Members of the media had their game faces on Wednesday at the Regional Public Safety Training Center, taking aim at their targets with Glock 17 handguns.
"It's very valuable," Officer Charlie de St. Maurice said. "The media can either be your biggest ally or your worst enemy."
That's why the Reno Police Department invited us out for training.
Whether it was shooting live rounds, or taking in some classroom time, the purpose is to build working relationships, respect for each others' jobs, and a unified front against crime.
"To be able to bring the media out here and explain to them why we do what we do, and sometimes, what we do is protect their safety and help resolve the call, is a huge benefit to the police department," de St. Maurice said.
"We're trying to do our job and get information to bring to the public, but it's good to know what they're dealing with," Channel Two News producer Rebecca Cronon said. "So, we can do our job better and make sure that they're doing their job and protecting the public."
The first part of the day was focused on safe handling of firearms, which most picked up on pretty quickly.
"Everybody paid attention to the firearm safety rules," de St. Maurice said. "Nobody was unsafe. Everybody applied the short classroom portion that we had on the fundamentals of shooting and they all did a very good job shooting their targets."
Next was the force-on-force training, where we learned, first-hand, about life and death encounters.
On average, 163 police officers are killed in the line of duty, every year.
Officers tell us a person is most likely going to fail in their first life or death encounter.
That's why they go through this training, which we also went through, using paint ball guns, and making split second decisions.
"That will help you to better set up when you come on to a scene," de St. Maurice said. "So, that if you're not downrange of where our bad guy is, that we may have to engage and you're also not behind us, directly, when the bad guy is shooting at us."
In the end, everyone left with smiles on our faces.
We learned some of the dangers that police officers face and they talked to us about how they can work with the media more effectively, so we can get important information out to our viewers.
Written by Paul Nelson
