When George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis in 2020, many terrible ideas sprang forth, including defunding or dismantling the police.
What many people miss is that training is the issue in many use-of-force incidents gone wrong. With that in mind, many police departments took that incident as an impetus to increase police training.
In policing, officers attend the police academy for anywhere between ten weeks to half a year. When I attended the police academy in 1980, it was ten weeks.
In my particular department, officers (myself included) were put on the streets before attending the police academy. A bad idea? You bet. It wasn’t until a lousy use-of-force incident where the town was sued that police academy training was mandatory before going out on the street.
My “field training” program consisted of riding one week with an assortment of day shift officers, which included visits to tag sales, a local hockey rink, and our senior officer, Nicky B., stopping by a local farm stand to get tomatoes for “mama.”
The second week was riding along with evening shift officers, where I was baptized to keep my head on a swivel, and if your partner ducks, you better do so as well. A punch to the jaw taught me that lesson as we wrestled with an entire family in the middle of one of my town’s busiest streets.
Fortunately, that is no longer the case. My old department now has a formalized field training officer (FTO) program where officers ride along with a trained FTO for (I believe) 14 weeks before they are released for solo capacity.
Some rookie officers wash out of the program, which is a testament to its intensity. Things are much better in 2023 than they were 43 years ago.
Yet, in many departments in our country, getting certified as an HVAC technician, plumber, or hair stylist takes longer than becoming a police officer.
Foreign countries have gotten the message. European countries such as Finland, Denmark, and Germany, which deal with less crime than American police, spend much more time training their police officers before releasing them onto the streets with the power to deprive citizens of their liberty.
For example, Finland requires police to undergo 5,500 hours of training. Comparatively, Georgia only requires 408 training hours for its officers.
It is a fact that better-trained police officers are better officers, especially in an increasingly complex world. I have seen first-hand that poorly trained officers often resort to improper use of force and are less able to deal with stressful situations.
Firearms training is one of the most critical skills that police officers must acquire. Yet, in many police agencies, training is the first thing to go when municipalities seek to cut budgets.
In some departments, officers only qualify with their firearms once per year, and that is shooting at stationary paper targets. Realistic firearms training under stress is, unfortunately, an afterthought.
An article in World News Daily speaks of the Newark, New Jersey, police department, which had a contentious relationship with its citizens for years.
The department was under a court order to get its house in order. In that regard, Newark has responded by adopting yearly seminars for police officers, with a focus on training on mental health programs for traumatized police officers.
In 2022, 180 police officers committed suicide, three times the number shot and killed in the line of duty. Statistics show that police officers have a 54% greater risk of suicide than the general population. That is why the program put in place by Newark is so essential.
As mentioned, Georgia is on the bottom end of the scale regarding police training. In response, Atlanta is developing a state-of-the-art training facility, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Such a development would be welcome news since well-trained police officers are better officers.
Unbelievably, the development of the Center has been met with strong opposition, primarily by radical leftists. Radicals have taken to social media, complaining the training center is designed to advance “white supremacy” and will increase “militarization tactics” among police.
The construction site has been the scene of violent protests, including arson. The most radical of the opposition has claimed Israeli special forces will be used to train the Atlanta Police Department to “terrorize” minority groups. That is, of course, absurd.
All of that has come as a surprise to city leaders, who have opened planning meetings to the public in the interests of transparency. They note it will officer first responders, including police, firefighters, and other emergency responders, training in best practices.
None of that makes a difference to the opponents on the other side, one of whom took to a podcast to call “Cop City” an attempt to “link intensive policing, undemocratic land use processes with the issue of climate change” and “a global struggle against fascism” to “disrupt the machinery of capitalism.”
In other words, it’s a smorgasbord of radical leftist ideology wrapped into a complaint about a training facility. The training center has attracted radicals from Atlanta and all across the fruited plain.
WND notes that one city council meeting saw protesters from as far away as Los Angeles showing at the hearing while protesters outside chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.”
Clearly, these violent protesters are not interested in lowering the temperature between police and citizens. What Atlanta is trying to do is what more police agencies throughout the United States should be trying to do.
As Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in the city, said, “Atlanta has an opportunity to create the prototype of what real training should look like, a model for the rest of the country.” He lamented the presence of the anarchists trying to prevent the facility's construction.
“Antifa, they don’t want any kind of training; they don’t want any police. No policing is no answer. We got to have police, and you got to have trained police,” McDonald said.
McDonald has advised on police reform efforts throughout the United States, so he knows that of which he speaks.
This is the issue when you are dealing with radical leftists. They complain about overzealous police and “systemic” problems with policing, yet when an agency, in this case Atlanta, takes steps to address those very complaints, they lose their minds. Worse still, it attracts the loons from around the U.S. and the globe.
For example, during violent confrontations earlier this year, only two of the 23 arrested were from Georgia. Some traveled from as far away as Canada and France. One has to wonder who is funding these individuals.
Another protest in 2022 saw every single demonstrator coming from outside Georgia. Construction crews have been attacked, and local legislators intimidated.
In one case, a protest turned deadly when an armed protester fired a shot that injured a Georgia state trooper. In response, the protester, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, was shot and killed by police. That has further fueled the radicals, with “Stop Cop City” signs being spotted in Brooklyn and San Francisco in the U.S. and Paris, France.
These radicals don’t want better-trained police…they want no police. Efforts to train police to work alongside mental health professionals in New Jersey have been met with outrage by anarchists, with one local group claiming the “white power establishment wants to build cop city everywhere.”
So, who is funding these individuals? WND writes one who is funding the group is James “Fergie” Chambers, heir to a billionaire media fortune who pledged $600,000 for the campaign against the training center.
Solidaire, funded by none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy California donors, has provided tips to activists on how to stop the training center.
Zuckerberg seems to have his entrails in many anti-American activities, no?
The irony of all this protest is that former president Barack Obama, who promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America," commissioned a committee on police reform, mentioning the inadequate training of police officers as a priority.
After the Floyd death and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the discussion focused on body-worn cameras, better training, and enhanced legal accountability. That, however, isn’t the goal of the radical left.
Instead, the spoiled brat millennial children of the wealthy concern themselves with virtue signaling and rising in opposition to the “system,” whatever that system is. Despite bloviating about “public safety,” they have zero interest in the issue. They just want to be “against” something.
At one time, WND noted, the NAACP supported Obama’s calls for better police training, calling such measures “absolutely critical.” That was in 2015. Fast forward to 2023, and now, Gary Spencer of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund speaks in opposition to the Atlanta training center, claiming it is a project for “perpetuating militarized policing that will endanger the lives of our residents, our visitors and put the black people and brown people in Atlanta at a heightened risk of police violence.”
Ironically, the Atlanta police training center came about after a police shooting in 2020 where Rayshard Brooks was killed after grabbing a police officer’s Taser. As usual, that led to violent protests in Atlanta.
In the aftermath, then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms vowed to increase the training of police officers. In April 2021, Bottoms announced the creation of a new public safety training facility.
She hoped the facility would overhaul the department and help recruit new officers while training them in modern policing techniques and focusing on tactics to avoid officer-involved shootings.
The proposed training center has gathered the usual members of the grievance mob, from cop haters, anarchists, environmental wackos, the LGBTQ crowd, etc. The city has tried to accommodate the mob within reason, including agreeing to plant 100 hardwood trees for every tree removed, placing the shooting range indoors, and forbidding the use of helicopters and explosives. None of that matters.
One particular lunatic claims the project will further genocide. The tattoo-covered man, who claimed he was dedicated to “fighting fascism,” made the histrionic claim that the U.S. had gone from “putting bullets in Nazi’s heads” to now “reward[ing] them with pay raises and playgrounds.”
Another activist followed that absurdity, claiming the facility would result in “queer trans people, black people, indigenous people” being “killed.” Talk about a leap.
The training center issue has undoubtedly created strange bedfellows. A local Atlanta activist, Rev. Gerald Durley, strongly supports the training center and has participated in its creation.
“Police, certainly in America, need more training, not just on police investigations, but on de-escalation and crowd control,” he said. “When you come down to the actual facts and figures, this training center would be something good.”
“Something good.” This training center would be a state-of-the-art facility that would be the envy of police departments across the country. It would help to solve what many on the left have complained about for years; however, they are not interested in solutions.
They are continually looking for the next thing to be angry about. Six years ago, it was about Trump being inaugurated. Three years ago, it was about George Floyd. This year, it’s about a police training facility.
Need a hobby anyone?
What many people miss is that training is the issue in many use-of-force incidents gone wrong. With that in mind, many police departments took that incident as an impetus to increase police training.
In policing, officers attend the police academy for anywhere between ten weeks to half a year. When I attended the police academy in 1980, it was ten weeks.
In my particular department, officers (myself included) were put on the streets before attending the police academy. A bad idea? You bet. It wasn’t until a lousy use-of-force incident where the town was sued that police academy training was mandatory before going out on the street.
My “field training” program consisted of riding one week with an assortment of day shift officers, which included visits to tag sales, a local hockey rink, and our senior officer, Nicky B., stopping by a local farm stand to get tomatoes for “mama.”
The second week was riding along with evening shift officers, where I was baptized to keep my head on a swivel, and if your partner ducks, you better do so as well. A punch to the jaw taught me that lesson as we wrestled with an entire family in the middle of one of my town’s busiest streets.
Fortunately, that is no longer the case. My old department now has a formalized field training officer (FTO) program where officers ride along with a trained FTO for (I believe) 14 weeks before they are released for solo capacity.
Some rookie officers wash out of the program, which is a testament to its intensity. Things are much better in 2023 than they were 43 years ago.
Yet, in many departments in our country, getting certified as an HVAC technician, plumber, or hair stylist takes longer than becoming a police officer.
Foreign countries have gotten the message. European countries such as Finland, Denmark, and Germany, which deal with less crime than American police, spend much more time training their police officers before releasing them onto the streets with the power to deprive citizens of their liberty.
For example, Finland requires police to undergo 5,500 hours of training. Comparatively, Georgia only requires 408 training hours for its officers.
It is a fact that better-trained police officers are better officers, especially in an increasingly complex world. I have seen first-hand that poorly trained officers often resort to improper use of force and are less able to deal with stressful situations.
Firearms training is one of the most critical skills that police officers must acquire. Yet, in many police agencies, training is the first thing to go when municipalities seek to cut budgets.
In some departments, officers only qualify with their firearms once per year, and that is shooting at stationary paper targets. Realistic firearms training under stress is, unfortunately, an afterthought.
An article in World News Daily speaks of the Newark, New Jersey, police department, which had a contentious relationship with its citizens for years.
The department was under a court order to get its house in order. In that regard, Newark has responded by adopting yearly seminars for police officers, with a focus on training on mental health programs for traumatized police officers.
In 2022, 180 police officers committed suicide, three times the number shot and killed in the line of duty. Statistics show that police officers have a 54% greater risk of suicide than the general population. That is why the program put in place by Newark is so essential.
As mentioned, Georgia is on the bottom end of the scale regarding police training. In response, Atlanta is developing a state-of-the-art training facility, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Such a development would be welcome news since well-trained police officers are better officers.
Unbelievably, the development of the Center has been met with strong opposition, primarily by radical leftists. Radicals have taken to social media, complaining the training center is designed to advance “white supremacy” and will increase “militarization tactics” among police.
The construction site has been the scene of violent protests, including arson. The most radical of the opposition has claimed Israeli special forces will be used to train the Atlanta Police Department to “terrorize” minority groups. That is, of course, absurd.
All of that has come as a surprise to city leaders, who have opened planning meetings to the public in the interests of transparency. They note it will officer first responders, including police, firefighters, and other emergency responders, training in best practices.
None of that makes a difference to the opponents on the other side, one of whom took to a podcast to call “Cop City” an attempt to “link intensive policing, undemocratic land use processes with the issue of climate change” and “a global struggle against fascism” to “disrupt the machinery of capitalism.”
In other words, it’s a smorgasbord of radical leftist ideology wrapped into a complaint about a training facility. The training center has attracted radicals from Atlanta and all across the fruited plain.
WND notes that one city council meeting saw protesters from as far away as Los Angeles showing at the hearing while protesters outside chanted, “If you build it, we will burn it.”
Clearly, these violent protesters are not interested in lowering the temperature between police and citizens. What Atlanta is trying to do is what more police agencies throughout the United States should be trying to do.
As Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in the city, said, “Atlanta has an opportunity to create the prototype of what real training should look like, a model for the rest of the country.” He lamented the presence of the anarchists trying to prevent the facility's construction.
“Antifa, they don’t want any kind of training; they don’t want any police. No policing is no answer. We got to have police, and you got to have trained police,” McDonald said.
McDonald has advised on police reform efforts throughout the United States, so he knows that of which he speaks.
This is the issue when you are dealing with radical leftists. They complain about overzealous police and “systemic” problems with policing, yet when an agency, in this case Atlanta, takes steps to address those very complaints, they lose their minds. Worse still, it attracts the loons from around the U.S. and the globe.
For example, during violent confrontations earlier this year, only two of the 23 arrested were from Georgia. Some traveled from as far away as Canada and France. One has to wonder who is funding these individuals.
Another protest in 2022 saw every single demonstrator coming from outside Georgia. Construction crews have been attacked, and local legislators intimidated.
In one case, a protest turned deadly when an armed protester fired a shot that injured a Georgia state trooper. In response, the protester, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran, was shot and killed by police. That has further fueled the radicals, with “Stop Cop City” signs being spotted in Brooklyn and San Francisco in the U.S. and Paris, France.
These radicals don’t want better-trained police…they want no police. Efforts to train police to work alongside mental health professionals in New Jersey have been met with outrage by anarchists, with one local group claiming the “white power establishment wants to build cop city everywhere.”
So, who is funding these individuals? WND writes one who is funding the group is James “Fergie” Chambers, heir to a billionaire media fortune who pledged $600,000 for the campaign against the training center.
Solidaire, funded by none other than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other wealthy California donors, has provided tips to activists on how to stop the training center.
Zuckerberg seems to have his entrails in many anti-American activities, no?
The irony of all this protest is that former president Barack Obama, who promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America," commissioned a committee on police reform, mentioning the inadequate training of police officers as a priority.
After the Floyd death and the rise of Black Lives Matter, the discussion focused on body-worn cameras, better training, and enhanced legal accountability. That, however, isn’t the goal of the radical left.
Instead, the spoiled brat millennial children of the wealthy concern themselves with virtue signaling and rising in opposition to the “system,” whatever that system is. Despite bloviating about “public safety,” they have zero interest in the issue. They just want to be “against” something.
At one time, WND noted, the NAACP supported Obama’s calls for better police training, calling such measures “absolutely critical.” That was in 2015. Fast forward to 2023, and now, Gary Spencer of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund speaks in opposition to the Atlanta training center, claiming it is a project for “perpetuating militarized policing that will endanger the lives of our residents, our visitors and put the black people and brown people in Atlanta at a heightened risk of police violence.”
Ironically, the Atlanta police training center came about after a police shooting in 2020 where Rayshard Brooks was killed after grabbing a police officer’s Taser. As usual, that led to violent protests in Atlanta.
In the aftermath, then-Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms vowed to increase the training of police officers. In April 2021, Bottoms announced the creation of a new public safety training facility.
She hoped the facility would overhaul the department and help recruit new officers while training them in modern policing techniques and focusing on tactics to avoid officer-involved shootings.
The proposed training center has gathered the usual members of the grievance mob, from cop haters, anarchists, environmental wackos, the LGBTQ crowd, etc. The city has tried to accommodate the mob within reason, including agreeing to plant 100 hardwood trees for every tree removed, placing the shooting range indoors, and forbidding the use of helicopters and explosives. None of that matters.
One particular lunatic claims the project will further genocide. The tattoo-covered man, who claimed he was dedicated to “fighting fascism,” made the histrionic claim that the U.S. had gone from “putting bullets in Nazi’s heads” to now “reward[ing] them with pay raises and playgrounds.”
Another activist followed that absurdity, claiming the facility would result in “queer trans people, black people, indigenous people” being “killed.” Talk about a leap.
The training center issue has undoubtedly created strange bedfellows. A local Atlanta activist, Rev. Gerald Durley, strongly supports the training center and has participated in its creation.
“Police, certainly in America, need more training, not just on police investigations, but on de-escalation and crowd control,” he said. “When you come down to the actual facts and figures, this training center would be something good.”
“Something good.” This training center would be a state-of-the-art facility that would be the envy of police departments across the country. It would help to solve what many on the left have complained about for years; however, they are not interested in solutions.
They are continually looking for the next thing to be angry about. Six years ago, it was about Trump being inaugurated. Three years ago, it was about George Floyd. This year, it’s about a police training facility.
Need a hobby anyone?
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The opinions reflected in this article are not necessarily the opinions of LET
Comments
2023-09-12T16:03-0500 | Comment by: S
Some of the worst things to happen to America were OBUMMER, Suckerberg, BLM and St. George…. I’m sure they’ll be to come. 🥴