{"id":3266,"date":"2015-09-04T11:15:42","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T15:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=3266"},"modified":"2015-09-04T11:15:42","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T15:15:42","slug":"about-retraining-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/about-retraining-police\/","title":{"rendered":"ABOUT RETRAINING POLICE\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of posts back, we had a guest essay by one of our regular commentators<\/a>.\u00a0 Much of what I\u2019d have said has already been posted by other commentators, so I\u2019ll be fairly brief.\"11895147_10153631070746336_3650196706485858672_o\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) is, as others have said, seen by some as being a bit left of center. I don\u2019t actually mind that. I am more concerned that some, myself included, see PERF as tinged by \u201civory tower\u201d syndrome.\u00a0 When you perceive yourself as very high above the street, you forget that the street is where policing takes place, and it\u2019s easy to lose sight of realities.<\/p>\n

Speaking as a sworn officer for more of my life than not: Yes, we understand that \u201cthe voices\u201d may have told him to attack you (or us), and it \u201cmay not be his fault.\u201d However, it\u2019s not your fault (or ours) either, and cop or \u201ccivilian,\u201d your right to protect yourself against his assault and meet force with force does not change.\u00a0 Neither an artificially altered state of consciousness nor an official diagnosis of insanity makes your attacker \u2013 or mine \u2013 a protected species.\u00a0 Yes, it would be nice if we could bring in an intensively trained Crisis Intervention Team to talk your attacker down and get him in touch with his inner child, or perhaps, his inner juvenile delinquent.\u00a0 Time is the essence in any sort of negotiation, including verbal crisis intervention. \u201cDetached reflection\u201d is a key ingredient.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that ingredient is missing from the recipe of reality in the cases that have brought about this discussion.\u00a0 It has been almost a hundred years since Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, \u201cDetached reflection is not demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.\u201d (SCOTUS,<\/a> Brown v. United States, <\/em>1921<\/a>.)\u00a0 It remains the law, and the truth, today.<\/p>\n

The police are actually pretty well trained in bloodshed-reducing crisis intervention already; witness the prevalence of George Thompson\u2019s \u201cverbal judo\u201d concept, championed today by my old friend and master police instructor and martial artist Gary Klugiewicz.<\/p>\n

But neither you nor I can fit a whole lot of detached reflection into a second or two when the soon-to-be \u201cunarmed victim\u201d is trying to stab you with his knife, or kill you with your own gun.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, in a time when screwing with cops in front of your iPhone so you can upload your douchebaggery instantly to YouTube is seen as something about to become a national sport, nobody has trained the public how to react to law enforcement. Police\/citizen contacts ARE a two way street, after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of posts back, we had a guest essay by one of our regular commentators.\u00a0 Much of what I\u2019d have said has already been posted by other commentators, so I\u2019ll be fairly brief. The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) is, as others have said, seen by some as being a bit left of center. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-current-events"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}