Only that's
NOT the training their getting. Read up. THIS GUY The "Killology" guy is the one who trained Derek Chauvin. We see how that turned out.
He also trained the officer who killed Philando Castille (ever even heard of him???) And I'm sorry, you can't train people how not to be racist...
One of America's most popular police trainers is teaching officers how to kill.
Dave Grossman.
"Do Not Resist"
One of America's top police trainers is teaching officers to be "emotionally, spiritually, psychologically" prepared to kill people on the job.
If you're prepared to kill, Dave Grossman says, it's "just not that big of a deal."
"I am convinced from a lifetime of study, if you fully prepare yourself, in most cases killing is just not that big of a deal. For a mature warrior who has prepared their self's mind, body and spirit for a lifetime, for a mature warrior whose killing represents a clear and present danger to others, it's just not that big of a deal," Grossman said in 2015, while speaking in front of a group
in a segment filmed for the 2016 police militarization documentary "Do Not Resist."
Grossman also enticed his audience by noting that killing can
lead to great sex.
"Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex. There's not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it," he said in the same course.
The retired Army ranger and former West Point instructor, teaches a course called "The Bulletproof Mind," where he teaches officers the logic behind killing. He offers online classes through Grossman Academy for $79.
His overly aggressive style prepares law enforcement officers for a job under siege, where they're
front line troops who are "at war" with the streets. Officers need to be prepared to battle the communities they're told to protect,
Grossman has said. And ideally in Grossman's eyes, officers need to learn to
kill less hesitantly.
Grossman, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Insider, is part of a larger industry of
controversial militarized and fear-based
police training educators, that also includes
psychologist William Lewinski at the Force Science Institute in Minnesota, whose work has been called
"pseudoscience" by the American Journal of Psychology.
Law enforcement agencies including the
Los Angeles Police Department,
California Highway Patrol, and hundreds of other jurisdictions have taken Grossman's courses over the last 22 years,
Grossman told Men's Journal in 2017. At least one police shooting death has been connected to the course — the 2016 killing of Philando Castile. The officer who killed Castile had taken a Bulletproof class with Grossman just
two years before the shooting.
Grossman's courses focus on the study of killing, or 'killology'
Since retiring from the US Army in 1998, Grossman has traveled to
all 50 states to
teach his Bulletproof courses to law enforcement agencies,
according to his website. Grossman's bio on the website says he's on the road "almost 300 days a year" teaching seminars.
As part of the course, Grossman is paid by local law enforcement departments to train officers in his warrior-based philosophy of
"killology," which he describes as "the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations."
Screenshot via WCCO
For years his classes were held through the Illinois-based organization Calibre Press that, according to its website, works to train "smarter, safer, more successful law enforcement officers."
Calibre Press told Insider that it no longer offers Grossman's Bulletproof courses. Yet,
there is still a class called "Bulletproof: Training by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (KRG, LLC) and Calibre Press, LLC" available on its website. The courses range in price from $239 to $279 per person, with upcoming seminars being hosted by police departments in Kansas City, Missouri; Chandler, Arizona; Richland, Washington; and Schaumburg, Illinois, as well as by a community college's police academy in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and by the security at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
said at one seminar filmed by The New Yorker. "
Are you emotionally, spiritually, psychologically prepared to snuff out a human life in defense of innocent lives?"
Craig Atkinson, the filmmaker behind "Do Not Resist," told Insider that he attended one of Grossman's Bulletproof courses upon an invitation from the Ohio State Patrol's SWAT team in 2015.
He said Grossman's military background seemingly makes it difficult to distinguish at-war soldiers from police trying to protect a community.
"He doesn't see the separation between Fallujah and Ferguson," Atkinson told Insider. "And so he thinks of the police as the first line of defense to Al Qaeda, and there's no difference."
He said he and a producer who attended the session were "appalled" by what Grossman was teaching law enforcement.
"Obviously not all cops are bad, but you take good cops and you give them warrior training and you quickly have an outcome that we see moving across this country right now," Atkinson said, referencing the
militarization of police in the US.
Grossman's course faced criticism from a watchdog agency after Philando Castile's death
Grossman's course came under scrutiny in 2016, when it was revealed that St. Anthony Officer Jeronimo Yanez, who shot Castile during a traffic stop outside Minneapolis, had taken a Bulletproof Warrior years earlier. In 2017, Yanez was found not guilty on all charges in connection to shooting and killing Castile.
The Minneapolis-based watchdog organization Communities United Against Police Brutality said in a 2018 information pamphlet shared with Insider that the claims Grossman makes in his courses are "Like a foundation full of cracks." The organization said much of Grossman's work is unverified and lacks peer reviews.
St. Anthony Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez poses for investigation photographs after he fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop in July 2016, in a combination of photos released on June 20, 2017 after a jury declared Yanez not guilty of second-degree manslaughter.
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension/Handout via REUTERS
"It's one thing to claim to discover a phenomenon that's under-researched and then try to learn more for the general advancement of knowledge. It's another thing to operationalize ideas drawn from controversial, fatally-flawed, non-peer-reviewed research. And that's what Grossman is doing: Preparing police officers to interact with the public they serve by telling them they are "warriors," by insisting that "WE. ARE. AT. WAR.!," and by encouraging them to question any previous training they've undergone," the organization said in 2018.
The organization added: "Grossman routinely puts cops on high alert in his seminars by insisting on a mythical exploding murder rate or decrying 'the systematic ambush, murder, and execution of cops.' Officers routinely hear that 'every single traffic stop could be, might be, the last stop you ever make in your life.' Awakening officers' fear that their work continually puts them in lethal danger, Grossman begins cultivating fear of the public and a readiness to kill."
Many police departments have stopped endorsing Grossman's courses in the years since Castile's death, including the
Santa Clara Police Department and the
Minnesota State Patrol.
Some departments are even turning toward less aggressive tactics, and are using what the
National Institute of Justice has deemed "Guardian" mentality
come together to shut down a Pentagon program that provides military gear to local law enforcement agencies. The program, and the move to militarize the police, had been championed by Trump.
One use-of-force expert says warrior training courses like Grossman's are 'counterproductive'
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is now a use-of-force expert and associate professor at the University of South Carolina Law School, told Insider that the issue with Grossman's warrior mentality is that it's not being used properly.
"In its most restrictive sense, the idea of a warrior mentality or the warrior mindset is to remind officers in life-threatening situations to have the mental tenacity and grit they need to survive," he said. "It's become a much broader metaphor for all aspects of policing, and it's contributed to a very adversarial approach to policing, where officers are told that they are superheroes doing battle with the forces of evil, that they're soldiers on the front line in a war against anarchy."
A woman holds a sign during a protest amid nationwide unrest following the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, near the White House in Washington, U.S., May 31, 2020.
Jim Bourg/Reuters
Stoughton, who co-wrote the book "Evaluating Police Uses of Force," and has articles criticizing warrior training in
The Atlantic and the
Harvard Law Review, said the practice is "counterproductive."
"If officers look at the people that they interact with as enemy combatants, as potential threats instead of community members whom officers are supposed to be serving and protecting, it's really not a surprise when they disregard the value of someone's life," Stoughton.
The US has a use-of-force problem that goes beyond Grossman's course
Grossman's seminars, of course, aren't the only thing leading cops to kill, and police brutality has been an issue
long before militarization techniques became popular. And use-of-force is still an issue among police departments that have banned courses like Grossman's.
Inconsistent policies and trainings among law enforcement agencies, lack of accountability, and
centuries of racial inequality and injustice in the US all contribute to a
proportionally larger number of people in the black community to die at the hands of cops.
Use of force is a key component in the death of
46-year-old George Floyd, who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for eight minutes, during which he repeatedly told the officer "I can't breathe."
Four police officers were fired after Floyd's death, including Derek Chauvin, who was filmed kneeling on his neck and was later charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Chauvin and another fired officer, Tou Thao,
both have a history of use of force.
George Floyd
Courtesy of Philonise Floyd
In Minneapolis, under
the police department's use-of-force policy, officers are still
allowed to de-escalate a situation by putting a knee on a suspect's neck, but only those who have been trained on how to do so without putting direct pressure on the person's airway are allowed to use the move.
After a
family received a $3 million payout from Minneapolis in 2013 following the death of a David Smith — a young black man who the police shot with a stun gun and held on the ground with a knee on his back for four minutes — all Minneapolis police officers were supposed to be retrained on how to restrain suspects,
according to a 2013 Minneapolis Star Tribune article. Both Chauvin and Thao were on the force when retraining classes were said to be carried out, and use-of-force experts have
criticized his actions leading up to Floyd's death.
Minneapolis banned warrior-style training in 2019
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned warrior-style training in Minneapolis in April 2019, calling it "fear-based."
"Fear-based trainings violate the values at the very heart of community policing," Frey said when he banned Bulletproof training from Minneapolis. "When you're conditioned to believe that every person encountered poses a threat to your existence, you simply cannot be expected to build out meaningful relationships with those same people."
A chain portrait of George Floyd is part of the memorial for him, Wednesday, May 27, 2020, near the site of the arrest of Floyd who died in police custody Monday night in Minneapolis after video shared online by a bystander showed a white officer kneeling on his neck during his arrest as he pleaded that he couldn't breathe.
Jim Mone/AP
But Grossman's course is still continuing elsewhere.
Atkinson told Insider that if police departments decide to continue to promote warrior training, they need to balance their training with de-escalation techniques that teach officers how to respond to heightened situations with proper communication. He also urged law enforcement agencies to destigmatize mental illness, and include trainings on trauma and mental health.
"You can't just send people out there with one side of the equation and expect that it's not going to get universally applied," he said.
Atkinson, the filmmaker, called warrior training the "number-one issue" that's getting people unnecessarily killed by police.
"If we really want to get down to the root of why all these killings are happening, this warrior training 100% has to be put under a microscope and analyzed. People need to ask the question: Is this still the appropriate training for what we're asking our cops to be on a day-to-day basis?" Atkinson said, later adding: "If cops got less of this training, less people would die. There's no question about that."
