Bulletproof Warrior.


Jim Glennon. Credit: Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune.

Jim Glennon. Credit: Elizabeth Flores, Star Tribune.

The seminar was called “The Bulletproof Warrior,” and the instructors urged the law enforcement officers in the hotel conference room to make the decision to shoot if they ever feel their lives are threatened.

Videos of bloody shootouts between police and civilians emphasized a key point: Hesitation can kill you.

In the audience at the May 2014 seminar was a young St. Anthony police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, city records show. He’s now known around the world as the officer who killed Philando Castile minutes after making a traffic stop in Falcon Heights last week.

Amid intensifying demands for changes in police training in the wake of the shooting deaths of Castile and others, such “survival” courses for officers are flourishing nationally. But some in law enforcement are distancing themselves from the approach.

The Houston Police Department, for example, won’t pay for its officers to attend the Bulletproof Warrior seminar, which is put on by an Illinois for-profit company called Calibre Press.

And the leader of an international police training association said he thinks some seminars like those offered by Calibre and other firms foster a sense of paranoia among officers.

Oh, you think? As if the militarization wasn’t bad enough, there’s shit like ‘bulletproof warrior’, which is little more than an expensive exhortation to shoot! shoot! shoot!, but not white people if you can avoid it.

“Police training became very militaristic and it caused a lot of the problems that are going on in the nation,” said Michael Becar, executive director of the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training, with offices in Idaho and Washington, D.C.

Ah, there it is. Nice to see this acknowledged, but are you going to move past that?

Jim Glennon, a co-owner of Calibre who co-taught the seminar Yanez attended, said it’s wrong to link the course to the officer’s actions last week. “Everybody’s going after this kid,” Glennon said Wednesday. “Nobody should be judging what he did yet without the evidence.”

Well, you see, we have evidence. Evidence of murder. It’s right there, for everyone to see. Perhaps if you hadn’t invested so much time in making cops hyper-aggressive, this might not have happened.

The Bulletproof Warrior is one of 15 sessions offered by Calibre and its parent company, LifeLine Training. The courses are well-known and popular in law enforcement circles. Facebook photos show conference rooms and auditoriums filled with officers to hear the Bulletproof Warrior message.

Fans say it provides a valuable “wake-up call” in police safety tactics for the street: how to read the body language of someone preparing to attack, for instance. Training professionals note that Calibre was a pioneer decades ago in teaching basic police safety.

The body language of someone preparing to attack. Right. Interesting how the body language of PoC is always “oh no, gonna attack!”, while that of white people, even when firing at police, is not, so you end up with dead PoC, and white people arrested. Something is seriously fucked up with your warrior training there.

Yanez took the 20-hour seminar on May 21-22, 2014, according to a summary of Yanez’s training that the city of St. Anthony provided after a public records request. A year earlier he attended “Street Survival,” another of the company’s seminars, records show.

Yanez also took 20 hours of training in 2012 in “Officer Survival” from a different organization. In May of this year, he took two hours of training titled “de-escalation,” the only instruction in his four years with the department that appears to focus on that approach, the records show.

Over 40 hours of “training” in how to be a bigoted profiler, hyper-aggressive, and a killer. Great. And a whole 2 hours in de-escalation. Wow, I am just so impressed. I don’t want to be funding cop shops, when they are doing this sort of shit. Who in their right mind would? (I said right mind.)

William Czech was also in the Bulletproof Warrior class in the Ramada in Bloomington those two days in 2014. Czech isn’t a police officer. He’s a 47-year-old electrician from Mendota Heights with a keen interest in police training because of incidents involving a mentally ill family member.

Czech posed as a student to get into the class. He said he was horrified. He said he expected to see a presentation about understanding both how to avoid using deadly force as well as how to realize when it’s unavoidable. Czech said the course consistently emphasized the risk of hesitation.

[…]

Still, there are some in law enforcement training who question the courses.

Becar, who leads the international law enforcement training group, said his organization has no position on LifeLine Training and Calibre. But he said he has attended Calibre classes.

“Everything they were doing made the police officers very paranoid,” Becar said. “At some point they wouldn’t even stop a car without three backups.”

The Houston Police Department will not pay for officers to attend the Bulletproof Warrior seminar, said Houston police spokesman Kese Smith. Officers can go on their own time and expense, he said.

Smith said he couldn’t elaborate, saying only that “some of their instruction is not what we instruct.”

“No position.” “Can’t elaborate.” Why in the fuckety fuck not? If there are good cops, who think all this shit has gone much too far, why don’t you have a position? Why can’t you elaborate? Why in the hell aren’t you speaking out and denouncing this absolute crap? Why aren’t you doing your damn job, to protect and serve?

Full article here.

Comments

  1. says

    Doesn’t it occur to these dungheads that this sort of mindset is going to put them more in danger because it’s going to cause people being stopped by the police reason to believe their lives are in danger, resulting in an ever escalating cycle of “shoot before I get shot”.

  2. rq says

    Oh man. I would actively forbid officers to go to these courses. Though I suppose if they’re doing it privately, that’s on them… in which case, they would need to take the equivalent hours times two in de-escalation and sensitivity training, with a dash of cultural awareness on top. That whole community policing bit.
    I mean, I can understand officer safety, but titles like ‘Officer Survival’ and ‘Street Survival’? That’s not safety anymore, that’s setting up a system where the same people they’re supposed to assist and protect become faceless monsters out to get them. And look how well that seems to be working out: essentially, less safe for everyone.

    Jim Glennon, a co-owner of Calibre who co-taught the seminar Yanez attended, said it’s wrong to link the course to the officer’s actions last week. “Everybody’s going after this kid,” Glennon said Wednesday. “Nobody should be judging what he did yet without the evidence.”

    Fuck you, too.
    As for the courses providing that wake-up call, what if they’re just teaching you to spot something that isn’t there? De-escalation, stormtroopers. Learn more de-escalation.

  3. chigau (違う) says

    Why does Glennon refer to Yanez as a ‘kid’?
    He’s 28 years old.

    Those cops who spend their time on the job in a state of pants-wetting terror should really consider another line of work.

  4. rq says

    Sympathy, chigau, sympathy. It’s the only reason they do it. They’re always ‘young men’ and ‘kids’, as opposed to the teenagers they kill (who are men at 16, 14, 12…).

  5. mostlymarvelous says

    One thing that I’ve noticed in the few videos I’ve seen of cops shooting people at traffic stops. Why aren’t they wearing hi-vis vests over their uniforms? The biggest danger for cops on traffic duties is other vehicles/drivers knocking into them when they’re on the traffic-driver’s side of a vehicle they’ve pulled over.

    When an Australian or NZ cop gets out of a car at such a stop, they pause to hitch their neon yellow safety vest on as they step out of their own vehicle. Cops everywhere are far more vulnerable to inattentive drivers still on the road, just like any other pedestrian, than to a possible bonnie & clyde shoot out with the occupants of a stopped car.

    Or is it standard practice and I’ve just not noticed it.

  6. says

    mostlymarvelous:

    Or is it standard practice and I’ve just not noticed it.

    They don’t do that here, they just expect to not get hit or clipped. They get hit and clipped a lot.

  7. mostlymarvelous says

    So much for cops being conscious of their own safety, then.

    They ignore the biggest familiar danger and fog up their own awareness of their surroundings by focusing on the big bad boogeyman shooter they’re much less likely to encounter.

  8. Ice Swimmer says

    I don’t if you’ve seen this documentary comparing Nordic and U.S. police:

    The Norden: Police.

    In the documentary a L.A. cop visits Finland, Sweden and Norway and he is a bit puzzled.

  9. says

    Ice Swimmer @ 9:

    In the documentary a L.A. cop visits Finland, Sweden and Norway and he is a bit puzzled.

    I’ll bet! I haven’t seen that, thank you for posting.

  10. Crimson Clupeidae says

    Ice Swimmer@9: Thanks for link. One thing that jumps out at me early (2:20 min), the LAPD guy referes to law enforcement as a business, the Nordic guy thinks of it as a service. That difference in mindset alone is huge. The Nordic cops even refer to the people the arrest as customers. :)

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