DANVILLE — While they are just big empty rooms right now, a classroom and training area for the Danville Police Department will soon be created for a variety of community uses.
Portions of the Danville Public Works Building, 1155 E. Voorhees St., are being prepped for a Police Community Training Center to be operational next year.
Danville Police Chief Chris Yates said the goal is to have it completed by March 1.
A $1 million Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Grant provided funding to the Danville Police Department to enhance violent crime prevention and community/police development.
Part of the funding is being used to create a Police Community Training Center within a section of the Public Works facility.
Yates said an area on the building’s east side that wasn’t being used will be a classroom.
The one full classroom will seat more than 50 people, preferably 54-56, Yates said. There will be tables and chairs throughout the room.
There will be partition walls to create different areas.
Officers will have a lounge area where they can come off the street if they are working on the east side of the city.
The classroom also can serve as a briefing area for special operations.
There will be auxiliary offices for things coming in the future.
There isn’t this much space available at the Public Safety Building for these uses.
Yates said they have a classroom on the second floor at the PSB on South Street.
“To get there, it’s not very inviting to the community,” he said.
He said a lot of people aren’t comfortable going to the police department.
“It’s maybe imposing. It’s a big, beautiful building,” he said. “But it’s imposing to some people.”
He said the new center will have a lot of uses.
“So, this isn’t just going to be for police training. This is something I want people to be able to use if, say if there’s something that we can be a member of community stakeholders in special need, community training,” Yates said.
It can be a wide range of things, such as with mental health, and Step Up group training.
The police department also is running out of room at the PSB, with about 70 officers.
The site at the public works building will have a locker room for the special units’ equipment.
Each section will be secured with security doors and systems.
In addition to the classroom. There will be a large television screen and also smaller monitors for the large room.
The police department can have mobile training unit training there, for the Problem Oriented Policing, Community Housing and other special units. Classes are mostly in Urbana, but could be in Danville in the future.
The space will include an armory for weapons, because weapons will not be allowed beyond a certain point.
The training room will be dedicated for tactical training, virtual reality training that’s paired with what they already do with scenario-based training.
There will be a rubber floor, with roll-out mats and padded walls for the controlled tactics and virtual reality training.
The VR system will be state-of-the art, Yates said.
“We will be able to run multiple officers through virtual reality training that is the latest and greatest,” he said.
The newest technology will be upgraded as upgrades are available. It is continual learning.
“If there is a training need that we need, we submit the request for them to develop the training software, and it upgrades our training,” Yates said.
There will be a control area where a person will run the VR training, there are headsets for those to train and also a sitting area for people to watch the training on a monitor in a 20-foot-by-20-foot room.
“You’ll have people walking through here like they’re going through buildings, and we can run everything from mental health crisis de-escalation, traffic stops, range, active shooters, anything that you can possibly think that the police could possibly have to respond to, we’ll be able to develop the software through this company to match it to where we can pair that specific need to training,” Yates said.
The police department also has a large interactive screen for training at Danville Area Community College.
“This is complete submersion,” Yates said of the VR training. “It’s Oculus on steroids. There’s no comparison.”
Yates said with the VR, in taking cover behind a vehicle in a training scenario, the person with the VR headset can see the vehicle’s undercarriage, the axles, chassis, shocks and everything.
“It looks like I’m looking underneath the vehicle,” he said. “The resolution is amazing. It’s very realistic.”
The system also can be played back for a person to critique themself.
Role-player scenarios can utilize the outside property east of the public works building too.
Yates added that police training is not just about the Danville Police Department, any police department that wants to come through their training can do so. DPD will have approved trainers through the state that are members of the police department, and state-approved training curriculum.
Some villages and departments have limited resources and training budgets to send people away to these different classes, he said.
He said the DPD has the luxury of having that funding, but others don’t.
“We have to rely on those guys from time to time. There’s times where they’ve assisted us. And this is a way that we can assist them to pay them back and keep them up to a level of proficiency,” he said.
Other departments can share information about what they do, which could be something different.
Control tactics and techniques can be gone over about how to take someone into custody properly by decreasing the amount of risk to them and yourself; and handcuffing techniques, if someone tries to disarm you, how to protect yourself without having to resort to the ultimate use of force, because that’s something they want to avoid, Yates said.
“So, the better we get at all that stuff, the better we are and the more confident we are in dealing with it, and you use less amount of force when you understand how to use every one of those levels to the best,” he said.
Yates is excited about the new center.
“We’ve got the vision, we just have to put it all together,” Yates said.
The police department is working with the city’s public works, finance and engineering departments on the project.
Yates said a next meeting is Thursday to check on the status of everything.
He told aldermen on Tuesday, they are waiting on a part, with vendors and contractors ready to go.
Paint, carpet, furniture installation and then technology installation will be completed, he said.
“We’re very excited about it,” Yates said.