It’s not like cops needed any more help being intolerant. It seems to come with the job. A badge, a gun, and a sense of superiority tends to turn even marginal cops into people who spend their entire careers adding to the “us vs. them” chip on their shoulders.
But even cops with the best intentions will soon find themselves persuaded to treat the people they serve as people who are beneath them. Shows of compassion — much less demonstrations of base-level humanity — are few and far between.
It shouldn’t be this way. But it is. Police trainers tell officers civil rights are just impediments to efficient policing and should be brushed aside whenever possible. Cop trainers tell cops they’ll have the best sex of their lives after gunning down someone in the street. Supposed medical experts tell cops “excited delirium” is not only a real thing, but an extremely handy excuse any time they have a dead body on their (bloodied) hands.
The end result is the amplification of the worst aspects of cop culture. Those who have the “training and experience” to provide others with training and experience are often those who have spent years — if not decades — soaking in the rot created by the worst apples in the barrel.
There’s not much that’s surprising about this new report from Tracey Tully for the New York Times. About the only thing capable of lowering a jaw into pre-drop mode is the fact that video evidence of this harmful mode of teaching exists online.
At a police training seminar in Atlantic City, N.J., one instructor flashed a photo of a monkey while telling participants about his interaction with a 75-year-old Black man, video shows. Another appeared to mock the L.G.B.T.Q. community: “He or she, him, her, she, him” — whatever “you want to call people now.” Several instructors referred to the size of their genitals in lectures that glorified violence.
And Dennis Benigno, the founder of Street Cop Training, which led the seminar and describes itself as the fastest-growing private police training company in the United States, told the attendees that he looked forward to vacations in Colombia surrounded by cocaine, “hookers” and poor girls who “need to do things to make money.”
There will be those who dismiss this sort of thing as “humor” or locker room talk or whatever. That might be true if this were happening in the relative vacuum of the precinct, behind closed doors and away from the public. (That wouldn’t make it right. It would just make it a bit more understandable, as in “pretty sure we won’t get caught if we do this here.”)
But this happened during supposedly professional law enforcement training classes that cost taxpayers $500 per attending officer. And that’s just the cost of admission. The additional cost of shipping and housing officers takes this well over the $500/per baseline.
In addition to being taught to dehumanize the people they serve and further dehumanize anyone sitting outside their binary sexuality preconceptions, these officers were also partook of, um, “wisdom” handed down by people like Fox News host Tomi Lahren (cue Wikipedia):
Some of Lahren’s commentaries on race issues have been described by critics as racist or race-baiting, which she disputes.
And Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer:
“Crucial parts” of the story that Marine Corps officials told about Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer’s bravery in Afghanistan are “untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents”…
And yet another quasi-celebrity, UFC fighter Tim Kennedy, who managed to piss off plenty of people in the armed forces with his take on how to get over PTSD (with his [paid-for] help):
I’ll tell you how to get better. You stop being a pussy.
These are the celebrities-for-hire willing to talk to cops for a cut of the take. They may seem controversial to me and you, but they seem pretty fucking mainstream to those blowing bucks on questionable training from questionable individuals. They’re getting what we pay for, including a misspelled promise to thrill, entertain, and (possibly) educate those in attendance.
You will leave this event with the training you would expect from a professional law enforcement conference. AS ALWAYS, WE WILL NOT DISSAPOINT!
The training is so questionable the New Jersey State Comptroller said it likely made everyone who attended it worse.
In a 43-page report, the comptroller’s office recommended that all New Jersey officers who participated in the seminar be retrained, and it urged the State Legislature to create licensing rules for private training companies.
Specifically, the state agency listed these complaints about the training provided by this collection of officers, semi-celebrities, and other professionals who seemed to feel the best way to impart knowledge is by peppering instruction with off-color comments and bigoted slurs.
In addition, the comptroller (which did not recommend handing out refunds to New Jersey taxpayers) said the cost of attending a conference this horrendous goes far beyond the $500 admission fee. The office notes state taxpayers will bear the financial burden of retraining officers to undo the damage done by this conference, foot the bill to defend officers, cities, and law enforcement agencies against civil rights lawsuits, and pay the costs of all settlements related to these lawsuits.
The report also points out instructors told cops to use an RAS (reasonable suspicion factors) checklist to justify traffic stops — a checklist that treats everything as suspicious, even the stuff that contradicts the others stuff. For instance:
There’s more. Stopped drivers spreading their arms while directly facing officers? Suspicious. Holding arms close by their side and turning their bodies perpendicular to officers (i.e., “blading”)? Equally as suspicious.
Then there’s the insularity, one cultivated by police instructors and internalized by pretty much everyone who dons a cop uniform:
A major theme with many speakers at the Conference was an “us versus them” mentality—law enforcement officers versus civilians, liberals versus conservatives, or those officers who follow Street Cop’s teachings versus those who do not. Instructor Tom Rizzo, current Captain, Howell Township Police Department, even referred to Street Cop as “starting a god damn army.”[ Instructor Kivet, current Sergeant, Robbinsville Township Police Department, called the Street Cop logo a “family crest” and Benigno stated during his presentation that if an officer is at the Conference they know the officer is “on our side.”
None of this makes law enforcement better. It only makes existing problems worse. It’s great the state comptroller has problems with this, but forcing attending officers to retrain won’t undo this damage, largely because attending officers view the conference as the “right” way to be a cop and will view any mandated follow-up training as an unnecessary waste of time.
Unfortunately, it’s not just a New Jersey problem. It’s a nationwide problem. Back to Tully and the New York Times:
The company estimates it trains 25,000 to 30,000 officers nationwide every year, court records show. In one month last year, it advertised courses in Texas, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Michigan, Indiana and Colorado.
In all, public agencies in 46 states have provided “direct payment” to Street Cop Training since 2020, the comptroller’s office found.
If we want to stop making cops worse, we need to do better vetting of law enforcement training and instruction. Law enforcement agencies have already demonstrated they can’t be trusted to do this job. Anyone offering training for law enforcement officers — especially those who are paid with public funds — needs to be subject to a certification process that involves non-law enforcement agencies and taxpayers themselves.
While law enforcement input is needed to determine what might be useful to officers, they should not be the only input considered, much less given the privilege of making the final call. If they wanted to be trusted to choose the instructional sources, they’ve had decades to prove they’re worthy of this trust. Instead, they’ve constantly demonstrated their inability to make good choices, much less be trusted with the billions they take from taxpayers every year.
