This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

There aren't many policing tasks seemingly more routine than pulling over a driver for a dead taillight.

But there I was on the side of the road, getting bumfuzzled while an angry motorist yelled at me for wasting his time. After telling him about the taillight, I stared at him blankly.

"Uh, what is my objective here?" I mumbled to my training officer. "What am I supposed to do?"

"What am I supposed to do?" was the refrain of my afternoon of training scenarios at the state police academy in Sandy. Utah's Peace Officer Standards and Training division recently worked with several departments and the group Utah Honoring Heroes to put on five live-actor exercises for news media.

To be honest, my expectations of how the training would go were a bit off.

After a year of controversy locally and nationwide over police use of force, I anticipated scenarios rigged for sympathy. I suspected I'd be ambushed repeatedly and end up in multiple shootouts. That suspicion grew as an instructor helped me strap on a holster with a blue simulator pistol and showed me how to reload once the magazine was spent.

In fact, the scenarios were mostly workaday police tasks. No one shot at me, and my gun mostly stayed in the holster.

But even there, the gun was a factor. At the door of a re-enacted domestic-violence call, I felt the instructor grab my hand, which was resting on my gun — the most natural pose for many officers, but one that can needlessly intimidate and agitate civilians. The instructor planted my hand at my side, instead, as I continued into the fighting couple's apartment.

However, my hand drifted back to the holster during a different scenario in which we were called to check out a "suspicious" woman who was lurking around a van, possibly preparing to break in. I kept my hand on the gun — even after we learned that the woman had simply locked her keys in the van and needed help. It really is a comfortable, and comforting, position.

After that encounter, my training officer mentioned he saw my hand on the gun and praised me for staying vigilant and being "ready to go," noting that complacency can get an officer killed. In just one day of training, I could see the tension between de-escalation tactics and feeling "ready to go."

I did take out my gun once. The scenario was a trespassing call on a woman who was wandering around a building and behaving oddly. After acting mildly annoyed, she freaked out and picked up a big rock from the floor, which my partner and I both failed to notice. She started to charge at me with the rock held overhead.

I drew my gun, hoping she would stop. She didn't. We weren't given any instruction on fighting with the actors, so I thought, "OK, I guess this is the one where they want us to shoot the person. Oh, well. The gun is fake."

When I tried to pull the trigger, the paintball didn't fire because I wasn't pulling hard enough. The instructor said I needed more firearms training.

But firearms training was just a drop in the bucket. I felt clueless through every step of every scenario. Simple choices took a ton of thought — like whether to leave the keys in the cruiser during traffic stops. Can my car battery support the flashing lights, or should I be more worried about someone stealing my car? And how do I get a passed-out-drunk domestic violence suspect off a bed? What orders do I need to give to safely get a gun out of the waistband of a drug suspect? I didn't have enough mental energy for all the decisions I needed to make.

As I left the academy, an instructor asked if the exercises got my adrenaline pumping. They did. When I went home that night, I hesitated to hug my 2-year-old daughter because I saw she was holding a child's safety fork, and my immediate thought was, "SUBJECT ARMED."

But my most vivid memory of the day was feeling underprepared for the sweeping breadth of know-ledge and skills I needed — and wondering how less than a year of training could possibly be enough for me to feel confident in a job in which practically every action has implications for someone's personal safety or constitutional rights.

For example, I would want weeks of training just on handcuffing people so I'd know not only how to do it, but also when — and the legal ramifications of making a bad choice.

Firearms training would need to go far beyond turning me into a decent shot. After I tried to shoot the woman in the training exercise, I realized I had forgotten one critical, common-sense action: I didn't make any commands before I shot her. So I would want to repeat shooting drills so many times that verbalizing a command is automatic whenever I unholster my gun. And I'd want enough simulations to create a training mindset that precludes the thought, "Oh, well. The gun is fake."

And that says nothing of all the things I didn't have to do in my scenarios such as: Drive fast. Handle evidence. Wrestle someone to the ground. Know Utah's criminal code. Deal with more than two people at once. Use a Taser. And a hundred other things.

Utah's police cadets get four months of basic training at the academy, plus whatever training they receive as new recruits in their departments — typically another couple of months, or less in smaller departments.

While academy director Scott Stephenson describes Utah police as highly trained professionals, he also acknowledges that some other countries have higher requirements. For example, police in Norway and the Philippines have bachelor's degrees and longer training programs.

A bachelor's degree was a recommended minimum for American police even back in the 1960s, when federal researchers looked at possible reforms in the wake of race riots, said Robert Wadman, professor of criminal justice at Weber State University.

"Utah requires beauticians, plumbers and electricians to have substantially more training before they're certified," Wadman said. "For [police], the risk to the public and to officers is substantially greater, but we don't require the same level of training."

Those are risks that I, personally, would not feel comfortable taking without a lot of preparation. My day as a police cadet gave me a better idea of what I would need.

ealberty@sltrib.com Twitter: @erinalberty