Vocational education should prepare students for the professional demands of the work. In police education, one way to accomplish this is to simulate specific situations so that students may develop professional knowledge. This article aims to increase the understanding of how simulations support learning of knowledge and skills by investigating how participants make sense of the critical incident they are involved in. To accomplish this, in this study, we have focused on the actions and utterances of the participants. We also used video analysis to analyse the actions of a student police patrol in a simulated critical incident. The participants’ passive actions did not fully mimic a critical incident suggesting that they defined the situation as a passive educational situation. The results demonstrated that simulation-based exercises’ possibilities for supporting vocational learning depend on such factors as authenticity, role-playing and ‘simulation competency’.