Mock village to give officers a realistic training environment
Houston Police Foundation raising $10M to build facility
The mock village looked like a Hollywood set equipped with video cameras and an open roof. Actual police officers apprehended fictional bad guys as trainers and supervisors — not movie directors — observed from a catwalk.
The films created in the Washington, D.C., police training facility provided critical information about tactical successes and errors before potentially deadly events in real life, such as the active shooters who terrorized the Houston area’s Memorial neighborhood and West University Place municipality in 2016.
After watching a demonstration, Houston Police Foundation chairman and billionaire Tilman Fertitta left convinced that a similar facility was needed for the nation’s fourth-largest city. In short order, the Houston Police Foundation board committed to a $10 million capital campaign.
A $2.5 million leading gift secured the building’s name: Tilman Fertitta Family Tactical Village.
“We need our patrol officers that are driving down the streets to be trained to be able to go in and take that active shooter out,” said Charlene Floyd, the nonprofit’s executive director. “The more they train and the more they practice, the more they’re going to feel comfortable
doing that.”
The foundation — which provides training and equipment for HPD in addition to the city budget — has raised nearly $5 million. Floyd said she hopes to secure the other half in the next six months.
The two-level, 40,000-square-foot training center will be built on Aldine Westfield Road close to HPD’s police academy in north Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport area. Construction could begin in 2017 with the earliest opening in late 2018.
“We have police officers who have never shot their weapon other than in training — which is a blessing — but we want to know that they have been trained and know what to do,” Floyd said. “They’ll be able to go in and do real-life scenarios — active shooters, domestic disputes, bank robberies.”
Scenario-based training
The village will have a school, residences and businesses, including at least one doughnut shop, and a high-rise building with an atrium. Entrances will be large enough for cruisers, tanks and horses to fit inside.
Foundation fundraising efforts point to President Barack Obama’s task force on 21st century policing. The group’s final report, published in May 2015, advocated for “training innovation” and “scenariobased training” as ways to improve the effectiveness of the nation’s law enforcement officers.
Patrol officers working their beats are often the first to respond to active shooters, hostage situations or terrorist attacks.
“It’s going to make our officers better prepared for the job that they do. Currently, the vast majority of our training is in a classroom environment,” former HPD acting chief Martha Montalvo said in a promotional video. “The tactical village will bring us to the next level, which is scenario-based training.”
An unstable military veteran unleashed more than 200 rounds from a Memorial-area automotive shop in May, killing one person and injuring six in less than an hour. The chaos included a fired-upon gas pump set ablaze and bullets sent skyward toward a police helicopter. The ordeal ended when a SWAT sniper fatally shot Dionisio Garza III.
Ambushes in July claimed the lives of five Dallas police officers and three more in Baton Rouge, La.
In late September, Harris County experienced another mass shooting in West University Place, a tiny jurisdiction nestled between Houston, Bellaire and Southside Place. Officers from Houston, West University and Bellaire fired their weapons during the incident to subdue Nathan DeSai, who was randomly shooting at civilians and then officers in a neighborhood strip mall. He wounded nine people before police killed him.
HPD Sgt. George Batcheler, who discharged his weapon during the West U. active shooter incident, said in the fundraising video that hands-on simulations help officers learn to make better decisions under less stress and think more clearly.
No more pretending
The tactical village is a special project in addition to the ongoing work of the Houston Police Foundation. In recent years, the nonprofit has provided heavy external vests to protect officers against highpowered rifle shots, vans for homeless outreach, dogs for canine units and a precision mapping system for police helicopters.
In 2015, Fort Worth opened a $100 million combined headquarters for its police and fire departments that includes a tactical village.
The training space with moveable walls includes a school and apartments as well as a bank, restaurant and convenience store. Speakers can pipe in sound effects such as screams or gunfire, and 15 cameras record the sessions. The facility can be filled with smoke in 15 minutes.
“This makes the scenarios a little bit more challenging and forces the officer to push past this distraction and get to the threat. We have seen active shooters using fire as a weapon and we have to train for this,” said Sgt. Eddie Trinidad, the mock village’s unofficial “mayor” who is with the Fort Worth Police Department’s reality-based training unit. “The officers want training that is realistic — training that will help them deal with dangerous situations as well as routine situations. The village allows for that.”
Over the last year, hundreds of Fort Worth police officers, firefighters and paramedics have participated in simulations. There are daily exercises for SWAT, canine and special response teams.
“One of the main goals of training is to get as close to real … as possible while maintaining safety. The village allows us to do that,” Trinidad said. “In our old academy, we had to pretend that a classroom was a bank, an apartment, a store and so on. Now we don’t have to pretend.”