Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who shot Philando Castile in his car in Minnesota weeks ago, took a training course called "The Bulletproof Warrior" less than two years ago, offered by an outfit known as Calibre Press.
The New York Times quotes Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, as saying that courses like those offered by Calibre "reinforce the thinking that everyone is out to get the police... if you hesitate, you could lose your life."
Michael Becar, the leader of an international police training association says"seminars like those offered by Calibre and other firms foster a sense of paranoia among officers."
The course Yanez took is now called "BulletProof," (according to the Star-Tribune, "Calibre recently changed the name of its Bulletproof Warrior course after complaints from police departments about the implication of the word 'warrior.'") It's coming to San Jose, CA this August 17th and 18th, to Alamosa, CO on July 26th, to Williston, ND on August 10th, and on and on. Other courses with appetizing names such as "Female Enforcers," "Street Survival Seminar," and "Cell Block Survival" are also scheduled around the country.
The Times describes the course Yanez took as having charts and graphs on "Combat Efficiency" and "Perceptual Distortions in Combat" and says that it suggests that "the will to survive is all too often trained out of the psyches of our police officers."
I'd put a different spin on what training the course provides:
...Philando Castile would still be serving the children he loved.
It's militarized policing on the individual level, drilled into the attendees as they are shown videos of police being shot. If they are shown videos such as Oscar Grant, Walter Scott, and Mario Woods being executed, well, no one is volunteering that information.
We know that police should be being trained to de-escalate; we know that paranoia leads directly to officers shooting at people because they think that toy trucks and cell phones look like handguns. Calibre and the mentality it pushes are indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds, likely thousands over the years.
Urban Shield - the organized para-military and terror response training funded by the Department of Homeland Security and run by the Alameda County Sheriff's Department once a year in California - is bad enough.
But Urban Shield could - at least theoretically - be shut down by the will of the people, because it is sponsored, financed and organized by various levels of government. Not so with Calibre trainings. They are privately run, and while some police officers go with the assent of their agencies and may get reimbursement, some simply pay the $200 fee and go to them on their own.
The one coming up in San Jose is "Hosted" by and at the Santa Clara Sheriff's Department. It should not be so hosted, and the public should, at the very least, demand such.
Calibre and its ilk should perish from this Earth. It's time, it's long past time, to stop training police to be weapons of execution.
