The SHOTPROS project
The European street patrol police officer’s field of action is in a constant state of change and new challenges are emerging all the time. The number of incidents where police officers are first responders in critical situations with severe threat circumstances has drastically increased. Being the first responder in high-risk situations never faced before, creates a highly stressful situation.
The SHOTPROS project aims to investigate the influence of psychological and contextual human factors (HFs) on the behaviour of decision-making and acting (DMA) of police officers under stress and in high-risk operational situations in order to design better training for police officers to improve DMA Performance. SHOTPROS will develop a Virtual Reality (VR) solution to experimentally assess the degree to which these factors influence DMA behaviour.
What we do
Subsequently the project will develop a HF-rooted training curriculum and a corresponding VR training solution to provide a comprehensive framework for practical training for decision-making and acting under stress and in high-risk (DMA-SR) situations in order to improve performance.The training will increase DMA-SR performance which will lead to better and more correct decisions (from several perspectives, e.g. law, ethic, etc.), to keep the guidance in threatened situations, to minimise use of force occurrences, and accordingly, to maximise the avoidance of casualties and collateral damage, such as panic and cascading or escalating effects.
Existing trainings mainly focus on skill training and do leave out the decision-making and acting behavior training. We aim to set up a training framework, enhanced with Virtual Reality, to change the training methods in LEAs to come to better decisions and minimizing use of forces, collateral damages and escalations.