Training was simulated, but adrenaline was all too real

For some reason, I couldn’t come up with the word “cane.”

An older man got out of a pickup truck and grabbed a cane from the back. Holding it up in the air, he walked toward me, asking what was going on.

As he drew close, my mouth failed me. I yelled, “Stop! Put the stick down!”

In hindsight, it might seem silly.

I was taking a turn on a judgmental use-of-force simulator that Byron police trained on last week. As part of an exercise, I had pulled the man over in a traffic stop.

Standing in a dark room that reminded me of a church social hall, I knew I was safe.

The man with the cane was an interactive figure whose image was projected onto a large screen.

The 9 mm Glock and Taser I held shot lasers and wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Still, knowing that I couldn’t say “cane” shows just how quickly real police on the job must not only decide how best to react to a situation — but how they must be effective in doing it.

Just like in real life when police conduct traffic stops, I had no way of knowing what the man was grabbing from the back of the truck. It could have been a gun.

I wonder how many lives could be saved — black, brown, white and blue — if everyone just turned off the ignition and put their hands on the steering wheel when police pull them over.

I spent about two hours watching as Byron Police Chief Wesley Cannon and two Macon pastors, the Revs. Paul Little II and Reginald Sharpe, ran through the exercises.

I think Little summed up the experience best: “It was intense.”

My stomach churned as Cannon handled a scenario in which a young girl came out of a pickup with a rifle after her father had been pulled over. The stress and adrenaline of the situation were very real.

The girl waved the gun around, yelling that she didn’t want her father to go to jail as Cannon and her father tried to get her to put the weapon on the ground.

I felt a sense of relief, like a weight had been lifted, when she got back into the truck without Cannon firing a shot.

But then the father grabbed the gun and began firing at police, sparking a shootout.

My heart pounded as I watched Cannon handle another scenario, a school shooting.

A man had already shot a deputy and was holding a gun to a student’s head. Other students huddled on the floor nearby.

Cannon yelled at the gunman to drop the gun twice before shooting him.

The chief said some people would have shot the gunman without saying a word.

But for him, he said he would always have wondered if he’d had to shoot if he’d just given the gunman a chance to end the encounter peacefully.

Whatever decision you make, “you have to live with it,” Cannon said.

Even in a simulation, making a life-and-death decision in seconds is tough.

It’s emotional.

It makes me thankful I don’t have to do it in real life.

This story was originally published August 10, 2016 at 5:12 PM with the headline "Training was simulated, but adrenaline was all too real."