The Bulletproof Warrior. Street Survival. These evocatively named classes were among the training electives taken by the officer involved in the Falcon Heights shooting last week.
A Twin Cities man who took one of the classes said he was greatly disturbed by what he saw — an instructor goading law enforcement students to not hesitate to shoot, and assuring them they’d be legally covered if they did. A promotional video for the other urged officers to visualize killing someone, to get “back in the game,” or get killed.
But supporters of the classes say their message is being grossly misunderstood — that the point is to make officers less nervous, and thus less likely to make mistakes or overreact. And they add that de-escalation is always stressed, first and foremost.
Last week, St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot 32-year-old Philando Castile during a traffic stop on Larpenteur Avenue. His fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed the immediate aftermath on Facebook, and the incident has spurred protests nationwide.
In addition to Yanez, St. Paul police spokesman Steve Linders said roughly 60 to 75 St. Paul police officers have taken the Bulletproof Warrior class, which is not required.
OUTSIDER’S VIEW
William Czech of Mendota Heights went to the class saying he was a student wanting to learn about law enforcement. He said he grew interested in use of force after a family member and friends had had negative interactions with police in the past.
He took two classes by Glen Ellyn, Ill.-based Calibre Press in 2014, one called Anatomy of Force Incidents, and another called Bulletproof Warrior — which he shared with Yanez.
The first went into the U.S. Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor, in which the court decided that “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”
“It really was spreading the good news that Graham v. Connor is very permissive,” Czech said. “Really the message was that not reacting was a mistake because officer safety was compromised by not reacting at the first possible indication that something might be wrong.”
Then he took Bulletproof Warrior — the course attended by Yanez — which Czech said “was a slow drip of the same message. … The message that darn near anything could represent in the right conditions a threat that the officer could reasonably articulate.”
The course was co-taught by Calibre co-owner Jim Glennon, and another instructor, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, though Czech said he had problems solely with Glennon’s teaching.
In particular, Czech was disturbed by a video of a Minnesota state trooper who followed a drunken driver. The driver stopped but ignored orders for a time, and eventually pulled out a long gun, loaded it and pointed it — at which point the trooper shot.
As the man fumbled, “At this point, Glennon was saying — like just about every video we’d seen — why aren’t you shooting? … I saw a hero, who was trying not to kill someone, and he saw an officer who was screwing up, who was hesitating. He clearly didn’t like hesitation in any of these videos.
“I think the people that do this training, they are victimizing these officers. They came out of these trainings scared out of their wits,” Czech said.
‘BEST TRAINER I’VE EVER SEEN’
The course was taught at the St. Paul Police Professional Development Institute, which is accredited to both certify and teach classes for police continuing-education credits. It does so for law enforcement officials nationwide.
St. Paul police Cmdr. Ed Lemon, who was in charge of the institute at the time and attended the class, said Czech was way off-base with respect to the point of Glennon’s lesson.
“Jim is the best trainer I’ve ever seen in my life. … Does Jim ever say, ‘shoot, ask questions later’? No,” Lemon said. “I would say that’s a complete distortion of the event … and the fact is he (Czech) was looking to criticize the course.”
“The bulletproof warrior is about a mindset; it’s ‘do everything you can to de-escalate and get someone to willingly be taken into custody, but don’t lock yourself into something where you can’t transition if you need to be that warrior,’” Lemon said. “It’s not ‘be the aggressor’ — all of this is in response to threats. You’re doing what you need to do; you’re not underreacting or overreacting.”
Officers unaccustomed to extremely confrontational situations might freeze or overreact under pressure — and the point of the course was to get them to where they wouldn’t be nervous enough to do either, Lemon said.
As for the video of the Minnesota trooper, Lemon said, Glennon was mostly criticizing the fact that the trooper didn’t keep firing after his first shot didn’t kill the drunken driver, who was still armed with a rifle capable of penetrating armor.
Reached Thursday afternoon, Glennon said the Bulletproof Warrior course is now simply called Bulletproof, changed after some “political bodies” got skittish about the word “warrior.”
“Though the word ‘warrior’ was not used in the context that they think it was,” Glennon said. “The word ‘warrior’ has been hijacked by people in order to prove their false thesis, that law enforcement officers are training like military warriors, which is to shoot first, ask questions later; that everybody’s out to kill you, so you better kill them first.
“And there is absolutely zero truth to that in our course, none,” Glennon said, adding that he was “looking at some legal recourse right now about that because the information he (Czech) came out with is not true.”
STREET SURVIVAL
Yanez took another Calibre course called Street Survival in 2013. A promotional video for that course on Calibre’s website Thursday morning showed instructors speaking to a room full of students. As hard rock music plays in the background, one of the instructors begins to speak:
“If we’re in a room and somebody’s trying to kill us, we need to be ready to kill them right back. Have you visualized killing somebody? Have you ever thought about it? (unintelligible) made this stop, suspicious DWI, winds up with a pistol in his face, but he psychologically gets back in the game.
“And that’s what we have to work on, getting psychologically back in that game because even for a split second, we’re going to be taken out of the game. So we gotta get back in the game. That’s winning, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what we gotta do.”
By Thursday evening, the video had been removed from Calibre’s site and was no longer viewable on YouTube.
In 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Peter Robison took the class, and wrote a story on it.
Robison wrote: “Like many companies in the business, Calibre promotes a ‘warrior’ mentality for police, likening cops to soldiers and focusing on conflict, vigilance, and martial skills. … Heart attacks, suicides, car accidents, and errors of judgment are all discussed, but most pervasive is the sense that an officer unaware of his surroundings is doomed to assault from an unseen threat — that any routine traffic stop can end in a shootout and that the only rational response is to be in a state of lethal alert at all times.”
Glennon said, “There’s one slide (in that course) with the word ‘warrior’ in the whole two days — it says ‘guardian heart, warrior spirit,’ and the next slide is all about balance. I had four slides about ‘treat people with dignity and respect.’ This is why I’ll never let the media in again.”
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
The term “warrior” has been a hot button in law enforcement.
After protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, President Barack Obama formed a Task Force on 21st Century Policing. In recommendations released last year, the group said, “Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian — rather than a warrior — mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with the public.”
The Police Executive Research Forum, a national nonprofit that researches policing, recently published a paper that echoed the president’s call.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Forum, said he believes the Bulletproof course “flows in the face of the current thinking on de-escalation, which attempts to look upstream at what officers can do to protect both themselves, and the person they’re dealing with. It can’t simply be about officer survival.”
“When I read (the Forum report), I thought, this is really a challenge to the culture,” said Maplewood Police Chief Paul Schnell, who often speaks for the police chiefs association at the Legislature. “But I know some line cops will say, ‘It’s a bunch of (expletive) chiefs who don’t have a clue what it’s like to be on the street.’ ”
A 2015 column in the Harvard Law Review by Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and assistant professor of criminal law at the University of South Carolina, decried “a warrior problem” in law enforcement — a doctrine of hyper-vigilance and fear of lethal threat from “every individual, every situation — no exceptions” as creating a “substantial, if invisible, barrier to true community policing.”
“You have been told (repeatedly) that your survival depends on believing that everyone you see — literally everyone — is capable of, and may very well be interested in, killing you. Put in that position, would you actually get out of your car and approach someone?” Stoughton wrote.
St. Paul police commander Lemon offered multiple examples of criminals that acted friendly at first, before attacking, and believed many officers were not prepared for that — which he saw as a problem with training.
Andy Skoogman, executive director of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, said he wasn’t familiar with the Bulletproof class, but said, “There has to be a balance in the training approach between the guardian and warrior mentalities, and I think if you look at the wide scope of available trainings approved by the police officer standards and training board in Minnesota, you will find that.”
Yanez also took at least eight hours of use-of-force training every full year since he was hired in 2011, as well as two hours of de-escalation training in May of this year.
