Penny Wolf held the gun firmly in her hand and prepared to shoot.
“Arms up. Put the weapon down,” she shouted, and aimed her weapon at the suspect’s chest.
In a split second, she fired the gun, and the armed man fell to the ground.
The scenario was fictional and Wolf’s gun wasn’t real, but the training exercise showed dozens of Aurora Police Department Citizens Academy alumni how difficult it can be to make the decision to fire a weapon.
“My heart was pounding,” Wolf said after she and partner Bruce Kleinfieldt put away their guns. “We’re doing this for fun, but (the officers) could get killed. Standing up there, the decisions I make don’t make a difference, but on the street, it does.”
No one knows this better than Kane County Sheriff Department Lt. Patrick Gengler, who was one of the first deputies to arrive on the scene at a Batavia Township home in 2013. The call was for a possibly suicidal man inside the home, but that quickly changed. When deputies arrived, the 52-year-old man was on the roof, and he was holding a rifle.
“We didn’t think that’s what we’d be walking into,” Gengler said.
The man refused to drop his weapon, and a 20-year veteran Kane County Sheriff’s Department sergeant shot and killed the man. An investigation by the Illinois State Police and the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office found that the sergeant was justified in shooting the man.
“Nobody wants to be in that situation,” Gengler said. “But when that time comes, we need to be mentally and physically prepared to handle it.”
In addition to standard weapons training, deputies from the Kane County Sheriff’s Department and officers from the Aurora Police Department also focus on the process of deciding when it is appropriate to fire their weapon.
Part of this training involves running practice scenarios. One scenario involves situations which are projected onto a large screen. Officers are armed with a variety of air guns and must make decisions about when and where to fire their weapon.
“It’s almost like a video game, Wolf said.
However, the exercise has a very serious purpose.
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“These officers are put in real life situations where they have to make split-second decisions,” Aurora Police Sgt. Chris Whitfield said. “So many things are going through your mind simultaneously when you’re on a call.”
He said officers must decide if a weapon a suspect is holding is real, whether someone’s life is in danger, how often to tell a suspect to drop a weapon, and more.
“We don’t shoot to kill, we shoot to eliminate the threat,” Whitfield said.
If that means fatally wounding a suspect to save an innocent person’s life, he said the shot is worth taking. However, that decision is one you will have to live with forever, Whitfield said.
“You’re going to get judged. Your actions are going to get second guessed,” he said.
That is why training officers when and when not to shoot is crucial.
“We’re really working on the decisions we make, and we are able to sit back and talk about why someone did or didn’t do something,” Gengler said of the training. “That’s its value.”
After getting a taste of that action during his training exercise for civilians Tuesday, Citizen Academy alumni Kleinfeldt said he has a deeper understanding of the decisions officers must make under stress.
“It really helps you appreciate the officers on the force,” Kleinfieldt said. “They have to decide in a split second whether they’re going to shoot, or not shoot. Either (the suspect) is going to be lying on the ground or the officer is.”
Thankfully, deadly force isn’t used often, the training officers said. The last fatal police-related shooting in Aurora occurred in January 2011 when an off-duty officer shot and killed a 15-year-old Aurora teen.
Police said the officer was driving through Aurora in his personal vehicle when he spotted the teen shooting at several men on Fifth Street. The officer got out of the car, identified himself as a police officer and ordered the teen to drop his gun, police said.
Instead of dropping the weapon, police said the teen pointed it at the officer. The officer shot the teen several times, police said. The teen was taken to Rush-Copley Medical Center and pronounced dead.
The shooting was ruled legal and justified by the Kane County State’s Attorney’s Office.
“It’s tough,” Gengler said, talking about the public scrutiny that follows deadly-force situations. “But, you can’t think about it at that time. While you’re thinking about what might be written in the newspaper tomorrow, that could be the second the suspect takes a shot.
“The article wouldn’t be about how an officer took a fatal sho. It would be an article about the officer’s funeral,” Gengler said.