WARNING: trigger alert, due to violent content regarding police misconduct.
Today the President of the Minneapolis Police Union, Lt. Bob Kroll, released a letter he wrote to the rank and file.
This letter led to calls for his resignation.
This guy appeared on stage with #IMPOTUS at the rally in Minneapolis Oct 10th.
As far I am concerned, the remarks of #IMPOTUS were one more step in a long straight line leading to the murder of George Floyd.
Without too much effort, it is easy to find a long and depressing timeline of police violence events in Minneapolis. It seems as though high-profile controversial police killings there are an annual event. The tip of an iceberg. The murder of George Floyd is not the first or only such tragedy.
Killology
Here is a term I never heard of before a few days ago. There is a company that offers Continuing Education credit for police officers. The title of a popular workshop is “Bulletproof Warrior.” I first read about them last week at the Unicorn Riot media webpage, where Unicorn Riot uploaded some training materials for Bulletproof Warrior.
They were profiled in The New Yorker in 2017
Mother Jones reported on Grossman in April 2017.
Grossman’s trainings are “fear porn,” says Craig Atkinson, a filmmaker who attended one for his documentary on police militarization, Do Not Resist. He wonders how the Castile incident might have played out if Officer Yanez hadn’t heard “Dave Grossman tell him that every single traffic stop could be, might be, the last stop you ever make in your life.” Grossman is “more of a motivational speaker than a trainer,” says Seth Stoughton, a former cop and law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies the regulation of police. In Grossman’s worldview, Stoughton says, “the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.” This approach to policing is outdated and ineffective, says Stoughton, and, “some of it is dangerously wrong.” Samuel Walker, a criminal-justice professor and expert on police accountability, says the “Bulletproof Warrior” approach is “okay for Green Berets but unacceptable for domestic policing. The best police chiefs in the country don’t want anything to do with this.”
They have a FaceBook page and there you can see memes that combine the role of the policeman who is killing, with a Christian theme. You can only find the FB link by going to the regular website.
This appears to be the source of a lot of the twisted thinking about kill-or-be-killed police mentality. This group did a workshop in Minneapolis a few years back, sited at Mall of America. The session was attended by the cop who later shot Philando Castile, and protesters attributed the Bulletproof Warrior mindset as a contributing factor.
Calendar of Sessions
If you go to the BulletProof warrior webpage you can find a calendar of future training sessions listing each host city, as well as going back a few years. You can’t get specifics as to exactly where the venue is unless you send them an email. ( I was surprised to see Bangor Maine on that list, a town where I once worked). Cryptically, they list many dates where the sponsor is “US Government.” But the exact host agency is shrouded in secrecy.
What to do next — Calling on Congress
These guys are promoting police violence. They are not training police; they are mis-training police. As long as they are out there and government agencies are hiring them, we will never make community policing work in this country. We will never be able to de-escalate a damn thing. The Government needs to stop funding them by stopping the reimbursing of any and all officers who attend. Congressional hearings into police violence need to focus on the negative role played by these rogue elements. If I were the congress, I would want to know exactly which federal agencies are sponsoring ( and thereby condoning) these trainings. Any such endorsement is an endorsement of a codified police brutality. We need to picket their presentations and call out their local sponsors.
This is not all
There are many other elements to address. It’s been clear to me that most municipal police departments are poorly trained in riot control, as evidenced by the mountains of police misconduct incidents documented by cell phone video in recent weeks. In Minneapolis is was only when the Minnesota National Guard came in, that any professionalism was evident. If we continue to go down the path of not fixing the eviction crisis, the employment crisis, and the food chain insecurity, we will have further spontaneous protests and riots. We can’t allow McConnell and the Senate to hold up relief for the unemployed while giving subsidies to the one percent. We also need to organize to GOTV.