A training day that's deadly serious.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Your mission: a "welfare check" on a man reportedly suicidal over his wife's decision to end their marriage.

You knock on his door, identify yourself as a police officer, and hear distraught shouts coming from inside. You announce that you are coming in and walk up the stairs toward the sound of his voice. At the top of the stairs you see the man - Eugene police Sgt. Sam Kamkar playing the role in this training scenario - standing at the end of a dark hallway, holding something to his head. As your eyes adjust to the low light, you verify that the object is a gun.

With your own gun drawn but pointed down, you try to calm the man. You ask him to put down his weapon, telling him that he has friends who care about him, offering to call one of them. But he keeps ranting about his wife's refusal to reconsider leaving him.

He briefly disappears into an adjoining room, then reappears and rushes toward you. You raise your gun and fire twice. Only afterward, when Kamkar demands, "Why did you shoot me?" do you see that the object he's now holding is a cell phone.

The simulation at the Eugene Fire Department's training house was part of a public training session Lane County police agencies led Wednesday for journalists, lawyers and other community members on Oregon's new "Response to Deadly Force" law.

"That was pretty shocking," participant Frank Travis said after he followed a reporter out of the training house simulation. Travis, a construction project manager, chose to attend the daylong training session because he is a new member of the Eugene Police Commission.

"It made me realize how little time there is to make a decision in that kind of situation."

The state law, which took effect July 1, required each county to create a deadly force response team composed of representatives from multiple agencies to review every officer-involved shooting or use-of-deadly-force incident. In Lane County, the team is led by an Oregon State Police sergeant and includes detectives from OSP, the Lane County Sheriff's Office, the Eugene and Springfield police departments, a couple of officers from smaller jurisdictions and Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner.

"Everyone assembles at the scene," Gardner told the group of a dozen reporters and others at the beginning of the day. "The whole idea is to have balance and diversity in the process. The wonderful thing is, it relieves the agency with the officer involved of some of the investigation responsibility and removes any perception of impropriety."

He said Lane County was the first in the state to create a team, which has investigated six officer-involved shootings so far.

The day of training included such hands-on experiences as examining and learning about the weapons used by local agencies, then firing them with live ammunition at the Baron's Den shooting range.

The business is owned by the father of Springfield training officer John Umenhofer, who made the facility available at no charge.

Later in the day, participants used the same weapons, this time loaded with paint-filled rounds, in the incident simulations. They also had an opportunity to examine and fire a Taser.

The training day also included Eugene police Sgt. Jay Shadwick presenting a "use of force continuum" that local jurisdictions use to train their officers.

The chart outlines six levels of force, beginning with an armed officer's mere presence and increasing to verbal requests, physical contact, physical control, serious physical control and the use of deadly force.

Thomas distinguished serious physical control from physical control, noting that the latter uses techniques that inflict pain or discomfort with little likelihood of causing injury - taking a suspect down by the hair, twisting joints or squeezing sensitive pressure points.

By contrast, at least temporary injury is likely with serious physical control techniques, such as focused blows with a baton, use of pepper spray or Tasers, or a neck restraint that cuts off the carotid artery long enough to cause unconsciousness.

The continuum ties the six levels to subject resistance, ranging from static to active to ominous to lethal.

Shadwick noted that even the first level of force - officer presence - can be too much.

"Say we had a whole SWAT team in riot gear show up for a shoplifting at Hirons," he said.

"What we found back in the '90s with all the protests was that if we had too many police, they became the show."

Even with deadly force, he said, "the intent is not to cause the death of the suspect - though it may do that - but to stop the threat."

He also noted that, under federal law, the standard for an officer's appropriate use of deadly force is what a reasonable person with a similar background, training and experience would do, based on what the officer knew or should have known.

Umenhofer said he hoped this and future public training events would provide insight into such incidents.

"It's neat to let you go through the training and have to ask yourself, `Was the guy I shot armed?'?" he said.

Shadwick has been on both ends of a police bullet - wounding a suspect in 1992 and getting shot and seriously injured by colleagues during a 2001 SWAT operation.

"It's not something we strive to do," he said. "It's something that affects you forever. It affects your family - my kids were affected each time I was involved in a shooting, and not in a good way."