When I did my post and analysis of the body camera footage of the extrajudicial killing of Daunte Wright, I referenced some of the really problematic education and training that is available to law enforcement officers in the US. Specifically that of Bill Lewinski and his Force Science Institute and LTC (ret) Dave Grossman who has pioneered the concept of killology. This is what Grossman is teaching:
And here’s a slightly longer treatment of Grossman:
LTC (ret) Grossman, who appears to be falsely stating, or allowing others to falsely state his military experience by referring to himself as either a retired Green Beret or US Army Ranger, he is neither (please see the update below for clarification). is either a retired Green Beret/US Army Special Forces or US Army Ranger depending on who is stating his military credentials He is also often referred to as a psychologist. Largely because he has a masters in education in counseling psychology from the University of Texas and is self proposing that what he is teaching and researching is an unrecognized field within the discipline of psychology. These credential are not what we really mean when we refer to someone as a psychologist.
Grossman didn’t invent the concept of killology, he took the idea/argument from the work of Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall, who conducted a study during World War II that posited that the majority of Soldiers do not fire their weapons in combat because they cannot fire their weapons in combat because they cannot overcome their innate and socialized aversion to killing. If this argument sounds familiar it is. In the 1990s an Emory historian wrote an entire book on this topic, won a prestigious award within the discipline of history, and was then viciously attacked by economist John Lott who claimed he simply fabricated his evidence. Based on Lott’s accusations the Emory historian was stripped of his award, he was driven out of academia, and last I had heard he was tending bar in New Orleans. It turns out that Lott had largely fabricated the evidence he used in his attack and, interestingly, made the same claim that the historian did to defend himself: that there was a flood in his campus office that destroyed his notes/evidence. This whole sad affair is documented in Adam Winkler’s Gunfight.
Grossman’s killology, rooted in Marshall’s work from World War II is, however, historically inaccurate. Actual military historians have debunked Marshall’s work and drawing a line from it to Grossman’s argument have also debunked Grossman’s assertion: (emphasis mine)
Grossman has become a serious contributor to popular knowledge on military psychology, and his popularity owes much to the wide acceptance of his theories on the human act of killing. These theories are highly revisionist, and claim that normal, healthy human beings – including trained soldiers – are physiologically and psychologically incapable of killing one another. For Grossman, this translates into a belief that “everything you think you know about war is based on 5,000 years of lies.”4 Only since the end of the Second World War have the Western nations discovered ways of psychologically conditioning their soldiers to kill others in face-to-face combat, Grossman claims. Prior to that, only a tiny fraction of the most elite (or psychotic) soldiers were capable of overcoming their innate resistance to killing.
Curiously, these works have elicited no serious response by military historians, in spite of the author’s provocations regarding the discipline being founded upon lies. Instead, Grossman’s theories have achieved great acceptance and are defining new popular understandings of killing, combat, and military history.
As a military historian, I am instinctively skeptical of any work or theory that claims to overturn all existing scholarship – indeed, overturn an entire academic discipline – in one fell swoop. In academic history, the field normally expands and evolves incrementally, based upon new research, rather than being completely overthrown periodically. While it is not impossible for such a revolution to take place and become accepted, extraordinary new research and evidence would need to be presented to back up these claims. Simply put, Grossman’s On Killing and its succeeding “killology” literature represent a potential revolution for military history, if his claims can stand up to scrutiny – especially the claim that throughout human history, most soldiers and people have been unable to kill one another.
I will be the first to acknowledge that Grossman has made positive contributions to the discipline. On Combat, in particular, contains wonderful insights on the physiology of combat that bear further study and incorporation within the discipline. However, Grossman’s current “killology” literature contains some serious problems, and there are some worrying flaws in the theories that are being preached as truth to the men and women of the Canadian Forces. Although much of Grossman’s work is credible, his proposed theories on the inability of human beings to kill one another, while optimistic, are not sufficiently reinforced to warrant uncritical acceptance. A reassessment of the value that this material holds for the Canadian military is necessary.
The evidence seems to indicate that, contrary to Grossman’s ideas, killing is a natural, if difficult, part of human behaviour, and that killology’s belief that soldiers and the population at large are only being able to kill as part of programmed behaviour (or as a symptom of mental illness) hinders our understanding of the actualities of warfare. A flawed understanding of how and why soldiers can kill is no more helpful to the study of military history than it is to practitioners of the military profession. More research in this area is required, and On Killing and On Combat should be treated as the starting points, rather than the culmination, of this process.
This article will analyze two major areas of evidence for Grossman’s theory: his biological-psychological theories on human nature, and his citing of military history to substantiate his extraordinary claims. I am not an expert in biology or psychology, but even a layman’s reading of the literature turns up credible works that clash with Grossman’s interpretations. And in terms of military history, Grossman’s over-reliance upon S.L.A. Marshall’s famous “ratio of fire” data represents a serious shortcoming. These matters must be discussed in some depth.
Click across to read the entire review.
Unfortunately, as you can see in the videos above, Grossman has been teaching his argument in search of evidence to law enforcement officers across the US for around twenty years. And what he is teaching is not only based on a historically inaccurate premise, but also runs counter to the vast majority of the criminological, criminal sociological, and criminal psychological research regarding human aptitudes for violence, including killing. Some of what you see Grossman gleefully present in the videos above, however, is accurate in regard to snipers.
Effective snipers are highly self contained and have a very high ability to compartmentalize. They have to in order to be able to effectively do their jobs. If they can’t then the parts of the human they are targeting stop being a target to put a bullet through and start being human beings. That’s why there are numerous marksmen who, on a range, can shoot just as effectively as snipers in terms of accuracy over short, medium, and long distance, but why very few of them would make effective snipers.
However, this is NOT what we want from law enforcement officers in the US. What Grossman is teaching is, for lack of a better term, techniques of dehumanization. He is teaching law enforcement personnel to mentally and emotionally dehumanize their fellow citizens in order to make them more effectively lethal. As someone who has been working for and with the military since 2007, I would argue that this may be appropriate for preparing Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines for war. It is not appropriate for preparing law enforcement personnel for patrolling traffic to regulate traffic for safety purposes, to respond to emergencies arising from alleged/suspected criminal activity, and to prevent or investigate crime.
There is a reason we do not use the military to police the citizenry in small “l” small “d” liberal democracies. The military is used to defend the nation-state if it is attacked by a hostile foreign power and/or wage war against the nation-state’s enemies should all other elements of national power (diplomatic, information, economic, financial, intelligence, and legal) fail to resolve an interstate conflict or dispute. We train and educate the military to treat the nation-state’s, in this case America’s, adversaries as the enemy. This is not what police are, do, should be, or should be doing. According to the American Bar Association, the purpose of policing is:
In assessing appropriate objectives and priorities for police service, local communities should initially recognize that most police agencies are currently given responsibility, by design or default, to:
(a) identify criminal offenders and criminal activity and, where appropriate, to apprehend offenders and participate in subsequent court proceedings;
(b) reduce the opportunities for the commission of some crimes through preventive patrol and other measures;
(c) aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm;
(d) protect constitutional guarantees;
(e) facilitate the movement of people and vehicles;
(f) assist those who cannot care for themselves;
(g) resolve conflict;
(h) identify problems that are potentially serious law enforcement or governmental problems;
(i) create and maintain a feeling of security in the community;
(j)) promote and preserve civil order; and
(k) provide other services on an emergency basis.
What the police do is not what the military does. It should not be. And we should not want it to be. Conflating the two communities, let alone doing what Grossman is doing based on his own experience in US Special Operations, which is taking the characteristics of military personnel who conduct Special Operations, especially kinetic/lethal Special Operations (the snake eaters/meat eaters to use the community’s slang), and placing those characteristics under the label of what police should be, makes Americans into enemies to be pursued, not citizens to be protected. Notice the language he uses. Police are warriors. Just like America’s Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines.
I understand why the military started to use the term “warrior”; it was partially about building esprit de corps and morale. My preference, as a civilian practitioner who has done both operational and educational work for the military, is for Soldier (or Sailor, Airman, or Marine), Scholar, Athlete, but warrior as a term and concept is more accurately applied to US military personnel who, actually, are prepared to and do wage war on behalf of the Republic. But being a Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine who is referred to as a warrior does not happen in a vacuum. Each service has a creed and values statement, which places all of these concepts – warriors, Soldier (or Sailor, Airman, or Marine), Scholar, Athlete – in context. Here’s the Soldier’s creed. Here’s the Sailor’s creed. Here’s the Airman’s creed. Here’s the Marine’s creed, which is a bit funky as it is the Marine’s Rifleman’s Creed. And here’s the more useful, for this discussion, Marine’s values statement. There are even creeds for Service civilians. Here’s the Army’s version of that. And here’s the Army’s Warrior ethos:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I will never quit.
I will never leave a fallen comrade.
There is nothing in the US Army’s Warrior’s ethos about taking joy in killing. There is nothing in there about dehumanizing the citizenry or even the enemy. There is nothing in there about killology.
Grossman is not teaching and training law enforcement personnel to be more effective. He is not teaching them to actually be warriors in terms of how the US military understands the concept of warrior. He’s teaching and training them to dehumanize their fellow citizens so that they can more easily kill them.
As long as Grossman is allowed to continue to educate and train law enforcement personnel, as long as others like Bill Lewinski who teach similar concepts are allowed to continue to educate and train law enforcement personnel, American policing will continue to be degraded. At the macro level, it will continue to produce bad systemic outcomes. At the individual level, police officers will continue to quickly escalate up through the force continuum because Grossman has convinced them that they – the police – are killers, that they are supposed to be killers, and that they should take joy in being killers because the people they are killing aren’t their fellow citizens, because they aren’t really even human. Lewinski has convinced them that if they do not immediately escalate force that they will themselves be killed. Lewinski’s training teaches law enforcement to be afraid all the time as a justification for the use of rapidly escalating to lethal force. Grossman’s training teaches law enforcement to be joyful killers because the people they’ve killed needed to be killed, deserved to be killed. When you put the two together you get police who have been educated and trained to be afraid of everyone they encounter, that to protect themselves they must immediately escalate up the force continuum to survive, and that they should take joy in doing so because they are killers who are warriors.
If you want to quickly, effectively, and positively change law enforcement, then you remove Grossman, Lewinski, their fellow travelers, and their materials from police and law enforcement academies and from in-services and continuing education programs. And you replace them with concepts based on legitimate, empirically validated, methodologically appropriate criminological, criminal sociological, and criminal psychological materials, as well as with instructors and subject matter experts who can teach and train law enforcement to competently undertake community based law enforcement and deescalation. Unless or until this happens, even when lethal force by police is justified by education, training, policy, and circumstances, we will see more and more and more of these bad, lethal outcomes.
Fiction speaks truth to power.
Updated at 11:45 AM on 23 APR 2021:
Grossman’s military bio has been bugging me for a while. A close friend who is a SWAT sniper asked me about him a while back, I looked at his bio, and my response was: “I don’t think this guy is really a Green Beret, there’s no mention in his professional bio of which Special Forces Group he served with.” Frankly, I’ve never seen a Green Beret’s professional bio that doesn’t mention this. So I started poking around and asked someone who’d know who confirmed he was conventional infantry who’d done the Ranger course, served only in conventional line units, and never saw combat. This was fully confirmed when the Marine vet who tweets as The Warax tweeted Grossman’s DD 214:
For the uninitiated, LTC (ret) Grossman is a conventional infantry officer who only ever served in conventional Army assignments. He attended and completed the Ranger course in 1979, meaning he is Ranger tabbed. He never served in the Ranger Regiment, he was never a Green Beret/Special Forces. He wasn’t even Army Special Operations. He was not branch qualified as a major and not selected for battalion command. He has no combat experience or deployments at all. This guy has never killed anyone, at least not while in uniform.
I’ve now done a separate post covering all of this.
Open thread!
raven
SLAM Marshall, West to Cambodia!
Steve in the ATL
I only got through the first ten chapters of this post, but your conclusion sounded damn right to me.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: I figured you’d get the reference, which is why I didn’t include the nickname.
Adam L Silverman
@Steve in the ATL: Don’t make me come up there!
Cameron
Probably it’s just me, but I find Grossman to be really, really creepy.
germy
The Columbus, Ohio police officer who shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant has been identified as Nicholas Reardon.
One thing I noticed from his bodycam footage. After he shot her, he kept his gun trained on her. As if she were still a threat. She’s lying on her back, bleeding out, but his gun is still pointed at her for a long time. I mean a really long time. It’s like he expected her to jump up and pull a gun out of her back pocket.
germy
@Cameron:
Among other things, it’s the way he enthusiastically says “You’ve all seen American Psycho, right??”
raven
@Adam L Silverman: It’s been a long time since I read any of his stuff. A local guy I know is in “West”.
Cameron
@germy: Christ – another law enforcement training film?
germy
Ohio Cop Shouted ‘Blue Lives Matter’ at Neighbors After Colleague Shot Teen Black Girl
Adam L Silverman
@Cameron: I do too. The reality is that a lot of the men who go into the kinetic/lethal side of Special Operations – Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers – test very highly on the Minnesota Multiphasic Index, which is the diagnostic we use to test for psychopathy. This is the same for snipers. In regard to what we need them to do in these highly specialized military occupations, this is a good thing. My guess is that Grossman blows the top of the scale.
trollhattan
Jesus, this Grossman is pathological. It’s like having your accountant tell you drowning kittens in the river is an affirmation of life.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: That’s a tactical training result. Handgun bullets are notoriously bad at actually stopping people. Which is why the training is to place multiple shots to center of mass and maintain coverage of the target with the weapon in case more shots are required. Individuals running on adrenaline, like Bryant was, often shake off bullet impacts until they’ve experienced sufficient blood loss so as to basically just shut down.
From what I know of law enforcement tactical training and most use of force policies, I expect that this will be determined to be a justified use of lethal force.
Adam L Silverman
@trollhattan: If your accountant is Mike Huckabee’s son, then yes.
rp
I love how Adam writes these long, incredibly focused posts and then at the end adds “Open thread!”
guachi
I appreciate that Adam correctly capitalized Soldier, Sailor, Airman, and Marine. I don’t even see fellow Sailors correctly doing it.
Cameron
I think I’d rather have LEOs learning restraint in the use of force instead of a joyful, vigorous employment of it. Must be the old hippy in me.
Amir Khalid
It’s chilling that there’s someone teaching police officers to become homicidal maniacs. Is there no professional pushback on this crazy warrior-cop nonsense?
stinger
Along with removing Lewinski and Grossman from training curricula, we also owe it to the police to begin seriously removing guns from the population at large.
lowtechcyclist
A bit of Pratchett:
Once you start thinking about a person or a group of people as things, you can do anything to them. Slavery, the Holocaust, you name it. They start with demoting those people to things.
Matt McIrvin
If humans are so inherently averse to killing one another, if this is an inhibition that requires such intense training to overcome, why are there supposedly so many people out there who it’s important to kill?
Steve in the ATL
@Amir Khalid: just the opposite, from what I’ve heard
Adam L Silverman
@rp: Every thread on Balloon Juice is functionally an open thread. So I’m just recognizing reality rather than fighting it.
Adam L Silverman
@guachi: I am aware of all Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandums of guidance…//
Adam L Silverman
@Amir Khalid: There is some. I don’t think there is enough. Largely because most of this stuff gets very little coverage.
Adam L Silverman
@stinger: That’s a separate post.
rp
@Adam L Silverman: You have learned to surrender to the river’s current rather than trying to beat it into submission.
Elizabelle
@stinger:
Agreed. The prevalence of guns is why we have this enormous death by cop and death by psychotic [ex-employee] toll.
The Second Amendment was not meant to become open season on your fellow Americans and their right to peaceful assembly and to peacefully go about their daily routines.
Enough carnage. This has to stop. Guns must be licensed, trained for, INSURED, and take the military grade weapons and cartridges and ammo out of use by the general public.
Enough. Protect the police. Protect our communities.
Adam L Silverman
@rp: Something like that.
Lapassionara
Thank you, Adam, for this post. The information is chilling, but we need to know it if we are ever going to get back to the “protect and serve” model of policing.
Matt
That’s a start, but what do you do with the thousands of heavily-armed qualified-immune psychopaths they trained that are still walking the streets quaking with fear and itching to kill? You can’t just tell them “OK stop doing that and be sensible now”, and there are way too many to just put them down.
CrowsSong
@Amir Khalid: Here in Minneapolis, they banned warrior training for the MPD. The local police union, headed by the detestable Lt. Bob Kroll, responded by offering to pay for the training for any officer that still wanted it.
Hoodie
@Adam L Silverman: You also have to wonder if this type of police training selects for people with these traits, i.e., this is marketing for psychos. You’d think the goal of a “peace officer” would be to minimize violence, e.g., don’t put yourself, your coworkers or the general public in positions that make them likely to kill or be killed. There are some practices by police forces that clearly run counter to this and actually create situations that are attractive to people with psychopathic tendencies, such as having state troopers patrolling highways alone or allowing them to pull people over for minor traffic violations that don’t present an immediate danger, such as an expired tag. With the tech we have now, there is no reason for most of that. Why would you go bust George Floyd at the store for passing a suspect $20? The store probably has security video and you can verify if the bill actually is phony. Send the guy a citation and arrest him only if you have to and do it under the most controlled conditions. If you get rid of these kinds of tasks for cops, the psychos might find police work to be boring. It should be.
L85NJGT
My high school spend a bundle for some anti-drug clown to come in and give a highly sensationalized, and straight up fictional account of his personal narrative. He was selling to the assumptions of his primary audience, reactionary administrators and parents, who didn’t have the first clue about much of anything.
Don’t get lost in the specifics. There’s lots of money to be made slinging egregious bullshit to the rubes. He’s just another Harold Hill on the all-American grift.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: I just want to make an additional point. Specifically, I don’t think this had to be the outcome regardless of training protocols or use of force policies. With four cops on scene, I think an attempt to disarm Ms. Bryant would have been appropriate. I teach my aikido students the GUN – Grab, Undue, Neutralize – system for disarming attackers with knives in addition to the traditional aikido techniques. The GUN system was developed by a police lieutenant in Wisconsin and was specifically built to be learned in about fifteen minutes, to not require regular training to maintain competency, and to be used in a wide variety of situations from on the street by police to in a prison by correction officers.
Kent
@Elizabelle:
So many cops are 2nd Amendment fanatics and gun collectors. You would think that for simple self-preservation they would want to seriously escalate gun laws in this country.
If not outright prohibitions on certain types of weapons, then seriously upgraded training, handling, storage, and licensing requirements such that hard core gun fanatics have to go through a lot of steps in order to build their arsenals including training, licensing, and investing in safe storage options. In other words, you can own an arsenal, but you better damn well be professional about it. No more of this unregulated redneck bullshit.
But that rarely or ever seems to be the case.
Adam L Silverman
@Matt: You re-vet them, retrain them, change your policies to encourage deescalation, and then monitor performance and either reward or punish as necessary.
You also change your recruitment thresholds to require a minimum of a bachelors degree, to incentivize getting masters degrees or law degrees or PhDs, and raise the salaries to reflect the higher educational requirements.
If I decided to become a cop, provided I could get them to allow me to sign up because I’m overeducated, once I finished the academy I’d do the minimum three years on patrol and then, mostly likely, would be moved directly into a position that they’d be holding for me because of my education, expertise, and experience prior to joining the force. But the pay wouldn’t reflect any of that. Because law enforcement doesn’t want someone with a PhD in criminology and almost 20 years of senior, often supervisory, nat-sec experience, in the ranks.
raven
@L85NJGT: The fascist Jon Voight before he became a fascist playing Ron Kovic in “Coming Home”.
DCA
For another good reason to disbelieve Grossmann, consider the killing squads of the Holocaust—an awful lot of people were easily converted to being mass murderers, albeit murderers of people they had seriously dehumanized.
raven
@Adam L Silverman: The testimony of the MPD chief was interesting, almost always two-years in a position and then moved up.
Adam L Silverman
@Hoodie: That’s part of the problem. That’s recruitment and vetting.
As for Floyd, the unspoken part of all of this is we still do not know if he was passing a fake $20 he got as change from somewhere else – as in there’s someone in Minneapolis making fake $20s and pushing them into the supply – or whether Floyd was making his own fake $20s. It is entirely possible that Floyd was himself a victim, just as the convenience store was. Regardless, it is the type of offense that results in a ticket, not an arrest, let alone an extrajudicial execution.
Mike in NC
Too many people watched a cheesy reality TV show starring Dinald Trump and concluded he was a genius businessman. He wasn’t. People also watched a cheesy action TV show called “24” and concluded torture works and saves lives. It doesn’t.
Hoodie
@Adam L Silverman: This is another part of the problem, there seems a mentality of next to zero tolerance for danger, which is in turned used to justify disproportionate violence. When I was an electrician back in the day, I worked a lot in hospitals. When we had to do work on 480v systems, we were often not allowed to turn things off because of the mission critical nature of the electrical service, so we’d have to do things hot. We’d take a lot of safety precautions (e.g., rubber blankets, HV rated gloves, arc-resistant goggles) but, if you dropped wrench in a panel, you could very easily get fried (utility line workers face this kind of stuff every day). People treat being a cop like it’s the most dangerous thing one could ever do. It’s not.
Adam L Silverman
@raven: Yep.
Frank Wilhoit
Again, again, again, you are looking at the storyteller instead of looking at the audience. As in every similar case, Grossman is feeding a pre-existing demand.
Anonymous At Work
What about dis-establishing his training via Daubert standard in legal proceedings?
Adam L Silverman
@Hoodie: That’s the Lewinski force science crap. That’s what he teaches.
Ruckus
Adam
I was in the Navy and I never had anyone teach me about killing. Now it’s true that it’s rare that a swabby has to actually face to face kill someone. And in fact, as I’ve stated here several times, I carried a loaded sidearm with an order that if necessary, shoot to kill, with zero training to explain any of that concept. And neither did anyone else that I served with.
jonas
That sounds like the Michael Bellesisles scandal — the Emory historian who wrote the Bancroft award-winning (later rescinded) book about gun ownership in colonial America that turned out to have been based on fabricated or unsubstantiated data. When confronted, he claimed his research notes had been “lost in a basement flood” and thus he couldn’t produce them.
Was there another one??
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Seems like there’s a contradiction at the core of this guy’s training…he trains police to be more lethal because he’s claiming they need that training because humans are inherently incapable of using lethal force on one another unless conditioned to do so…but if hardly any humans are capable of killing, why do the police need to be lethal? It seems highly unlikely that any of them would encounter other humans who are capable of being lethal if those humans are exceedingly rare, in which case the police themselves would not have to be capable of using lethal force. So then they wouldn’t need his training.
Fabio
Adam, military historian Dr. Bret Devereaux goes into a great deal of detail about the extremely ahistorical and flawed ideology of a warrior/soldier dichotomy at his blog:
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-i-soldiers-warriors-and/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iia-the-many-faces-of-battle/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/12/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iib-a-soldiers-lot/
https://acoup.blog/2021/02/19/collections-the-universal-warrior-part-iii-the-cult-of-the-badass/
Saw your discussion here, and thought this might be of interest if you didn’t already know of it.
Adam L Silverman
@jonas: That’s him. Couldn’t remember how to spell his name. And I decided not to look it up.
Dave
@Hoodie: Yeah a hugely disproportionate sense of danger and danger avoidance that seems pretty prevalent in police ranks.
One that ironically enough discounts major sources of police danger such as being hit by vehicles during traffic stops or in the last year COVID for the real but not nearly as common as you’d think from listening citizen threat.
Much of this Killology crap plus heightened sense of risk is almost calculated to traumatize police who then go on to traumatize the public at large.
It’s bad for everyone but the guys that already ping the scale Adam was talking about above.
Adam L Silverman
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Yep.
Betty Cracker
@guachi: This is one of those situation where correctness is in the eye of the beholder. I can’t help but edit everything I read according to AP style, so I mentally strike those caps…
Adam L Silverman
@Fabio: I’m familiar with some of his stuff. Thanks for the links.
AliceBlue
@raven: IIRC, the Ron Kovic movie was “Born on the Fourth of July” and Tom Cruise played him.
TKH
I have read somewhere that in police departments where the “teachings” of Grossman where removed from the police training curriculum the effing police union brought that creep in and the cops learned his junk science on their own time.
I mean I am a strong supporter of the idea of unions, but the real existing unions, and the police unions in particular, make it difficult at times to hold on to the commitment of strong support.
Brachiator
@Adam L Silverman:
Sometimes police departments appear to believe that if they can conclude that lethal force was “justified” or “in policy,” then everything is OK and this should be the end of it.
I don’t think that this is necessarily correct, or that it should be the case.
ETA: I see that you deal with aspects of this in a later post. Good.
Adam L Silverman
@Brachiator: We are in agreement. Just because it is deemed a “good” shoot, doesn’t mean that it should’ve happened.
rp
@Hoodie: It’s part of us vs. them mentality that they’re taught. They’re not public servants helping their communities, they’re an occupying force keeping enemies under control. Their lives are simply more valuable than civilians, and if they face any perceived danger they respond with lethal force.
Raven
@AliceBlue: Coming Home was also based on Ron.
Raven
@Raven:
patrick II
Who is paying for this “training”? If it is a government entity, it should stop.
Al Z.
So de-militarize the police
Old School
sab
@CrowsSong: It is my understandimg that that is true across the country. The local police want that training. Their unions demand it. If they can’t get it paid for by the police departments then the FOP will fundraise for it. If that doesn’t work the individual police will pay for it themselves.
And meanwhile, the higher-ups have no idea what kind of trainimg they are sending their people to.
Amir Khalid
@TKH:
I don’t quite understand this.It is surely within the power of a police department’s leadership to declare such training contrary to police doctrine, ethics and values, and forbid officers to take it.
cain
@rp: if it is especially alarming, he’ll add “stay frosty!”
Mike in NC
@Betty Cracker: As a retired editor those capitalized titles drive me nuts. The proper term for a member of the Marine Corps is “marine”.
Also hate the word “warrior” being applied to service members. I spent most of my 30 years in uniform sitting behind a desk doing paperwork.
UncleEbeneezer
Adam, how do you respond to those that say “We’ve already tried focussing on training, and it didn’t work? That’s how we got here in the first place!” IE- the Reforms Don’t Work argument.
I think it’s bullshit because in my experience working on local police reform, things like De-escalation really have NOT been tried until recently and even then only grudgingly (our own police put out an internal memo saying “Don’t worry about AB-392 (CA Use of Force law requiring de-escalation) nothing will change!” I’m guessing there has also been little to no real effort by LE Agencies to change their culture to how they view the civilians they interact with.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I’ve wondered in the past why things like “net guns” aren’t the norm by now.
BolaWrap looks interesting, too.
The idea that cops’ only choices are risking death or killing the other person first is ridiculous and it’s long past time we took fire arms away from most of them.
Let’s see some real numbers: How many traffic stops have a usable weapon in the vehicle? How many traffic stops involve the weapon actually being in someone’s hands? Etc.
Grr…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: That was the same thing that occurred to me–if it’s so hard for humans to kill each other, why would there be so many people who need killin’ on the streets? Why would you believe that being a cop is so mortally dangerous, and being ready to kill so important?
I think the implied deduction is that the people you shoot are not human beings.
WaterGirl
@sab:
I was totally with you until I got to this part. I think they know exactly what kind of training they are sending their people to.
VOR
IIRC, the Minneapolis PD banned so-called “Warrior” training after Philando Castille was killed in a nearby suburb in 2016. The MPD’s police union head offered to pay for the training for any MPD officers taking such courses. http://www.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-union-offers-free-warrior-training-in-defiance-of-mayor-s-ban/509025622/
JAFD
The thing that gets me about S.L.A. Marshall and Men Against Fire:
I was born in 1950, so was – personally – interested in military history and current affairs in the late ’60’s. In those years, Men Against Fire was reprinted in pocket-book paperback (ie. about 4″x7″ (Yes, I owned a copy.)) and read and cited many times by those holding ‘pacifist’ positions on Vietnam, The Territorial Imperative, etc, etc; and, we are told, widely read in the US armed forces, and influential in changing Army training.
In that era, there were still many WWII combat veterans around, many still holding high positions in the Army and the DoD. Why weren’t there some of them who spoke out, then, to say ‘Men Against Fire is a lot of malarkey’ ?
One could say that because Marshall had gone to Vietnam as syndicated newspaper combat correspondent, wrote several books praising the Soldiers and supporting the war, his credibility was an asset.
Still, that the facts were not questioned until nearly all the witnesses were dead – one asks ‘Why’. I’m old man, don’t want to argue the arguments of 1969 any more. just that these new mysteries…
To change subject, Historians In Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, And Politics In The Ivory Tower, by Jon Wiener is probably the best ‘defendant’s brief’ review of the case of Michael Bellesles.
Josie
@VOR:
It sounds as if the police unions are a big part of the problem. I don’t know what can be done about that, but municipal governments need to take a look at the problem they present.
Cameron
@Old School: What’s next – The PD Instant-Pot Cookbook, by Hannibal Lecter?
sab
@WaterGirl: My husband knows a lot of cops. He has been debating with them about this for years. And when he finally persuaded some of them to read up on Lewinski and Grossman they came back saying ” Wow. We had no idea.”
They don’t research this stuff. Who has time? They go by the reputations established among their peers. Lewinski and Grossman have been marketing themselves successfully for years. It would have been nice if their credentials had been vetted early on, but that didn’t happen.
J R in WV
@Old School:
OK, this guy is a total pervert, who needs to be put away for a very long time, so he can undergo long term re-education to cure this perversion.
Sex after killing is NOT one of the “perks that come with the job” at all, and anyone selling that very sick idea needs to be put away, again, for re-education and training to understand that those victims are humans at least as valuable as this pervert wanna-be killer cop.
The best sex is with someone you know well, even love, and has nothing to do with murder. So sick!!!
J R in WV
@VOR:
“Take the training and lose your job for cause” should be the rule with any real police force. This isn’t policing, it’s murder under cover of police work.
No one interested in killing the people the police are sworn to “serve and protect” is worthy of being a police officer, and should be fired for taking a course antithetical to the career of policing. Same as joining the American Nazi Party — get fired right away.
Gbbalto
Patrick Skinner in the WaPo the other day is the kind of cop we need. Sorry for no link, on my phone.
Eta also Debbie Ramsey today
Adam L Silverman
@patrick II: We the people are.
debbie
@Betty Cracker:
There’s military language and then there’s language for the rest of us.
cain
@VOR:
I think a civil suit should be brought against this man.
Adam L Silverman
@Mike in NC: That’s what the guidance is.
Adam L Silverman
@UncleEbeneezer: We seem to have pretty much abandoned deescalation as a reality about 20 to 30 years ago.
debbie
Dumb question: Did all of this (Grossman, deadly force, militarization, etc.) start after 9/11?
cain
It seems though that despite this training white men still get away with doing a lot of things that black men and women would get shot for?
raven
What is the spirit of the bayonet!!!!!
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: No, but it got worse after 9-11.
Ruckus
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
There you go with that logic crap.
What would you expect to ever sell using logic and reason?
schrodingers_cat
So Adam is an Adama fan! I am watching BSG for the first time, just finished Season 3. It is one of the best TV shows I have seen.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks. There was a security guard where I work who was a retired cop. We were talking, shortly after Michael Brown was murdered, and she expressed disbelief that police were using deadly force. She said the only time in her 30 years that she had had to shoot someone was during a speeding stop on the freeway when the suspect suddenly jumped out of his car, knocked her to the ground, and pulled out his gun. Down on the ground, she managed to pull out her gun, and she shot him in the thigh, stopping him cold.
She couldn’t understand why cops still didn’t do the same thing.
debbie
@debbie:
Then there’s also diplomatic and legislative language. They like to capitalize every damn word.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: They have some meta narrative issues in the final season or so, but in many ways it is one of the best shows dealing with civil military relations, as well as low intensity and unconventional warfare you are going to find. I’ve used clips in seminar at USAWC when I was teaching there.
Ruckus
I wonder if the current day republican party has been listening to cops, who have been listening to this moron effectively telling cops that the people who you are beating and killing are all, every last one of them, trying to kill every last one of you so killing them is the only answer? And here’s how you do that….
IOW, while I fully know that some level of people hate anyone who isn’t lily white, I wonder if this behind the scene asshole is at least partially responsible for the national level of racism?
Wapiti
@DCA: Yup. One thing that stuck with me from his book, On Killing, was the assertion that civilians in WWII and medics in military units don’t suffer PTSD like the shooters… I think that hasn’t aged well, and I expect the reality was that no one gave a shit.
Doug R
Peel published his principles for policing back in 1829 which specifically states police are part of the community and NOT military:
https://twitter.com/stuartlister1/status/454332254937169920
TKH
@Amir Khalid: In a country where your rights are so much more important than your responsibilities (provided you are willing to recognize that you have any), the police leadership can likely not prohibit you from attending such “training” put on by the union. What they could do is put on training that aims to undo the damage done by the “training”.
However, I think you run into the same problem as in all security issues, it always only goes in one direction, the direction of getting more rigid and never in the direction of relaxation. Because if so anything goes wrong after you have relaxed rules, the hyenas will have you for a snack.
WV Blondie
Two thoughts come to me reading this.
Many years ago I was a reporter assigned the city beat in a city of roughly 40,000. It did, of course, include the police. I used to have ferocious discussions with a lieutenant about policing, including my dismissal of him referring to the public as “civilians.” I would point out that to the military, cops are civilians too, and that I thought that created a barrier.
That was just one of our many conversations. We talked a lot about police use of force.
About a decade later, he’d retired and I had moved to a different publication. He became a private investigator and I contacted him because of a very messy family matter. We arranged to meet for lunch.
When we sat down, he said, “before we discuss what you need, I have to apologize to you. Everything you ever told me about how the police treat the public is true.”
Turned out that the moment he retired, he got treated the same as us ordinary folks.
He now does a lot of work for the Innocence Project.
(Sorry for adding another chapter to Adam’s post.)
Adam L Silverman
@WV Blondie: No worries. It is an important point.
planetjanet
@WV Blondie: That is an encouraging story.
debbie
This certainly seems timely. Today’s Fresh Air interview:
(Both audio and transcript available at the link.)
trollhattan
@schrodingers_cat:
Tricia Helfer had a birthday the other day. I took a moment.
dimmsdale
Many thanks for the post, Adam. Haven’t started it yet, but I can see it answers some questions I had from last time you mentioned this turd and his “killology.”
As always with Silverman posts, it goes into my “Read and RE-read” archive.
different-church-lady
So, the most basic part of the problem is no longer understanding that warfare and policing should be two very different things?
RaflW
Nicely done, Adam. I hadn’t know that Norm read the blog!
Starfish
@Steve in the ATL: How are we going to graduate from War College if you don’t even do the short reading? ?
Starfish
@Adam L Silverman: I read a memoir written by a SEAL and her psychologist, and SEALs did not seem like good people.
WV Blondie
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks. I’ve been nagging him to write about police reform (I’ve offered to help), since he’s been in the trenches on both sides, but he thinks no one would listen to him.
Adam L Silverman
@RaflW: Norm’s a friend, senior colleague, and excellent mentor. He and I were emailing about this last night, I decided to write it up, and pushed it across to him. Sometimes he puts the posts out on blast, sometimes he doesn’t.
Adam L Silverman
@Starfish: Chief Beck is a unique person. She was very good at her profession, which, like the other SEALs, is to hunt, capture, and if necessary kill specific high value targets, as well as to conduct search and rescue of Americans being held by those high value targets. It is a special skill set. It requires people with very specific personalities. And it is most certainly not supposed to be a template for policing.
Adam L Silverman
@WV Blondie: People would listen.
Another Scott
And another thing, … ;-)
I think a lot of this police warrior stuff got much worse after 9/11. Cheney with his 1% Doctrine undoubtedly had some effect on making police hyper-sensitized to 1% threats, especially after getting some of that sweet, sweet anti-terrorism money and military equipment. And since they’ve got that money and equipment, they construct reasons to keep it and get more. Crime rising? We need more money and equipment because of insufficient investment by those previous bad guys. Crime falling? We need more money and equipment because what we’re doing is obviously working and we can’t go back and lose our hard-fought gains.
:-/
We obviously don’t have to worry about bin Laden killing us all in our beds any more, but the mentality remains.
I hope that it doesn’t take people relegating 9/11 to ancient history like, say, the Tampico Affair before we roll-back the excesses. We need much faster action than that, and we need to take the lessons of the bad over-reaction and incompetent execution of the response to 9/11 to heart and not memory-hole it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
The fella being talked about here does not think warfare and policing are two different things. And he doesn’t think that warfare is like policing, he fully believes that policing Is warfare. Know your enemy and kill them before they kill you.
So to answer your question, yes.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: A large number of police are in the National Guard and Reserves. Up until 9-11 they’d not been to war. Just one weekend a month and two weeks a year, plus the occasional mobilization if there was a natural disaster. After 9-11 they went to war, came home, went to war again, came home, went to war again, etc, etc, etc. At that point they stopped being cops where were in the National Guard or Reserve, but Soldiers who were battle hardened in unconventional and irregular theaters of war with repeated deployments under their belts.
War is corrosive. This is one of the results of that corrosion.
Adam L Silverman
@different-church-lady: Yep.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
Relatedly, ICYMI, ProPublica:
You can guess the result of the internal investigation.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
BruceFromOhio
@Adam L Silverman:
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: I saw that a couple of days ago.
Eventually change will come. And no matter how much the police unions try to stop it, because they refuse to give an inch on anything and when they are given an inch they take a mile, it will be overwhelming change. And rather than having a say, rather than helping to lead the change, they will simply get run over by it.
Adam L Silverman
@BruceFromOhio: Yep.
Bill Arnold
@Old School:
Ah, good, you linked the “the best sex is after-killing-somebody-else sex” video.
Guy is loathsome,. 11X loathsome.
Superb piece, Adam.
tandem
My husband and I are re-watching Battlestar with our young adult son, a first-timer. Amazing how timely its discussions of religion, power, politics, equity, civil society, justice and more remain to this day. When we watched the episode from which your clip is taken, The Former Guy was still in office, making Adama’s simple explanation hit all the harder. We talked for a long time that night….
tam1MI
@schrodingers_cat: Be warned – if you don’t think Kara Thrace is the most awesome creature ever to grace the face of the universe, the rest of BSG is going to be a hard slog.
SwampWitch
@Adam L Silverman: We were trained to use nets to neutralize a knife.