Community Corner
Edgartown Police Go High-Tech in New Training Room
Edgartown police are stalking suspects and firing weapons more than ever before after voters in 2012 approved $85,000 for a new police training and emergency operations center.
Shots fired. Officers down. Civilians injured. Hostages held at gunpoint. Unknown suspects lurking.
Edgartown police officers are confronting these dangers more than ever before — not on the street, but in the dark on the top floor of the police department on Pease's Point Way South.
Monday afternoon, Edgartown selectmen and Island media got a preview of the department's new training and emergency operations center, for which town voters approved an $85,000 budget item nearly a year ago.
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The facility was built with contributed framing from One Job at a Time and many hours volunteered by off-duty police, Chief Tony Bettencourt told the group.
"Everybody pitched in," he said.
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The room's state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment and software will help Edgarown officers fulfill their state-mandated firearm training requirements, Bettencourt continued.
"We hope that by using this on a regular basis, they'll make some good decisions and shoot better," Bettencourt said.
The training room is a bit like the holodeck on TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, only less 3-D: One wall serves as a life-size screen against which digital video is projected, with surround sound boosted by a chunky subwoofer.
A software program, controlled during Monday's demo by Officer Joel Deroche, can immediately plunge police into a simulated school shooting scenario with a gunman on the loose, or send them on a tense search for a burglar in a darkened pharmacy.
When the officers believe deadly force is necessary in the scenario, as you'll see in our video, they fire laser weapons at the interactive video screen.
The public will be invited to an open house at the police department April 27, Bettencourt said. Expect to see some familiar scenes and faces during the simulations they'll be demonstrating that day.
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