning towards Henderson, I say, “Sergeant, shut the fuck up!” 

 

I spin away from the simulated scene, facing the spot where I know Solovay and King are standing in the real world. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do!” I say loudly. I turn back to the injured man on the floor, with the sergeant screaming behind my back. I bend over, trying, and failing, to pick him up. 

 

 

When asked whether the PPD’s training system is successful, Solovay says to look at the statistics: according to the department’s annual report, there were only four use-of-force incidents in 2024 out of 41,306 police calls for help.  

 

“If officers are even learning or taking away just a little bit from the training, then that’s a success,“ says Solovay.

 

According to the non-profit research group Mapping Police Violence, police use force on over 300,000 people every year, injuring an estimated 100,000. In 2024, they reported that 1,364 individuals were killed by American law enforcement.

 

Research by the Washington Post has shown that, over the last eleven years, Black Americans “are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans.” Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and other high-profile killings by law enforcement, calls for systemic change to policing have gained renewed traction. Advocates suggest a variety of solutions: reallocation of resources into low-income communities, the defunding of police agencies, and larger cultural shifts, among many other ideas.

 

No one is claiming that the VR training is a solution to the endemic problems of police brutality. But scenarios like the one with Sergeant Henderson indicate an attempt at change. In this contentious cultural environment, VR training allows for officers to practice de-escalation in novel situations. But as a tradeoff, they do so in a pixelated world. 

 

 

Solovay and King load me into a “domestic-dispute response” situation. I see a woman curled up in the corner of a mobile home’s porch; a man with a baseball bat stands between us. He stares at me, then drops his bat and walks down the steps of the porch in my direction. 

 

“Do you want to put your hands behind your…,” I say, interrupted by the echo of a gunshot; I register the character’s cowboyish stance and see the gun in his hand. I shoot back, far too late, and the virtual character falls to the ground. 

 

King invites me to experience the scenario through an “After-Action Review” – in another angle of the scene, I watch a ghost-like rendering of my police avatar, with my movements and voice recorded, interacting with the domestic abuser. It all feels like a George Saunders story. I break down laughing. 

 

In the third-person, I see the NPC pull out his gun and fire. I see the red line tracking his shot, an emasculating manifestation of law-enforcement-failure passing through my avatar’s groin. I see my own shot go through his jaw. 

 

King tells me to walk over to the place I’d shot from. “And now look towards the girl.” 

 

The red line, tracking the trajectory of my bullet, passes through the virtual abuser and continues on. The bullet lodges itself in the wall of the mobile home, barely above the crouched head of the virtually rendered abuse victim. 

 

“Police are responsible for every round that comes out of our weapon,” says Solovay.