Critics blamed the training program for fostering a culture of aggressive policing that goes back decades.
Retired Minneapolis Deputy Chief Greg Hestness wondered how much of Lane and Kueng’s coaches may have influenced the novice officers, saying he was impressed by how quickly Floyd’s arrest on a $ 20 counterfeit bill reached Lane yelling at Floyd for “show me yours [expletive] hands!”
“Where does this come from on the 4th?” he asked.
“A really cynical but deserving question is, would Chauvin have been kneeling over him for so long if he hadn’t been training officers at the time?” said Michael Friedman, a former executive director of the Legal Rights Center, saying it looked like Chauvin was “trying to demonstrate how to control a person”.
Gerald Moore, a retired veteran over the age of 30 from the Minneapolis Police Department, said that since novice officers must undergo regular assessments before they can leave on their own, this can create damaging power dynamics with their training officers.
For some, the biggest problem is the tendency for some officers not to question and intervene when a colleague – especially a senior officer – uses excessive force.
After Floyd’s death, Minneapolis Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo announced a stricter “duty to intervene” policy that says officers who witness another officer “use any prohibited or inappropriate or irrational force” should try to “intervene safely by verbal and physical means”.
For years, groups like United Communities Against Police Brutality have been pushing for the department to adopt a peer intervention training program developed by the New Orleans Police Department, based on the premise that there is a tendency for police not to intervene when they see it. a colleague is involved in misconduct.
The program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, or EPIC, is based on the premise that intervention must be taught through training and role play and must be continually reinforced through more training, to the point of infusing departmental culture.
The St. Paul police participate in the training, but Minneapolis does not. The debate over police training has been brewing in Minneapolis in recent years, following a series of murders of civilians on duty.