New Boca Raton Police ‘TAC House’ Simulates Real-World Challenges

As Boca Raton police officers navigate their way through a tactical training course more often seen in documentaries on special forces teams than in the bowels of local police stations, they could face any number of challenges: a conference table full of executives being held hostage in a meeting, family members engaged in a violent domestic dispute, an armed person lurking behind a corner. Then, in the middle of it all, the lights cut out.

Scenarios like these are practiced by the city’s police officers on what has become almost a routine basis thanks to the addition of the Action Target TAC House at the department’s building on Congress Avenue. The facility can be re-arranged within minutes, and present different combinations of lighting, colors, temperatures, furniture layouts, and the presence of civilians during training evolutions that expose officers to complicated scenarios that they normally would encounter for the first time in the field, with lives at stake.

The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

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The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The non-ballistic, indoor training structure is designed specifically for use with “simunition” ammunition rounds, marking cartridges, and blank. It provides a safe and realistic environment for building search exercises and close-quarter engagements. Overall, it is designed to be both modular and immersive.

The facility was built within the Congress Avenue police building with funding raised by the Boca Raton Police Foundation and has already hosted 36 training events. It is formally named “Lauren’s House” in remembrance of Officer Lauren Kresse, who died in January 2024 after a valiant fight against cancer. Kresse was a U.S. Air Force veteran, a 20-year veteran of the police department and a beloved member of the Training Unit. Officer Michael Porter, the Rangemaster, is responsible for essentially writing the scripts that make up the training evolutions and helping officers hone their skills in the various scenarios with which they’re presented.

“We mix it up, figure out the problem, and then we mix it up again,” said Porter. “It gives us the ability to change things whenever we get comfortable … because we want officers to see things here before they see them outside.”

Though Boca Raton has become a well-known city and occasionally experiences a high profile event, fortunately, the crime rate remains less than half the national average. But the city’s layout, which uniquely hosts environments ranging from the ocean and intracoastal waterway, to office towers, to suburban neighborhoods, means its police officers may be presented with challenging – and perhaps even obscure – situations that can develop in minutes. For that reason, the city’s police department has fielded numerous specialized units, all of which can customize the TAC House and move variables that could prove invaluable in the real world.

“We can have this set up as, say, an apartment,” Porter explained. “We’ll tell them, ‘the guy who’s the problem is in here,’ but then they’re really over there.”

The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The department’s diverse array of tactical teams has begun to spend a significant amount of time training in the facility already.

“We can make the officers use their [flashlights], we can make the SWAT team use their NVGs (night vision goggles), so it just isn’t about one portion of our department – it’s the specialty units,” said Porter. “We get the bomb team to come in here with their dog robots, we have the drone team come in here and use it, out everyday officers use it – I even saw the assistant chief in here the other day.”

Porter compared the facility to a life-sized Rubik’s Cube, where different combinations of actions can come together to form a cohesive solution to a problem. Once a problem is solved, he said, “we create more problems.” Officers are presented with making decisions about whether to shoot or not to shoot, how to talk to people they encounter in a tense situation, and how to become more comfortable dealing with complex situations that might otherwise be stress-inducing, even to professionals. There are also the intangibles, Porter said, including building confidence, boosting morale, and allowing officers to be creative and even have fun putting together the puzzle pieces and working as a team to solve a serious problem with a positive outcome.

“We added the ‘F word’ to training, and the word is ‘fun,'” said Porter. “We have them have fun, and that’s what we really want. I’ve taught in-service training here, I’ve instructed the SWAT team, and I can tell you, it’s very important for people to come in and work, but also have fun. We can do quality training, provide purpose, direction and motivation, and also have fun.”

The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The Boca Raton Police Department’s new TAC House training facility, Sept. 2025. (Photo: Boca Daily News)

The ultimate purpose of the TAC House, of course, is to simulate real-world scenarios – and in a world where curveballs are thrown to local police officers on a daily basis, Boca Raton aims to be a step ahead.

“We’ll see something happen on the news and I’m in here thinking, ‘how would we have handled this?” said Porter. “It’s not that they did it wrong – whoever did it – it’s just a question of how we can do it better. This structure allows us to come better and see scenarios over and over and over again until it becomes autonomic; So officers can show up and already know the elements of a crime.”

Bob Tucker, executive director of the Boca Raton Police Foundation, which funded the TAC House, took a tour himself this week and saw it in action.

“The last couple of years the foundation has been helping raise money for this facility to come to life,” he said. “It is the single largest contribution in the 12 year history of the foundation, it cost $200,000, and we believe it was money well-spent.”