I am standing in the center of a dark, circular room almost entirely surrounded by screens. I am outfitted with a receptor on my chest that can receive gunshots fired from actors playing roles on the screens in front of me. When I am hit, I will feel a shock. I have a nine-millimeter handgun that has been converted to fire an infrared signal at the simulator screens but retains its original action and noise.
At the controls behind me stands Paul Carifi. A bald and jacked forty-nine-year-old white man with the compact intensity of a human bulldog, he’s been overseeing training for years. I cannot conjure in my mind someone who’s more of a cop’s cop. Later I will learn he’s also a Republican member of the Parsippany town council.
On the computer system, he can pull up any one of eighty-five different scenarios and then manipulate it in real time as I interact with the scene in front of me. Actors on a video screen will speak to me. They will appear to respond to my commands, though really it’s Carifi making dynamic selections from a menu of responses available on the computer. Each scenario begins with a call from dispatch giving me some cursory information about what I’m being summoned to, and then a few moments later, there I am confronting the scene alone.
“So you want to maintain control, some semblance of order,” Carifi tells me before I start. “You want [your suspects] to stay in one spot. You want their hands out where you can see their hands. You don’t want people moving around, sticking their hands in their pockets, in their jackets, because now you don’t know what they’re grabbing for. . . . You want to be able to maintain a calmness, so when you’re talking to people you’re not getting upset, getting riled up. And if they are, you want to calm them down.”
In the first scenario I happen upon, a white man, probably in his late fifties, is standing in the back of a pickup truck, throwing junk from his flatbed into an empty lot. He’s not hurting anyone. There’s no one else around, but what he’s doing is a clear violation of the law, and I have to get him to stop. I don’t know what law he’s violating, and I have a sneaking suspicion that a rookie cop might not either.
I summon my best commanding voice and ask the man on the screen before me what he’s doing.
“Great,” he says. “I knew someone was gonna call you guys.”
“Yeah, uh, what are you up to here?”
“Why you gotta give me a hard time?”
“Well, this is not a dumping ground.” I don’t actually know if that’s true. But would a real cop in my position who just showed up know the ins and outs of dumping laws?
“This is my friend’s lot. I can dump here.”
Again: maybe true! Who knows? I press on. “Uh, no. I’m going to have to ask you to pack up your stuff and go.”
“My friend owns this property.”
“You got any proof?”
“Shut up, you dumbass.”
I freeze for a moment. Obviously, I can’t let this dude call me a dumbass and tell me to shut up. But what exactly is my recourse? I mean, I suppose I could try to slap some cuffs on him for disorderly conduct or resisting arrest. Instead I say, “Uh.”
“Relax, man. It’s only a little fucking concrete. It ain’t gonna kill ya.” He holds a cinder block in his hands.
“Okay, can you drop that please for me?” I attempt to affect a voice of authority, even though I’m asking a question. Which I probably shouldn’t do. And then just to make sure he understands which precise implement I’m asking him to drop, I add, “That concrete block.”
“You want me to put the block down?”
“Yeah. Yes, sir.”
“Put the block down. Yeah, I’ll put the block down.” At that point he raises the cinder block above his head as if to throw at me.
I respond by drawing my weapon and aiming it at him.
The simulation ends.
Carifi asks me if I was right to draw my weapon, and the obvious embarrassing answer is no, of course not. The man is far enough away that he can’t really hit me with a cinder block. This, of course, delights Carifi. We’re only one scene in, and already the self-righteous liberal pundit has drawn his weapon on an unarmed man holding a cinder block.
“I probably didn’t need to go to my gun,” I say somewhat sheepishly.
“You don’t. You see that especially with some of our newer trainees. They want to go to the gun right away.”
For Carifi, and for the good folks of New Jersey law enforcement and beyond, this is already mission accomplished. Police officers dislike being second-guessed by politicians, activists, and journalists who’ve never had to do their job, and in this context the exercise is designed to beat some humility into loudmouth pundits like myself. See—it’s not so easy, right?
We continue to another scenario: a pimp yelling at and verbally threatening a sex worker who seems strung out. The pimp tells me to scram, and when I hold my ground, he takes off. I stay behind to help the sex worker, who briefly threatens to stab me with a hypodermic needle, but I don’t take the bait this time. My weapon stays holstered, and she ultimately puts the syringe down.
In the next scenarios, I pull over a group of kids who look stoned out of their gourd blasting metal in a car in the parking lot of a mall; confront a couple whose neighbors have called in a noise complaint about music blasting from a garage; and enter a chaotic scene at a suburban home in which a man’s ex-girlfriend has parked her SUV in front of his driveway. She’s yelling at him and refusing to let him and his new girlfriend leave.