“Kill without empathy,” and other lessons brought to you by the Killology Research Group, the police training workshop that has been traveling all around the country for years.
Did you know about this? It was news to us just yesterday, but as it turns out, a lot of people knew about this, and many in the law enforcement industry have embraced it. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is retired from the army and now spends his time traveling around the country, teaching law enforcement not to feel bad about killing “the bad guy.”
Here he was from a clip back in 2015. He claimed his words were taken out of context in a later interview, and producers edited this clip. However, the more you look at this guy, the more nauseated you’re going to feel. Because it’s not just the message, it’s the disassociation that many have with the message.
Others have raised the red flag.
It came to our attention yesterday when someone talked about how Lt. Col. Grossman was going to be in Texas today. Where in Texas?
We don’t know, but he was at Amarillo College Criminal Justice Department last year, selling seats to his workshop at $249 a pop.
Is this what Criminal Justice students learn?
He put out a lengthy statement last year to journalists covering him or reaching out for inquiries.
This guy is making money hand over fist.
Aside from the pricey tickets he sells at his workshops, he’s written multiple books and has been on the New York’s Best Seller List. Lt. Col. Grossman wants to make sure that people who write about him tell their readers about his books. 🙄
He wants people to know that his work has to do with lawful killings and not homicides. “Lawful Killings.”
According to Cornell Law School, “justifiable homicide” is defined as:
The taking of human life under circumstances of justification, as a matter of rights, such as self-defense, or other causes set out in the statute. For example, in Virginia, justifiable homicide in self-defense occurs where a person, without any fault on his part in provoking or bringing on the difficulty, kills another under reasonable apprehension of death or great bodily harm to himself. Justifiable homicides also include killings permitted by law, such as an execution for a capital crime. A justifiable homicide absolves the actor of any criminal liability. Justifiable homicides are not the same as homicides committed under the heat of passion or with diminished capacity, which may be considered mitigating circumstances that reduce the actor’s culpability with regards to a killing.
Do you know what that sounds like?
“I couldn’t see his hands.”
“He reached for my gun.”
“I feared for my life.”
“I feared for my life,” is all a police officer has to say to justify why he killed someone.
There is an entire culture in America that doesn’t see what’s wrong here. So far this year, police have killed 321 people. This problem is so deep and so broken that it may not even be solved in our lifetime.
In America, people are killed by police officers every single day, sometimes while committing crimes, most of the time, not. Sometimes they’re armed, sometimes they’re not.
As a society, we keep asking ourselves, “why?” And, “how do we stop it?”
First, we have to understand why the system is so broken.
The Ignored 2006 Report.
In 2006 the FBI released a heavily redacted report to the American public, claiming that white supremacists were actively infiltrating police departments all over America. If you’re old enough, many of you probably remember this being discussed on the national news front for a short blip of time, and then as the news cycle goes, it became something you heard once. Fourteen years later, America is burdened with a police system that regularly and systematically murders Black and brown bodies. This isn’t an accident. Although there are many contributing factors to systematic racism and uncontrolled police violence, police officers are a big factor.
What happened after that FBI report in 2006? Absolutely nothing, except the FBI, continue to investigate it. A 2017 article by the Intercept found that white supremacists and other domestic extremists maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies.
Police stop Black motorists at a higher rate than their white counterparts. There is a staggering disparity of a racial gap in American arrests. Black people are seven times more likely to be convicted of murder or even charged with a petty crime. And, of course, there are racial disparities in how the police use force.Â
On top of the fact that white supremacists have infiltrated America’s law enforcement for 20 years, Lt. Col. Grossman is teaching them not to feel bad for killing “the bad guy.”
Grossman and those who support him argue that since it’s a justifiable homicide, they shouldn’t beat themselves up over it. He teaches police, “you are the good guy, and you’re protecting the people from bad guys.” This method of teaching completely ignores the fact that white supremacists have been infiltrating law enforcement. It completely ignores how policing plays a role in systematic racism. We should not be teaching police officers to be soldiers.
Hundreds of Americans are killed every year at the hands of police after a traffic stop or a welfare check. Lt. Col. Grossman teaches that they are all bad guys and crime is out of control. On one podcast I listened to, he talks about how the crime rate is three to four times higher than what the data actually tells us.
Listen to the video on the left. This is the training material being produced by Grossman. It pushes combat readiness for police and outlines fear-based pre-attack indicators.
Think about all of the police killings over the last decade. How many of those officers have killed without de-escalation? How many have killed while a person was complying? And how many police officers said they killed because they were in fear of their life.
Grossman has also been involved with politics.
Check out this 2018 social media post:
Criminal justice reform? How can you reform white supremacists who have learned to kill without empathy? If we ever hope to live in a world where police aren’t murdering unarmed Black men daily, this type of training should be banned in America. Policing needs to have more empathy, and this training is teaching them to have less.
Lt. Col. Grossman is in Texas today, somewhere with an audience full of cops, telling them not to feel bad about killing bad guys because they’ll have great sex afterward.
America is broken because of men like this. If we want to fix it, the approach has to change.
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