Critics have blamed the training program for fostering a decades-long culture of aggressive policing.
The retired deputy principal in Minneapolis, Greg Hestness, asked him how many of Lane and Kueng’s coaches may have fired at the rookie officers and said he was struck by how quickly their arrest of Floyd over a fake $ 20 bill escalated to Lane who on Floyd yells to show me [expletive] hands!”
“Where does it come from on Day 4?” he asked.
A real cynical but deserving question, would Chauvin have kneeled him for so long if he had not trained the officers at that time? ‘ said Michael Friedman, a former executive director of the Legal Rights Center, said Chauvin appeared to be “trying to demonstrate how to control a person.”
Gerald Moore, a retired veteran of more than 30 years from the Minneapolis Police Department, said that because novice officers have to evaluate regularly before they can go alone, it can create unhealthy power dynamics with their training officers.
For some, the bigger problem is the tendency of some officers not to interrogate and intervene when a colleague – especially a senior officer – uses excessive force.
After the death of Floyd, the Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo announced a stricter ‘duty to intervene’ policy stating that officers who witness another officer ‘may use any prohibited, or inappropriate or unreasonable force’ to try to ‘intervene safely by oral and physical means’ ‘.
For years, groups such as Communities United Against Police Brutality have been urging the department to adopt a peer intervention training program developed by the New Orleans Police Department, based on the premise that there is a tendency for officers not to intervene when they do not see a colleague. misconduct.
The program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, or EPIC, is based on the premise that intervention through training and role-play should be taught and continuously strengthened through more training to the point that it infects departmental culture.
The St. Paul police are taking part in the training, but Minneapolis is not. The debate over police training has been going on in Minneapolis for the past few years following a series of genuine killings of civilians.