LAC LA BICHE - It's a nice looking building, but nothing about Lac La Biche's Law Enforcement Training Centre was easy on the eyes for recruits in the latest Monday's training class.
It was pepper-spry training day for 16 recruits in the program's current training session.
The cadets were exposed to a realistic scenario by instructors, in which they were to use their arrest authorities while working through the effects of a pepper spray blast. The instructors who fired the pepper spray, then played suspects that cadets had to arrest.
According to Chris Clark, the director of the Law Enforcement Training Program for Lac La Biche County, the cadets experience what it is like to be contaminated by oleoresin capsicum spray — more commonly known as pepper spray or OC spray — learning first-hand in a painful lesson, what the chemical agent does to a suspect.
Clark said this exercise tests the ability of cadets to operate under stress. After each cadet had gone through the scenario, they were also taught how to decontaminate from the OC spray using eye wash techniques.