Police officers stand by as buildings are set on fire after the announcement
of the grand jury decision, Nov. 24, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. (photo: Charles
Riedel/AP)
ALSO SEE: Police Killings on Track to Top 1000 for Third Straight Year
Militarizing the Minds of Police Officers
By Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
03 July 17
three years ago, amid the protests erupting in the streets of Ferguson,
Missouri, President Barack Obama ordered a review of a federal program
allowing military equipment to be transferred from the armed forces to state
and local police departments. For many, the images of local police dressed
in camouflage and travelling in armored vehicles became a metaphor for the
ways in which the lines had blurred between civilian law enforcement and the
military-a phenomenon that the journalist Radley Balko has referred to as
the "rise of the warrior cop." The review resulted in an executive order
that curtailed the transfer of some types of military equipment. A new short
film by Craig Atkinson, "Conditioned Response," which includes unreleased
footage shot while filming his documentary "Do Not Resist," from 2016,
suggests that the armored vehicles rolling through Ferguson were only the
most visible indicators of this militarization. Another, more subtle-and
perhaps more intractable-form of it is affecting the psychology of the
officers themselves.
For the past two decades, David Grossman, a former Army Ranger and
self-described product of a law-enforcement family, has been conducting
police-training seminars on the use of deadly force. Policing is a complex
job that at times requires split-second decision-making. More often, though,
it requires a reservoir of knowledge about social interaction and human
behavior, and the ability to read situations that may become violent.
Officers are granted a great degree of latitude in their work, partly
because interacting with the public requires more nuance than any rigorous
set of codes could possibly hope to encompass. Grossman's "Bulletproof
Warrior" philosophy, however, dispenses with these gray areas. Here the war
on crime is not metaphorical; police are a kind of domestic militia tasked
with subduing a potentially lethal enemy. Danger is ambient, ever present,
and unpredictable. (Grossman did not respond to a request for an interview.)
Grossman's seminar exists at the opposite pole of the current drive for
criminal-justice reform. While progressives emphasize police training to
de-escalate conflict, Grossman's seminar pushes officers to become more
comfortable with the use of deadly force. As Grossman informs one group of
attendees, "only a killer can hunt a killer." Killing is a central theme of
Grossman's seminars but is only a fractional portion of law enforcement's
responsibilities. The vast majority of police in this country never use
deadly force in the course of their careers.
Jeronimo Yanez, the police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile, in
Minnesota, last year, belongs not only to the small percentage of officers
who have killed civilians but also to the much larger group of officers who
have attended Grossman's seminars. He reacted quickly, interpreted an
otherwise calm moment as the paramount danger, and fired seven times into a
vehicle with a four-year-old girl in the back seat. A jury determined that
Yanez had not committed any crime, but, at the very least, no reasonable
person would understand his handling of the situation as good policing.
Last year, sixty-three police officers were killed by assailants who used
weapons-but a thousand people were killed by police, and a hundred and
seventy of those people were unarmed. If there is, indeed, a war, it's an
asymmetrical one.
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