wakened at what she would consider such an early hour on a Sunday. He knew that, grumpy or not, she’d eventually come around and like the plan he had for the day.
He went back inside to write down the name Danny Grissett.
The Force Options Simulator was a training device housed at the academy that consisted of a wall-size screen on which varying interactive shoot/don’t shoot scenarios were projected. The images were not computer generated. Real actors were filmed in multiple high-definition sequences that would play out according to the actions taken by the officer in the training session. The officer was given a handgun that fired a laser instead of bullets and was electronically wedded to the action on the screen. If the laser hit one of the players on the screen —good or bad—that person went down. Each scenario played out until the officer took action or decided that no action was the correct response.
There was a blowback option, which involved a paintball gun located above the screen and that fired at the trainee at the same moment a figure in the simulation fired.
On the ride to the academy, Bosch explained what they were doing, and his daughter grew excited. She had become a top shooter in her age group in local competitions, but those were tests of marksmanship against paper targets. She had read about shoot/don’t shoot situations in a book by Malcolm Gladwell, but this would be the first time she faced the split-second life-and-death decisions with a gun in her hand.
The front lot at the academy was almost empty. There were no classes or scheduled activities on a Sunday morning. Besides that, the citywide hiring freeze made the cadet classes lean and the activity level low, as the department could hire only to replace retiring officers.
They entered the gym and crossed the basketball court to where the FO Simulator had been set up in an old storage room. Holodnak, an affable man with a gray-white mane, was there waiting for them. Bosch introduced his daughter as Madeline, and the trainer handed them both handguns, each equipped with a laser and linked by an electronic tether to the simulator’s computer.
After explaining the procedures, Holodnak took his place behind a computer in the back of the room. He dimmed the lights and started the first scenario. It began with a view through the windshield of a patrol car that was pulling to a stop behind a car that had pulled onto the road’s shoulder. An electronic voice from overhead announced the situation.
“You and your partner have made a traffic stop of a vehicle that was driving erratically.”
Almost immediately two young men got out of both sides of the car in front of them. They both started yelling and cursing at the officers who had stopped them.
“Man, why you fucking with me?” said the driver.
“What’d we do, man?” said the passenger. “This ain’t fair!”
It escalated from there. Bosch called out commands for the men to turn and place their hands on the roof of their car. But the two men ignored him. Bosch registered tattoos, hang-low pants, and baseball hats worn backwards. He told them to calm down. But they didn’t, and then Bosch’s daughter chimed in.
“Calm down! Place your hands on the car. Do not—”
Simultaneously the two men went to their waistbands. Bosch drew his weapon too, and as soon as he saw the driver’s weapon hand coming up, he opened fire. He heard fire come from his daughter on his right as well.
Both men on the screen went down.
The lights came up.
“So,” said Holodnak from behind them. “What did we see?”
“They had guns,” Maddie said.
“Are you sure?” Holodnak asked.
“My guy did. I saw it.”
“Harry, what about you? What did you see?”
“I saw a gun,” Bosch said.
He looked over at his daughter and nodded.
“Okay,” Holodnak said. “Let’s back it up.”
He then ran the scenario over in slow motion. Sure enough, both men had reached for guns and were raising them to fire when Bosch and his daughter had fired first. Hits on the screen were marked with red
Holodnak said they had both done well.
“Remember, we are always at a disadvantage,” he said. “It takes a second and a half to recognize the weapon, another second and a half to assess and fire. Three seconds. That’s the advantage a shooter has on us. That is what we must work to overcome. Three seconds is too long. People die in three seconds.”
They next did a roll-up on a bank robbery in progress. As with the first exercise, they both opened fire and took down a man who emerged through the bank’s glass doors and took aim at the officers.
From there the scenarios grew more difficult. In one, there was a door knock and the resident opened the door angrily, gesturing with a black cell phone in his hand. Then there was a domestic dispute in which the arguing husband and wife both turned on the responding officers. Holodnak approved their handling of both situations without firing their weapons. He then put Madeline through a series of solo scenarios where she was responding to calls without a partner.
In the first exercise, she encountered a mentally deranged man with a knife and talked him into dropping the weapon. The second involved another domestic dispute, but in this case the male waved a knife at her from ten feet away, and she correctly opened fire.
“It takes two strides to cover ten feet,” Holodnak said. “If you had waited for him to make that move, he would’ve gotten to you as you fired. That would be a tie. Who loses in a tie?”
“I do,” Madeline said.
“That’s right. You handled it correctly.”
Next was a scenario where she entered a school after a report of gunfire. Moving down an empty hallway, she heard children’s screams from up ahead. She then made the turn and saw a man outside a classroom door, pointing a gun at a woman huddled on the floor, trying to shield her head with her hands.
“Please don’t,” the woman begged.
The gunman’s back was to Madeline. She fired immediately, striking the man in the back and head, knocking him down before he could shoot the woman. Even though she had not identified herself as a police officer or told the gunman to drop his weapon, Holodnak told her she had performed well and within policy. He pointed to a whiteboard along the left wall. It had some shooting diagrams drawn on it, but across the top it had one word in large capitals: IDOL
“
“Okay.”
“I have one question for you, though. How did you assess what you saw? What I mean is, what made you think that was a teacher being threatened by a bad guy? How did you know the woman wasn’t the bad guy who had just been disarmed by a teacher?”
Bosch had drawn the same immediate conclusions as his daughter. It had just been instinct. He would have fired just as she had.
“Well,” Maddie said. “Their clothes. He had his shirt out, and I don’t think a teacher would do that. And she had glasses and her hair up like a teacher. I saw she had a rubber band around her wrist, and I had a teacher who did that.”
Holodnak nodded.
“Well, you got it right. I was just curious about how. It’s amazing what can be assimilated by the mind in so short a time.”
They moved on, and Holodnak next put her in an unusual scenario where she was traveling on a commercial airliner, as detectives often do. She was armed and in her seat when a traveler two seats ahead of her jumped up and grabbed a flight attendant around the neck and threatened her with a knife.
Madeline stood and raised her weapon, identifying herself as a police officer and ordering the man to release the shrieking woman. Instead, the man pulled his hostage closer as cover and threatened to cut her. Other
