Police face ‘live fire’ with paintballs

BUCKSPORT – It’s a scene that almost every police officer faces.

A drunk breaks into an empty building to sleep it off. The police are called and an officer must enter the building to investigate. Often, the call ends peacefully. Sometimes the offender puts up a fight. Sometimes, he has a gun.

That was the situation Bucksport police officers faced Saturday during a Simunitions training session. Simunitions are “live-fire” situations, using volunteer “bad guys” and modified weapons that fire specially designed paintballs, enabling officers to train for real-life scenarios.

“This is very serious training,” Detective Sean Geagan of Bucksport told the officers during the session. “These are the kinds of situations we run into on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. We won’t try to blindside you. These are the calls you go to every day. The only blindside is that you never know what is going to happen.”

The idea of the training, Geagan said, is to prepare the officers better for the calls they have to respond to.

During the scenarios, officers and volunteers are equipped with specially designed handguns – with the weight and feel of real weapons – that fire paint balls at about 400 feet per second. Because of that danger, participants wear protective gear, including a vest and helmet, and Geagan stressed that safety was the primary concern during the exercises.

“People can get hurt,” he said.

That was proven during the session when one of the volunteers, Andy Miller of Bangor, was hit by a paint pellet fired by one of the officers, which left a small cut on his arm.

Each scenario begins as the officer, accompanied by an instructor, is presented with the scenario as if he were receiving a call while on patrol. The instructor not only observes the action, but also acts as the dispatcher with whom the officer can communicate.

Despite the extra protective gear, and the presence of observers, officers said they were able to almost forget about those distractions and concentrate on the call itself. They agreed that the training provides a “real-life” situation.

“I’ve been involved in a situation where I was shot at,” said Officer Robbie Findlay. “This closely mirrors that.”

Bucksport Police Officer Dan Saunders agreed.

“It’s a live-fire situation, so it brings that element of intensity to it,” he said. “You don’t know if you’re going to have to shoot or not.”

“It’s as realistic as it gets without using real live weapons,” added Bucksport Police Officer David Winchester.

Each officer went through two scenarios on Saturday – the drunk in the building scenario, and the loud party scenario. In both situations, the people inside the house had a gun.

Volunteers Miller and Mike Copp of Bucksport portrayed the subjects in the two scenarios, who, in each situation, were loud and intoxicated.

Inside the building, the situations seemed realistic. The occupants of the building were belligerent as the officers attempted to learn who they were and to determine if they were armed.

The confrontations were loud. In some cases, they ended with gunfire; in others, the officers were able to talk the individuals into submission.

Either way, it was a learning experience.

“We try to make sure the officers can justify what they have done,” Geagan said.

Mistakes are used to teach officers a valuable lesson that could save their lives.

“That’s why we do it now,” Geagan said. “So it doesn’t happen later.”

Geagan said he hopes to use the Simunitions training on a regular basis, using different real-life scenarios each time.