Stanislaus Academy is pilot program for scenario-based training

In the next few weeks, 21 rookie police officers and deputies will begin patrolling the streets equipped with real-life, hands-on experiences only being offered in Stanislaus County.

On Friday, 12 Modesto police officers, five Stanislaus County sheriff’s deputies, one Tuolumne County sheriff’s deputy and three Turlock police officers took the oath of office at The House church on Coffee Road.

Class 174 was the first to graduate from the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Regional Training Division since 2010, when it was shuttered as a result of the recession when agencies were laying off officers instead of hiring them.

But the academy this year’s graduating class attended is different than it was five years ago. The 20-week pilot program, certified by the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, immersed recruits in the requirements of the job through scenario-based training.

“It’s almost a necessity before you hit the field, you never know how a call is going to turn out. These scenarios give us the basics, now we can build on that,” said graduate Josh Lancaster, who will start work as a Stanislaus County deputy next week. “It gives us a lot more confidence going into the field – we’ve handled calls like this before, now we know what to do.”

The program is condensed, about a month shorter than the average academy, but recruits must pass all of the same commission-required tests.

New Turlock Officer Marco Diaz said the scenarios aided in taking the tests, “by allowing you to remember certain aspects like the elements of a crime better. It’s one thing to read it and see it on piece of paper, but when you actually make a mistake on a scenario you won’t forget that mistake.”

In a traditional academy, recruits generally are taught each “learning domain” – such as arrest and control techniques or building searches – individually, said Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Lt. Brandon Kiely, director of the academy. The scenarios allow the training officers at the Stanislaus academy to incorporate a number of elements into one training exercise, he said.

For example, recruits role-played a domestic violence call that evolved into an active-shooter situation and another in which a suspicious-person call turned into a burglary in progress.

They participated in multiple scenarios each week.

“There is the textbook way to do things, and in real life you aren’t going to get textbook black-and-white,” Diaz said. “You have to make adjustments.”

Recruits must test in more than 40 different “learning domains” including range qualifications tests, penal code, report writing and first aid, Kiely said. Some are written tests, others performed, and all can be incorporated in scenarios.

They get two attempts to pass each test or fail the program.

It’s one of the reasons the academy is so challenging, said Modesto Police Department recruit Jeff Harmon.

“The constant awareness that one missed step could mean the end of the road. The fact that you may be doing great for 13 weeks in a row and have one bad day and it’s all over,” Harmon said. “I know that the stress of coming to work and constantly being on your ‘A game’ is part of what they are trying to acclimate us to, what this job is really like.”

There were 33 recruits when the class began in April. Some failed written tests, some didn’t cut it at the shooting range, but several were removed from the program because of the way they performed in scenarios.

That is the benefit of having a local academy with a heavy emphasis on scenario training, said Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Capt. Jim Gordon. Administration from each agency can observe how their recruits perform in a scenario and end their employment if they don’t think the recruit will make it on patrol.

The agencies sponsoring the recruits in the academy will invest thousands of dollars in them before they are driving a patrol car and answering calls on their own.

The recruits underwent interviews, physical and written testing, a background check and psychological screening before going to the academy.

Their sponsoring agency pays for their academy training; the recruit’s salary while he or she is in the academy; and, prior to the opening of the Stanislaus academy, their housing.

For several years, Stanislaus recruits were being sent to the regional training center in Alameda, Gordon said.

He said the last three recruits who were sent there all failed out of the Field Training program for a variety of reasons, including lack of confidence and poor officer safety.

The department had invested about $200,000 in them, Gordon said. Had they been trained locally, their deficiencies might have been recognized sooner.

Sheriff Adam Christianson said even finding people to send to the academy is difficult.

“There are agencies hiring up and down the Central Valley and we are all competing for a shallow pool of qualified applicants,” he said.

Christianson said usually about three out of 100 candidates make it past the interview process. “It’s about protecting the public’s trust and confidence in us,” he said.

The next academy starts Nov. 2 with 40 new recruits from the four agencies that sponsored recruits for the first pilot class, as well as from sheriff’s departments in Calaveras, San Joaquin and Mariposa counties.

This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 2:19 PM with the headline "Stanislaus Academy is pilot program for scenario-based training."