“Get up, get up”: Mexico City police officers simulate an intervention among civilians in a virtual three-dimensional universe used to improve their reflexes as in a few other countries.
The first Virtual Reality Training Center (Cerv) in Latin America was inaugurated on February 15 in the megalopolis of nine million inhabitants where local authorities say that crime has been falling for three years.
“Only three police forces in the United States and the Israel Police have this virtual reality system,” the local government said in a statement. The center, installed in the premises of the police university, has “one hundred motion capture cameras” and different types of rifles and revolvers (virtual too).
Equipped with glasses that project them on the scene of the crime, police officers must free a child taken hostage in Tepito, a district which is the stronghold of the main gang of the capital.
Computer embedded in a backpack, armed with guns, the police approach the hostage taker, force him to drop his weapon and release his victim.
They “can interact with real or virtual avatars, in extremely realistic graphic representations”, explains the Secretary of Security, Omar Garcia Harfuch, according to whom virtual reality makes it possible to reproduce different places of intervention: “schools, shopping centers, restaurants, highways, planes”.
Mexico City has invested 60 million pesos ($3.27 million), said the president of the city government (mayor), Claudia Sheinbaum, who puts forward a saving of four million pesos ($220,000) in ammunition.
In the United States, police officers in New York and Los Angeles also use virtual reality to improve their reflexes in the face of emergency situations such as shootings, reported the press.
The European Union funded a virtual reality “Shotpros project” in 2019 to “develop better training modules for police officers”.
“Its objective is to improve their overall performance in stressful situations”, according to a press release available on the European Commission’s website.
In Belgium, thousands of police have gone through the program, the federal government and authorities in Antwerp told reporters in September.
In Mexico City, the exercise was presented by Security Secretary Omar Garcia Harfuch, injured in an attack in June 2020.
Two of his bodyguards and a passerby were killed in this attack attributed to the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, one of the two most powerful in the country.
A possible candidate for the presidential election in 2024, the mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum says that crime has dropped sharply in her city under her mandate. “We have gone from 15.46 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to a rate of seven per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022,” said a statement from local authorities on February 8.
02/20/2023 16:10:47 – Mexico (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
