Thursday, June 19, 2008

Con-Sims

Citizens Academy is almost completed. Next week is our final night and our graduation. This week we had "Con-Sim's". I'm thinking that probably stands for Confrontation Simulation. Either way it was a fun and interesting evening.

We all arrived and got searched and metal-detected before entering. This is just their way of ensuring that we're not carrying any "real" weapons on the premesis.

Next we had a volunteer who got tazed to show us what that does to a person. Bravo to the fireman who volunteered to do that. It was really an amazing experience. To see him standing there, then hit with the tazer. One of the probes didn't stick so he had very little "zap" in the beginning, but then the lead fell and hit his leg, as it's designed, and the cirucit was complete. He was ZAPPED! I mean, his face controted, his muscles locked up, he lost control of his legs and fell to the ground. Once it really hit him you could see how imobolized it was. Quite cool and quite a great tool for law enforcement.

Next it was our turn for scenarios. Unfortunately, we didn't get to use tazers. We were however trussed up in our "cop gear" for the evening. We were instructed to wear heavy layers, just in case we were to get hit by a con-sim round, which is a paintball type round that apparently REALLY hurts and breaks skin if you get hit with it. Then we were given a neck guard, bullet-proof vest, a duty belt, training glock (with aforementioned really HARD paintball-type rounds), a baton/asp (with padding on it), training OC spray (which smelled like BenGay instead of pepper, thank goodness!), and a training mask. Here I am ready to go but waiting to put on my Darth Vadar helmet.

As soon as we were ready to go we partnered up for scenarios. I was pleased to see that Cheif was the hit-man for us. He did quite a good job of getting into character and acting criminal , despite the fact that he was in tons and tons of hot and bulky gear.

I watched several teams before it was my turn. My partner and I had 2 scenarios, each of us taking the lead on one of them. The first scenario was mine. It was an agitated man on his porch who didn't like the police. When I arrived "on scene" he was agressive and walking toward me, yelling and angry. I tried talking to him to figure out what was going on, but he kept coming at me. I instructed him to stop and he did, only to start walking towards me again. I took out my OC to spray him, only I held it backwards (blame my inexperience! LOL) and sprayed myself in the glove instead! DOH!!! I smelled like BenGay all evening! LOL After the failed OC-ing, the hit-man charged us and we were forced to take out our asps and hit him with them, finally getting him to fall and putting him in custody.

Here I am on the left with my asp out, ready to hit him with it.

I don't recall the next scenario, since I was backup on that one and it was nothing of consequence. But they did get this picture of me taking him into custody.

After every member had their turn they asked if anyone wanted to go again. Well I did! I paired up with an older gentelman in our group who is just so great and always interested in trying these things.

Our first scenario I was lead. It was another agitated gentelman, this time with a shotgun. I talked to him a bit and got him to put down his shotgun, only to find that he had a pistol hidden on his back. He grabbed that and we immediately started shooting. We hit him several times (including some shots in the face mask ... sorry Chief!!!). He went down but still had his hand on the gun. He did finally comply and threw the gun away from him. We moved around as a team and took him into custody. Wahoo! That was fun.

We had another scenario which, again, I don't recall the details of. But we did get to asp the chief again and both got a little extra hit, even after he was down. Oops, total accident. But it does go to show that sometimes the adrenaline of the situation causes your brain to take a few seconds to comply when you tell it that it's time to stop.

Con-Sims were really fun! It is a reminder though of how volatile the situations can be and how quickly they can become dangerous and deadly situations.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! You go girl! What a great program. Thanks for sharing!

Anita said...

That sounds like a really fun program. Interesting details!