Mapping demands: How to prepare police officers to cope with pandemic-specific stressors

Frequent and varied training of police officers is crucial to optimally prepare them for the chal- lenges they face in their police work and allow them to cope with these demands effectively. The Horizon 2020 project “SHOTPROS” aims to develop a training program in Virtual Reality (VR) to train appropriate decision-making and acting capabilities of police officers in high-stress situa- tions. The current COVID-19 pandemic can be considered a prime example of such a high-stress situation. Therefore, the aim of the present article is to re-analyse data from a longitudinal sur- vey among 2567 police officers across Europe, to identify pandemic-related demands experi- enced by the participating officers during the first COVID-19 lockdown that can be integrated and trained in (virtual) scenario-based training to better prepare police officers for the current and potentially future pandemic outbreaks. Following the constraints-led approach to training, pandemic-related demands are categorized as task, environmental, and individual constraints to provide police trainers with a toolkit how to change and manipulate training scenarios ac- cording to the trainees’ needs. Offering high control over training procedures, VR might be an effective tool to incorporate pandemic-related stressors into current training practices.