As national public outcry increases, LAPD to re-train all officers in 'de-escalation'

[Dave70968]

http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/07/06/52850/as-national-public-outrcy-increases-lapd-to-re-tra/

In light of public concern over police shootings, the Los Angeles Police Department will re-train all 10,000 police officers on de-escalating confrontations with suspects and approaching mentally ill people, officials told KPCC.

“This is a pause that this department is going to take to recalibrate,” said Deputy Chief Bob Green, who helped design the training. “We want to make sure everybody knows how to constitutionally police, and how to treat people with respect.”

Green and other police officials said the LAPD had started to look at new training before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last summer. But that incident and others – including the fatal shooting of Ezell Ford in South Los Angeles – moved the training to the top of the department’s agenda. It'll start in a couple of weeks.

The five-hour re-training will address four areas:

• Building public trust by partnering with the community and recognizing your own implicit racial biases.
• Use of force and de-escalation techniques, including taking cover and creating distance from suspects to buy time to talk to them and call for back-up.
• How best to identify and approach mentally ill people.
• Basic laws of arrest, including reasonable suspicion and probable cause.

“We do teach these already,” said Deputy Chief Bill Murphy, who heads the LAPD’s Police Sciences and Training Bureau. “But we are going to reinforce them to a far greater level.”

The training will include a history of the LAPD’s difficult relationship with minorities.

The department also plans to permanently add three new 80-hour training sessions on the same topics early in an officer’s career– at ten months, three and five years. Officials said they hope the new modules will reinforce good habits and stop bad ones from forming.

“This may be the biggest we’ve ever done at the LAPD, as far as what will amount to hundreds of hours of new in-service training,” Murphy said.

He said bringing officers in for training after they've been cops for a while makes sense.

“That’s an ideal time, they’ve been in real life incidents,” Murphy said.

One other topic they’ll address: consensual stops of pedestrians on the street, a common occurrence in high crime minority neighborhoods. Green said they'll remind officers that sometimes they need to be willing to accept ‘no’ for an answer.

“It’s about being able to walk away from an encounter when somebody doesn’t want to talk to you – checking your ego and leaving,” he said.

Green, a 40 year LAPD veteran who oversees operations in the San Fernando Valley, said the training is a high priority.

“I’m shutting down all my commands for the training – officers from other areas of the city will cover for us,” he said. “We have never done that in my 40 years with the LAPD. Its to send a message to everybody how significant this is.”

One police watchdog said training might help, but the LAPD needs to change its “culture of violence” aimed at black and Latino men.

“That takes more than a few training sessions,” said Patrisse Cullors of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. She also decried what she sees as a continuing code of silence among officers.

“The idea that officers have each others' backs and they don’t tell on one another – that needs to change,” she said.

Emphasis mine.

 

[mugsy]

Officers should have each other's backs. but it should also be crystal clear to all what is beyond the pale and must be reported - the rest has to be left to an officer's discretionary judgement. In any event, honesty is a 100% non-negotiable requirement.

 

[HoLeChit]

While I strongly believe that extra training and reinforcement of good professional practice is a great thing, I don't agree with most of the crap that was stated. In the grand scheme of things I t is only going to create more problems and more fatalities. In my opinion.

 

[doctorjj]

While I strongly believe that extra training and reinforcement of good professional practice is a great thing, I don't agree with most of the crap that was stated. In the grand scheme of things I t is only going to create more problems and more fatalities. In my opinion.

What force are you a part of currently?

 

[mugsy]

While I strongly believe that extra training and reinforcement of good professional practice is a great thing, I don't agree with most of the crap that was stated. In the grand scheme of things I t is only going to create more problems and more fatalities. In my opinion.

What do you mean specifically by the "crap"? Are you referring to the subject matter itself, or the Deputy Chief's comments? And why? I actually want to know what you mean.

 

[BadgeBunny]

As an officer's wife I see absolutely no problem with any of this. In fact, when I read the article to GC he said "You mean they aren't teaching them that already?? All of that should be Police 101."

 

[mugsy]

As an officer's wife I see absolutely no problem with any of this. In fact, when I read the article to GC he said "You mean they aren't teaching them that already?? All of that should be Police 101."

BB, I gathered from the article that they are teaching it but that this is...skills reinforcement, since they have had some problems lately. I can't speak from police experience but in my military career we did this type of "spot training" frequently - sometimes it was value added (no kidding, needed refreshing of perishable skills) and sometimes it wasn't (CYA exercise designed to convince someone higher up or holding the purse strings that by golly we are doing something about problem X).

 

[BadgeBunny]

Ahhh, that could be -- and make sense. I know that it's easy to start to judge everyone in the same light when you deal with the same types of people day after day. I know it was that way for the attorneys and other legal professionals I worked with. Not everybody who is arrested and charged is innocent, no matter how many times they say it.

 

[HoLeChit]

What force are you a part of currently?

I am not a part of any force any more, I apologize if somehow I misled you in my post.

What do you mean specifically by the "crap"? Are you referring to the subject matter itself, or the Deputy Chief's comments? And why? I actually want to know what you mean.

By crap I am referring to some of the OP's bold quoted text. I don't see anything good coming from it. I see it like this.... In the practice of law enforcment and security the practice that I was taught was to meet force with equal or greater force, whatever was needed to resolve the situation. If you can fix a situation by talking someone down, do it. If you have to "encourage" someone to sit down cause they're a bit rowdy, alright. But if someone is going to keep you from getting home to the wife and kids at the end of your shift, rather than giving them a nice hug and trying to get back to your car, you put some firepower on your target. De-escalation techniques such as turning around and hiding/seeking cover just sound like asking to become a victim. Stereotypically they will embolden An aggressor. If police officers are being told/suggested to do this rather than confront the issue at hand, I feel it will do more harm than good. Likewise for "checking your ego and getting back in the car" when someone doesn't want to talk to you. What about going out on a burglary, and you find the CP getting beaten half to death by the burglar; and the burglar refuses to comply? Turn around and walk back to the car because he/she won't comply? Take cover and wait for the PR Lt. And your backup who's 10 minutes out show up, so that they can ensure you aren't doing something wrong and not using excessive force? Now these examples are rather extreme, and I understand that I have grossly exaggerated them, but it is to get my point of view across.

 

[Dave70968]

Likewise for "checking your ego and getting back in the car" when someone doesn't want to talk to you. What about going out on a burglary, and you find the CP getting beaten half to death by the burglar; and the burglar refuses to comply? Turn around and walk back to the car because he/she won't comply? Take cover and wait for the PR Lt. And your backup who's 10 minutes out show up, so that they can ensure you aren't doing something wrong and not using excessive force? Now these examples are rather extreme, and I understand that I have grossly exaggerated them, but it is to get my point of view across.

Next time, quote the whole passage in context. Here, I'll do it for you, and this time, I'll put something different in bold to show you the important bit you chose to ignore:

One other topic they’ll address: consensual stops of pedestrians on the street, a common occurrence in high crime minority neighborhoods. Green said they'll remind officers that sometimes they need to be willing to accept ‘no’ for an answer.

“It’s about being able to walk away from an encounter when somebody doesn’t want to talk to you – checking your ego and leaving,” he said.

In a consensual stop, the person stopped has every right to terminate the encounter; in the state of Washington, he can even tell you to "go f*ck yourself," and you can't do anything about it.

Your attitude is exactly the one I had in mind in posting the article. Yes, of course you can still intervene in a violent crime; suggesting otherwise is either being intellectually dishonest or just plain stupid (my money's on the former). This is about A) avoiding force where it can reasonably be avoided, and B) remembering that "contempt of cop" is not a crime.