A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
I’ve been so sad since George Floyd’s murder. It’s sad and enraging. I keep wondering how it could have been different. For years, my son has been teaching me about police brutality against black Americans from his vantage point as a resident and businessperson in Brooklyn.
And all the others.
Philando Castile’s murder, a Minnesota black man who simply reached for his wallet when a traffic cop asked him for his driver’s license.
Justine Damond, who called to report the possible assault of a woman in her alley: Killed by a Minneapolis officer who responded to her call.
Since Floyd’s murder, I’ve been listening to and reading about inquiries into and critiques of contemporary police training. I wanted to share some of my findings.
A good example is the Minn Post article by James Densley, professor of law enforcement and criminal justice at Metropolitan State University: “It’s time to rethink Minnesota’s system of police education and training.”
Remarkably, Densely writes, Minnesota is the only state in the nation that requires aspiring police candidates to earn a two-year degree from a regionally accredited college or university. Yet most high school career fairs and police recruitment videos “show the ‘sexy’ side of law enforcement — officers dressed in hard body armor crashing through doors at dawn, fast-roping from helicopters, taming riots, and shooting their way out of trouble.”
This is especially curious, Densely notes, because most officers complete their entire careers without firing their weapons.
In addition to their college degrees, many police recruits have gone to “warrior camp,” an exercise scrutinized in a July 11, 2018 Star Tribune article by David Chanen following public concern over the deaths of Castile, Damond, and Thurman Blevins, a man running from police in north Minneapolis in June of 2018.
Warrior training is the invention of retired Lt. Col. David Grossman, whose courses and book, “On Killing,” teach that cops should be taught to kill with less hesitation. As writer Cinnamon Janzer describes in an April, 2019 issue of Next City: “Warrior training prioritizes officer safety over community safety by conditioning trainees to view all encounters as inherently dangerous.”
Both Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and police chief Medaria Arradondo have spoken out against such training, banning it for their officers, though it is hard to prevent them from privately taking the course. Janzer quotes Mayor Frey: “Fear-based, warrior-style trainings … are in direct conflict with everything that our chief and I stand for in our police department … Fear-based trainings violate the values at the very heart of community policing. When you’re conditioned to believe that every person encountered poses a threat to your existence, you simply cannot be expected to build meaningful relationships with those same people.”
The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, a union not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, represents the city and park police officers and department. They are part of the problem, enthusiastically endorsing and financing warrior training for members. In May of 2019, following Frey’s ban, the union offered free warrior training in defiance of the mayor’s ban.
It’s not just Minnesota, either. It’s national. In the April 10, 2015 Harvard Law Review, author Seth Stoughton reviewed the record. “Officers are trained to cultivate a ‘warrior mindset,’” he writes, citing a long list of articles and videos you can find online. For instance, the 2015 International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association Conference featured two sessions each on “Becoming Knights – Teaching Warrior Mindset to the Non-Warrior” and “Building Warrior Women Trainers.” It’s an eye-opening article, which you can access through your public library.
Stoughton argues that the guardian, not the warrior, offers the appropriate metaphor for modern officers. He offers two practical changes to police training that could advance the ultimate police mission — promoting public security — in a way that fosters, rather than thwarts, public trust: requiring non-enforcement contacts and emphasizing tactical restraint.
Read more online:
• http://www.startribune.com/fear-based-training-for-police-officers-is-challenged/487958041/
• nextcity.org/daily/entry/minneapolis-bans-warrior-style-training-for-police-officers
