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‘‘There are people in the world who don’t care if you’re the police. They’ll knock you down and they’ll kick your teeth in,” Capt. Luther Reynolds, director of the academy, said as he paced in front of the group. ‘‘You’re not getting hired to play tiddlywinks. You’re not getting hired to serve sandwiches. You’re getting hired to be police officers. Despite our best efforts, there are people who leave this academy and learn the hard way. Don’t let that be you.”

Training is getting more intense as the recruits near the end of the 26-week session. The rookies will hit the streets after graduation July 10. There’s no trial period for this job. Once on the beat, they are expected to solve the same problems as a veteran.

One way the instructors prepped their charges was to expose them to one of the tools at their disposal for extreme situations — pepper spray. The recruits went through one of the academy’s rites of passage last month — a three-second blast of OC spray, an inflammatory foam that affects the eyes, nose, throat and other mucus membranes.

The recruits divided into three rotating groups — one to get sprayed, one to administer the foam and one to hold a sparring pad that the recruits had to fight off for 45 seconds after being sprayed. The unaffected recruits dumped buckets of water on their peers who were sprayed and led them around the field until they calmed and regained their vision.

‘‘The idea is that you can work through it even if you get some on you, which happens,” Reynolds said as he watched the chaotic scene, adding that most people have an emotional response the first time they are sprayed because they don’t know what to expect. ‘‘They’re anxious to do it, but when it’s done, there’s a sense of accomplishment.”

‘‘That was the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to me,” Javier Baquero, 24, of Kensington said with a laugh. ‘‘In hindsight, it was a really good thing that you have to go through, but you’re not really thinking about that at the time.”

The recruits also prepared for a different kind of extreme situation: terrorist attacks and other large-scale emergencies. They suited up in biohazard suits and gas masks, but instructors also reminded them that sometimes it’s better to wait to provide help until the nature of the threat is known, a tough but necessary decision.

The recruits made their own decisions during role-playing June 18. Working in pairs, they handled scenarios acted out by volunteers, such as lost children, an argument over cab fare, and a domestic dispute that ended with the distraught husband pulling a gun on officers and then himself.

The scenarios were designed to test how recruits handle stressful situations, from the everyday to the unlikely.

‘‘You feel empowered because you know you have the authority to handle the situation. You feel good, like you can fix the problem,” said recruit David Sottile, 29, of Damascus. Some scenarios could be solved through conflict mediation techniques, while others potentially required the use of force.

‘‘You can’t always play the nice guy,” Sottile said. ‘‘Sometimes you have to do the dirty work.”

Some were able to quell the situations, and others lost sight of their training in the heat of the moment, a potentially serious problem in a field where failing to follow procedure can be the difference between life and death.

‘‘When you have a specific class, you know what you’re getting into. With these scenarios, you have to pull from various sources,” Baquero said. ‘‘Even though you know it’s a controlled environment, you don’t know how you’re going to react, and that’s scary.”