Critics have blamed the training program for fostering a culture of aggressive police work dating back decades.
Retired Minneapolis deputy chief Greg Hestness wondered how many of Lane and Kueng’s trainers would have rubbed off the novice officers, saying he noticed how quickly their arrest of Floyd after a fake $ 20 bill escalated in Lane that yelled at Floyd to ‘show me you [expletive] hands! “
“Where did that come from on day 4?” he asked.
“A really cynical but worthy question is, Would Chauvin have knelt on him for so long if he hadn’t trained the officers at the time?” said Michael Friedman, a former executive director of the Legal Rights Center, who said it looked like Chauvin was “trying to demonstrate how to control a person.”
Gerald Moore, a retired 30-plus-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department, said that because rookie officers need to be regularly evaluated before they can go out alone, it can create an unhealthy power dynamic in their training officers.
For some, the bigger problem is the tendency of some officers not to ask questions and to intervene when a colleague – especially a senior officer – uses excessive force.
After the death of Floyd, Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo announced a stricter “duty to intervene” policy that says agents who witness another officer “use prohibited force, or use improper or unreasonable force” to attempt to “safely intervene by verbal and physical means” .
Groups like Communities United Against Police Brutality have for years urged the department to adopt a peer intervention training program developed by the New Orleans Police Department, based on the premise that officers tend not to respond. when they see a colleague. are guilty of misconduct.
The program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, or EPIC, is based on the premise that intervention should be taught through training and role-playing and continually enhanced through more training to the point that it permeates departmental culture.
The St. Paul Police Department is participating in the training, but Minneapolis is not. The debate over police training has started in Minneapolis in recent years after a series of high-profile murders of civilians on duty.