Background
The Woodridge Police Department serves the village of Woodridge, Illinois, a Chicago suburb in DuPage and Will counties. Chief Tom Stefanson said the department went looking for new training options in 2023 in response to changing legislative requirements - the Illinois SAFE-T Act and the state's De-Escalation Training Act of 2022 - and to the disruption the COVID-19 pandemic caused to conventional training.
The deployment
The department added an Operator XR virtual reality system to its training tool kit in July 2024. Officers wear a lightweight headset that places them inside a 360-degree simulated environment, rather than standing in front of the large projection screen used by older police simulators. Scenarios cover routine traffic stops, high-stress encounters and active shooter incidents, and are used to train de-escalation, use of force, crisis intervention and responses to community behaviour. Officers can run pre-programmed scenarios or move through customisable settings, and they are not told in advance what a session will present.
During a session officers carry their own department-issued firearms, modified so they cannot fire, or precise replicas, so that handling the weapon builds the same muscle memory as live training. Use-of-force instructors debrief each run with the officer afterwards.
Cost and significance
FOX 32 Chicago reported the system cost about $110,000 and was paid for out of the police department's share of federal drug-seizure funds rather than from village taxes, and described it as the first time the technology had been used by a police department in Illinois. The station reported the system had been in use for roughly three weeks as of 12 August 2024.
Supplier
Operator XR was founded in Australia and supplies portable virtual reality training systems to police and military agencies, with its US operation based in Virginia. The company describes its law enforcement system as running offline on a closed network from a single transportable case, with no additional servers or computers required. No source names the headset model used at Woodridge.
