A new study at Lethbridge College, using immersive technology, could be the future of recruitment in public safety.
The combination of artificial intelligence and virtual reality is being blended into a new research project that puts police applicants in real-world scenarios to determine a person’s ethical decision-making ability.
According to Dr. Kirsten Fantazir, Lethbridge College’s President’s Applied Research Chair in Public Safety, they’ve met with many industry partners to identify different needs including retention and recruitment.
“This project is really exciting because we’re bringing together seven different police agencies and police services across Canada, from B.C. all the way to Ontario,” said Fantazir.
Tyler Heaton, industry liason and research adviser for the START Centre and lead designer in the program shares they’ve spent the past eight months working on this project.
“The reason we’re using virtual reality is it allows us to create a very authentic environment. Sometimes with actors you know the situation, they’re clearly an actor or when you’re doing roleplaying while in the class for example, you don’t behave exactly how might behave in that situation,” said Heaton.
“By creating a virtual reality environment, we’re able to tailor that situation and we’re also able to make it very changeable and flexible. It’s a fluid system.”
Coupled with an AI character in the mix, it allows the recruit to demonstrate their personal behaviours, explains Heaton.
He goes on to add that by putting applicants into different types of scenarios, it allows someone to evaluate how they would behave in an actual situation.
“We present them with opportunities. It’s not really a clear right or wrong answer because that’s a little bit too obvious for most people,” said Heaton. “So, it’s really more of that grey area where you need to make a decision.”
Typical methods of recruitment often rely on subjective approaches like behavioural interviews and aptitude tests, something that’s a tad outdated according to School of Justice instructor and researcher, Dave Maze.
“The needs of police agencies now have drastically changed in the last 25 or 30 years, so those old processes don’t necessarily work the way that they should,” explained Maze.
“So, police agencies are looking for new ways to actually have a high value process that selects the right person, for the right job.”
Maze, a former officer with the Lethbridge Police Service, says through this research they can give officers more information when they’re selecting applicants.
“Through applied research this gives us the ability to talk to police agencies, find out some of the struggles or problems that they’re facing and then try to assist them in figuring out how to overcome those situations.”
Fantazir added this study could support new recruits going through the application.
“Maybe there’s some people in the traditional processes that weren’t necessarily progressing on because they were getting filtered out by some of the paper-based exams,” said Fantazir.
“So, we’re hoping that this more authentic way of assessing applicants might allow for some people, who might not have been successful otherwise, to continue on in the process.”
Participating agencies have been providing feedback on the program so far, with the research team’s goal to determine if this could be an effective way to find suitable candidates.