Speaker 1: M what's overthrowing the government? My everyone? Uh, this is
Speaker 1: Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the show about bad people, UH,
Speaker 1: recording right now in the middle of what's what's rapidly
Speaker 1: turning into a nationwide insurrection against uh legally constituted power. Uh.
Speaker 1: And my guest, as with all insurrections, is the inimitable
Speaker 1: Jack O'Brien. Yeah, what's up, guys. How quite a year Jack. Yeah.
Speaker 1: As you can see, I'm standing in from the flaming
Speaker 1: police headquarters. I have a sword, my shirt is tied
Speaker 1: around my head, uh, and I'm covered in blood. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm I am really you know Jack, when you got
Speaker 1: that full chest fuck the police tattoo last year, I said,
Speaker 1: when are you going to have a chance to show
Speaker 1: that off? And I, by god I was wrong. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's been pretty wild. Uh. Yeah, Yeah, you've
Speaker 1: been talking about the possibility of an American civil war
Speaker 1: for a long time. Uh. I sure have converted me
Speaker 1: into believing that was, you know, more possible than uh
Speaker 1: we realized. And now I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: people are probably having that same realization. Yeah. It was
Speaker 1: almost exactly a year ago that I put out the
Speaker 1: episodes of it could Happen Here that talked about the
Speaker 1: President potentially laying siege to American cities with US troops.
Speaker 1: UM and uh, now now that appears to be happening.
Speaker 1: So I didn't want to be right about that one,
Speaker 1: but you were about to tell me what we're talking
Speaker 1: about today. So first off, this is a bonus episode,
Speaker 1: and it's the second bonus episode we recorded. You'll get
Speaker 1: that other episode at a later point. This is a
Speaker 1: bonus episode because back thirty thousand years ago, my listeners
Speaker 1: raised like sixteen thousand dollars to buy diapers for poor
Speaker 1: women in Portland and Northern Oregon. UM, poor families, people
Speaker 1: who couldn't afford diapers, which is awesome. It was very
Speaker 1: nice of you guys funded the diaper bank in Portland
Speaker 1: here for the rest of the year. So that's one
Speaker 1: problem among everything else that a lot of people don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about. And I so this is a
Speaker 1: free episode, a third episode special for all of you.
Speaker 1: UM and I really were re recording a separate one
Speaker 1: because this this I wanted to do something timely what
Speaker 1: with the riots. So we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: bastard who trains cops to kill That is the subject
Speaker 1: of today's podcast. Yeah. Man, yeah, it's gonna be fun.
Speaker 1: Somebody's got to do it. I guess right. I not
Speaker 1: somebody has to do it, but there must have been
Speaker 1: somebody else. If someone is doing it, for sure, Yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody is clearly doing it. I think we could probably
Speaker 1: get by without someone doing this. But someone is doing
Speaker 1: would be wonderful if somebody didn't do that, wouldn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it it is definitely being done. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: gonna talk about that today. Um yeah. So we're we're
Speaker 1: all currently in the middle of a let's let's call
Speaker 1: it a complicated moment in our the history of our
Speaker 1: national relationship with our police. Uh. As I type this,
Speaker 1: it's like less than twelve hours after a crowd of
Speaker 1: activists breached, occupied, and burnt down a Minneapolis police station.
Speaker 1: Um and this is the first time anything like this
Speaker 1: has occurred to my knowledge since the Battle of Athens,
Speaker 1: Georgia in nineteen forty six. I think it was Georgia.
Speaker 1: Um and that was like a bunch of veterans, very
Speaker 1: different story. We'll talk about it at some point. Protests
Speaker 1: in marches and by this time. You know that by
Speaker 1: the time you hear this, maybe even riots are like
Speaker 1: cropping out all over the country. People were shot in
Speaker 1: Louisville last night, I think also in Phoenix. Like it's
Speaker 1: just it's going down a former Kentucky and I can't
Speaker 1: let you call Louisville. It's Louisville. This is what the
Speaker 1: Civil War is gonna be over, Jack louis or louis Yeah,
Speaker 1: Louisville Americans banded together to fight against the pronunciation of
Speaker 1: Louisville or for it. I don't know how most people
Speaker 1: will break down. Um, Kentucky and the time for Yeah,
Speaker 1: I apologize for interrupting. Uh no, no, what was a
Speaker 1: very very serious and important thing you were saying. I
Speaker 1: uh but yeah, I just couldn't do it without uh
Speaker 1: you know my fellow Kentuckians inside my head getting very
Speaker 1: yeah fair enough. So as we're all aware the this
Speaker 1: this all started off like the kind of the spark
Speaker 1: to all. This was the blatant and outrageous murder of
Speaker 1: George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers on funk. I
Speaker 1: think like Monday of this, yeah, Jess, it feels like years.
Speaker 1: Uh good lord, um so Yeah, that was a spark, um,
Speaker 1: and it was the spark that caught all of this.
Speaker 1: But that spark was only able to catch because over
Speaker 1: the last several years, Americans have become increasingly aware of
Speaker 1: how often black men in particular are murdered by police
Speaker 1: under very shady circumstances. Minneapolis itself has a particularly full
Speaker 1: modern history of this. In two thousand ten, David Smith,
Speaker 1: a bipolar black man, was a Minneapolis y m c
Speaker 1: A acting bizarrely. Bizarrely is the term used to describe
Speaker 1: it by people the y m c A folks uh ship.
Speaker 1: Note here that Americans with untreated mental illnesses are sixteen
Speaker 1: times as likely as other Americans to be killed by
Speaker 1: the police. UM. So the police were called on Mr
Speaker 1: Smith UH. They tased him multiple times and held him
Speaker 1: down on the ground. One officer knelt on his back.
Speaker 1: He asphyxiated and died. UM. There were protests as a
Speaker 1: result of this UH, and the cops were eventually cleared
Speaker 1: of all wrongdoing. No one was punished. In two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: Jamark Clark, aged twenty four, was killed by police responding
Speaker 1: to a call over domestic disturbance. They handcuffed him and
Speaker 1: while he was on the ground, they shot him in
Speaker 1: the head, claiming he had reached for one of their weapons.
Speaker 1: Protesters occupied land around minneapolis Is Fourth Precinct, but the
Speaker 1: officers were again cleared of all wrongdoing. In two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: Philando Castile was stopped by Geronimo Jannez, a Minneapolis police officer,
Speaker 1: case Stile was carrying a legal concealed firearm. He informed
Speaker 1: officer Janez of this as he was required to do
Speaker 1: so um without pausing to breathe, and As drew his
Speaker 1: firearm and shot Castile to death in front of his girlfriend. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were protests, you know, As was charged with manslaughter
Speaker 1: and again found not guilty. I could go back further.
Speaker 1: These are not the only examples of this. In fact,
Speaker 1: I was doing I was trying to research earlier. You know,
Speaker 1: there's that that video going around with that guy with
Speaker 1: the the umbrella that some people think was an agent
Speaker 1: provocateur the auto zone UM in Minneapolis, and we were
Speaker 1: trying to like lockdown who it was, and I was
Speaker 1: looking into the officer people think it is, whose name
Speaker 1: I won't use just because I it's very unclear if
Speaker 1: that's actually the person. UM but that officer was involved
Speaker 1: in another shooting of a black man that was really sketchy.
Speaker 1: Like you, you just keep finding these cases and like
Speaker 1: so anyway, there's a ton of them in Minneapolis. Stop
Speaker 1: for a second, the person. Like the theory is that
Speaker 1: this person intentionally broke some windows to try and like
Speaker 1: insight rioting. Yeah, that's that's the theory from some protesters.
Speaker 1: I don't know how credible I think it is, like
Speaker 1: to be honest, like other stuff was already burning at
Speaker 1: that point. The video is weird. I'm not gonna it's
Speaker 1: not worth getting into at this moment, Like I yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I don't think I have to establish for
Speaker 1: anyone how often American police use force UH. In two thousand,
Speaker 1: five ninety Americans were killed in mass shootings. UH. Nine
Speaker 1: hundred and eighties seven Americans were killed by police officers.
Speaker 1: That's one year. So every year, police officers killed about
Speaker 1: twice as many people as die in mass shootings UM,
Speaker 1: and that number is probably very low because most police
Speaker 1: shootings actually are not reported in the way that you'd think.
Speaker 1: From the Columbine shooting UM to April two, nineteen, two
Speaker 1: twenty three Americans were killed in school shootings. So in
Speaker 1: the last twenty some years, two d twenty three Americans
Speaker 1: killed in school shootings, which means that every year American
Speaker 1: cops killed four times as many Americans as have died
Speaker 1: in school shootings in generation. So that's a lot of
Speaker 1: people being shot by cops, um, American police killed. The
Speaker 1: argument that pops into my head, coming from conservative people
Speaker 1: or just people who uh the Blue Lives matter set,
Speaker 1: would be that, well, how many of those people were
Speaker 1: trying to kill the cops um at the time when
Speaker 1: they were shot. But I mean, there's so many other
Speaker 1: countries where where the cops don't kill their citizens. Uh,
Speaker 1: And those those cops aren't like you know, dying by
Speaker 1: the in by droves. They are not they are not
Speaker 1: were This episode is about why. So the answer to
Speaker 1: that really is that most of these cops would say
Speaker 1: that they were in fear of their life, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that they were actually their lives were actually
Speaker 1: being threatened. Um. And this episode is about helps to
Speaker 1: explain a big part of why so many of those
Speaker 1: cops believe they were in fear for their lives or
Speaker 1: we'll we'll say that it may not be lying, which
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that it's okay, but it means that like
Speaker 1: they they are being trained to fear for their life
Speaker 1: and react with violence UM at a a a wildly
Speaker 1: disproportionate rate. And this is an episode about like how
Speaker 1: that happens. So one of the other things I want
Speaker 1: to note before we get into the main subject of
Speaker 1: the day is that the rate at which our police
Speaker 1: kill citizens seems to be accelerating. Is currently on target
Speaker 1: to match twenty nineteen for police killings of citizens, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that a huge portion of the country has
Speaker 1: been trapped inside for half the year so far. So
Speaker 1: despite the fact that people are not out nearly as often,
Speaker 1: are not traveling, or not out in the street, or
Speaker 1: not doing things nearly as often, UM, police are still
Speaker 1: killing the same number of Americans, uh, which is striking
Speaker 1: to me. That's that seems surprising because crime is to
Speaker 1: got you gotta fight against all those people wielding lisol
Speaker 1: and dangerous toilet paper packaging. Yeah. So the question, of
Speaker 1: course that you were just asking is like, why are
Speaker 1: why are things this way in America? UM? And the
Speaker 1: answer that some of my more militant UH left is
Speaker 1: for a would suggest probably boils down to all cops
Speaker 1: are bastards, and um I'm not going to disagree with that,
Speaker 1: but it's also not a satisfying answer because there are
Speaker 1: things that make American police very different from police and
Speaker 1: other countries. Um police and other countries have a lot
Speaker 1: of the same problems as US cops, but kill a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot fewer people per capita. Um So.
Speaker 1: There there is a reason that American cops are particularly aggressive,
Speaker 1: and a big part of this reason is the special
Speaker 1: training courses offered by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, the bulletproof
Speaker 1: mindset courses. Um SO. Officer Janez, who we talked about
Speaker 1: earlier is the guy who killed Filando Castile. He had
Speaker 1: attended a bulletproof mindset course in two thousand fourteen, two
Speaker 1: years before he murdered Castile. More than a hundred police
Speaker 1: departments in the US and thousands of officers, perhaps tens
Speaker 1: of thousands, have taken Grossman's courses over more than twenty years.
Speaker 1: His teachings have made their way into mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
Speaker 1: UM he is probably it is said that he's probably
Speaker 1: trained more American cops than any other single person. Um
Speaker 1: he is. He is the most influential single police trainer
Speaker 1: in the United States. So that's who we're talking about today. UM,
Speaker 1: so he must we have, Yeah, we're we're fortunate that
Speaker 1: we have the entirety of the Bulletproof Mindset course book
Speaker 1: that police in Lieutenant Colonel Grossman's class take. Um. And
Speaker 1: we have this thanks to the same heroic journalists who
Speaker 1: are currently documenting the everything that's happening in Minneapolis Unicorn Riot.
Speaker 1: And if you haven't already and you have any spare money,
Speaker 1: go donate some cash to Unicorn Riot right now. They're
Speaker 1: the ones fucking They should get Appealitzer for how they've
Speaker 1: covered this. But they also got a hand of a
Speaker 1: hold of a scanned copy of this textbook which they
Speaker 1: uploaded to the Internet for everyone to see. And it
Speaker 1: includes like the notes that the cop taking the course
Speaker 1: took during the course, which is really interesting because you
Speaker 1: get to see what this guy. You know, this is
Speaker 1: a course book that's like follow along notes. So we
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what Grossman said in his lecture, although
Speaker 1: I found other articles written about his lectures, so we've
Speaker 1: we've got some of that in here too. Um, but
Speaker 1: we do know, like what this officer was taking out
Speaker 1: of the course or what whoever was taking this course
Speaker 1: was like, was like learning from it um and that
Speaker 1: lets his piece together, like what this guy is saying
Speaker 1: the police and what police are actually taking home from
Speaker 1: it um. So to start us off, I want to
Speaker 1: read how Lieutenant Colonel Grossman describes his own backstory in
Speaker 1: the first page of his training document quote. Lieutenant Colonel
Speaker 1: Dave Grossman retired from the Army after twenty three years
Speaker 1: experience leading U S soldiers worldwide. Today, he is the
Speaker 1: director of the Killology Research Group. He is an internationally
Speaker 1: recognized scholar, soldier, speaker, and one of who is one
Speaker 1: of the world's foremost experts in the field of human
Speaker 1: aggression and the root cause cause of violence and violent crime.
Speaker 1: Grossman is a former West Point Psychology professor, professor of
Speaker 1: military science, and an Army ranger who has combined his
Speaker 1: experiences to become the founder of a news field of
Speaker 1: scientific endeavor which has been termed killology. That can't be real.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's not I'd also like to point but
Speaker 1: he does look exactly like what you would picture in
Speaker 1: your head. Just it's it's certainly not a real field
Speaker 1: of scientific endeavor. But he absolutely calls it killology, and
Speaker 1: he somehow does that molology collapsing in on himself. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,
Speaker 1: which sounds more impressive than it is because you can
Speaker 1: nominate yourself. It's actually pretty easy to get nominated for
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer price. Um. I don't know that he did.
Speaker 1: I don't know who nominated him. His books are legitimately
Speaker 1: very popular there in like part of the training for
Speaker 1: the FBI Academy there in, like the Marine Corps Commandants
Speaker 1: required reading list. On Killing and on Combat are the
Speaker 1: two big books by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman. Now, based on
Speaker 1: all of that very impressive biography Jack, based on his
Speaker 1: military career and the fact that he started a scientific
Speaker 1: discipline called killology, you might expect that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman
Speaker 1: is a hardened combat veteran, right like the guy who
Speaker 1: write a book on him. Nothing. Yeah, But interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: he's seen less combat than me. Um. And for the record,
Speaker 1: the combat I've seen is a tiny bit, and the
Speaker 1: amount of combat that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has experienced is none. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: I want to make it clear that doesn't make him
Speaker 1: unqualified to write books on the psychological impact of killing
Speaker 1: or of combat any more than being born in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties makes me unqualified to write about Hitler. Right,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have killed anyone or have been
Speaker 1: in combat to do a very good job of writing
Speaker 1: about it, of doing a scholarly treatise of studying it.
Speaker 1: You know, it could even be argued that someone who
Speaker 1: has not been in combat is the right kind of
Speaker 1: person to try to do a scholarly analysis of how
Speaker 1: it impacts people. Um, I'm not saying that he has
Speaker 1: indirectly killed thousands, So he has now, yeah, killed huge
Speaker 1: numbers of people. He should take that into onto his
Speaker 1: chest and then uh and then rewrite his course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm I'm I'm not going to say that he
Speaker 1: shouldn't be writing about killing at all. However, I will
Speaker 1: say that he does quite a bit more than just
Speaker 1: write academic treatises on combat. Um. And you can judge
Speaker 1: for yourself whether or not his record kind of makes
Speaker 1: what he's been doing unreasonable. Um. I'm gonna start off
Speaker 1: by quoting from a write up of him in Men's
Speaker 1: Journal that kind of talks about, Um, what he believes.
Speaker 1: Quote on combat is probably which is his most famous
Speaker 1: book is probably best known for his assertion that people
Speaker 1: can be divided into three groups, sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs.
Speaker 1: And it's the sheep dogs, blessed with the gift of aggression,
Speaker 1: as he says, who are responsible for protecting the sheep
Speaker 1: from the wolves. The analogy has been adopted by various
Speaker 1: military and gun rights groups, and Clint Eastwood's American Sniper,
Speaker 1: the father of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, gives a fictional
Speaker 1: Din Dinner table lecture about sheep dogs taken directly from
Speaker 1: Grossman's writings. So this guy's attitude is very influential. Um
Speaker 1: and it. Yeah. Uh so that's is the small artist
Speaker 1: and most accurate views of humanity that start out with
Speaker 1: the phrase, now there are three types of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can categorize three groups. I am going to serious
Speaker 1: academic m hm is I I am? I am famous
Speaker 1: Jack from my assertion that all of humanity can be
Speaker 1: divided into two groups, people who are literally Adolf Hitler
Speaker 1: and everyone else, which is just impossible to argue meaningless.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, um yeah, So as as that might key,
Speaker 1: you went on that paragraph Grossman is more of a
Speaker 1: pop psychologist than an academic. He tries to portray himself
Speaker 1: as a scientist, but he is not approaching us scientifically.
Speaker 1: You can't scientifically lump people into sheep, dogs, sheep and wolves.
Speaker 1: It's just not the way things Work's famous theory of
Speaker 1: the sheep, dog, sheep and wolves. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: So I've heard him compare aired to like a right
Speaker 1: wing militant Malcolm Gladwell, and that's not far off. His
Speaker 1: research is distinctly unscientific, for on combat. He gathered his
Speaker 1: information via what he called an interactive feedback loop, which
Speaker 1: is what everyone else would just call interviewing a bunch
Speaker 1: of guys who have been in combat, which is fine,
Speaker 1: but like, it's not an interact. You're you're talking to
Speaker 1: people with relevant experiences. Just just say you interact people feedback.
Speaker 1: Fucking christ dude. Um. So he says he interviewed a
Speaker 1: thousand soldiers and cops using no particular and and then
Speaker 1: took what he had learned from them, using no particular
Speaker 1: scientific method or rigor, and boiled it down into his
Speaker 1: book about killing and books about killing in combat. Now, again,
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily a bad thing to talk to a
Speaker 1: thousand people who have been in combat or killed people
Speaker 1: and write a book about it. But the way he
Speaker 1: has done it is not science. Like there's no control group,
Speaker 1: there's no attempt, there's no attempt to rigorously actually learn
Speaker 1: anything from this. He's just sort of talking to people
Speaker 1: and giving you what he thinks about it, which is
Speaker 1: again fine, but not science. Yeah. Question when was this
Speaker 1: book published or released? It like the nineties? Yeah, like
Speaker 1: the nineties. I think eighties or nineties. Yeah. Um, he
Speaker 1: most of the books a couple of decades ago. My
Speaker 1: gym teacher was given like eight years and like forced
Speaker 1: to write a book and just like keep writing what
Speaker 1: he thought. Yeah about It's interesting that you mentioned that, Jack,
Speaker 1: because Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was your gym teacher and his
Speaker 1: most famous quote is that you were not great at
Speaker 1: the hundred meter dash. He's really Do you like the
Speaker 1: implication that I still have a gym teacher. I still
Speaker 1: go to Jim class to be humiliated by my peers.
Speaker 1: It is a weird thing that I Heart radio requires
Speaker 1: of us. Um, no other radio company mandates gym teachers
Speaker 1: for their on air hosts. But what can you do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: not much, I'll tell you that. In one interview, when
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was asked for his qualifications, he cited
Speaker 1: the quote body of information I've crafted over the years
Speaker 1: and his ability to speak from the heart, noting that
Speaker 1: I truly am one of the best people on the
Speaker 1: planet in a couple of areas, whether it's preparation for
Speaker 1: a life and death event or walking the sheep dog path,
Speaker 1: I really feel like I'm the pre eminent authority. He
Speaker 1: is the pre eminent authority on the thing he invented,
Speaker 1: the jumble of words he just slammed together. And again,
Speaker 1: a huge number of the police in Minneapolis right now,
Speaker 1: if not the vast majority of them, have taken this
Speaker 1: guy's course. So keep that in mind as we And also,
Speaker 1: if you wind up in the streets in the next
Speaker 1: couple of days, very good chance your cops too took
Speaker 1: this guy's course. Yeah yeah, um So. That same Men's
Speaker 1: Journal article also noted quote. Since leaving the army, Grossman
Speaker 1: frequently introduces himself as a reserve cop. Parentheses he's the
Speaker 1: deputy reserve coroner for St. Clair County, Illinois, and he
Speaker 1: notes I think a lot more like a cop today
Speaker 1: than I do, like a soldier. So just to set this,
Speaker 1: coroner would be a coroner who who is the assistant
Speaker 1: to the backup coroner in case, Yeah, you might recognize
Speaker 1: that is not really a cop. Somebody who, in an
Speaker 1: unlikely chain of circumstances and events, uh, would maybe have
Speaker 1: to see a dead person. I mean, ironically, the chain
Speaker 1: of circumstances and events right now, in which, like the
Speaker 1: police in multiple Yeah, he might wind up being called
Speaker 1: into active duty because in part because of the uprising
Speaker 1: that he has helped to spark. So that's he might
Speaker 1: get his wish. He might finally get to be on combat.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Um, you know who's not a cop?
Speaker 1: The products and services that support this podcast. We're back, okay,
Speaker 1: So let's see what Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, non combat
Speaker 1: veteran who has never killed anyone and not a cop,
Speaker 1: teaches cops about combat and killing. I'm sure it's nuanced
Speaker 1: and accurate. Uh. So the training program opens with and
Speaker 1: this is again the Bulletproof mindset opens with a graph
Speaker 1: on rates of violent crime, murder, and imprisonment to make
Speaker 1: the case that the first two have dropped steadily as
Speaker 1: the first one has gone up, So he's pointing out
Speaker 1: to police that, like, the more people you arrest arrest,
Speaker 1: the less crime there is in the United States. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: these graphs are not technically wrong. Incarceration has broadly gone
Speaker 1: up as crime has gone down. But just graphing those
Speaker 1: three things together leaves out a number of other things
Speaker 1: that have had an impact on the rate of violent crimes,
Speaker 1: such as let exposure, internet access, availability of social programs,
Speaker 1: average level of educational attainment, income inequality, et cetera. The
Speaker 1: point of this graph is to take to show that
Speaker 1: taking dirt bags off the streets is to make is
Speaker 1: what makes society safer. Um And unfortunately, people who actually
Speaker 1: study the impact of incarceration on crime disagree with Lieutenant
Speaker 1: Colonel Grossman on this. And I'm gonna quote from the
Speaker 1: Brennan Center for Justice. Now, between two thousands seven and
Speaker 1: two seventeen thirty four states reduced both imprisonment and crime
Speaker 1: rates simultaneously, showing clearly that reducing mass incarceration does not
Speaker 1: come at the cost of public safety. For sources and
Speaker 1: definitions and credit. The total number of sentenced individuals held
Speaker 1: in state prisons across the US also decreased by six
Speaker 1: percent over the same decade. The Very Institute of Justice
Speaker 1: has also conducted a study looking at incarceration and crime
Speaker 1: since two thousand. They found that between seventy five and
Speaker 1: a percent of the drop in crime we've experienced since
Speaker 1: the early nineteen nineties came as a result of factors
Speaker 1: other than incarceration, like increased graduation rates, an aging population,
Speaker 1: and increased consumer confidence. But Grossman's course waits waste no
Speaker 1: time in moving on from that to a series of
Speaker 1: pages on Indiana University brain scanned research. These pages have large,
Speaker 1: blurry images of scanned brains purporting to show increased aggression
Speaker 1: in kids due to violent TV movies and video games.
Speaker 1: He notes, quote media violence makes violent brains. Violent TV,
Speaker 1: movie and video game exposure head an effect on normal
Speaker 1: kids the same as children with documented diagnosed aggressive behavior disorder. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, this is the he's saying so wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like you can find something incorrect and uh
Speaker 1: that will justify I don't know. It almost feels like
Speaker 1: if you've ever like been around a bully who really
Speaker 1: wants to beat you up, and like there's just like
Speaker 1: no arguing them out of it, like that, it just
Speaker 1: feels like that he's just like finding his anger and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, excuses to use uh violence are going to
Speaker 1: find a way. Yeah, it's cool. It's Fox News for cops.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is. And it's it's it's like Fox News.
Speaker 1: It has I won't say completely, but very heavily helped
Speaker 1: craft the my set that cops walk onto the street
Speaker 1: with today. So UM in terms of when it comes
Speaker 1: to this, like study on video games and violent movies
Speaker 1: and stuff affecting adolescent brains, the specific studies referencings from
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, and it did, in fact show that
Speaker 1: ten hours of violent video games in one week showed
Speaker 1: reduced levels of activity and regions of their frontal lobes
Speaker 1: responsible for cognitive function and emotional control. UM. And there
Speaker 1: is some evidence, a decent amount, that suggests that violent
Speaker 1: media can at least temporarily increase increase aggression. But aggression
Speaker 1: is not violence, it's just the feeling of aggression. It's
Speaker 1: an emotional response. In two thousand nineteen, a group of
Speaker 1: researchers carried out an enormous meta analysis, which is an
Speaker 1: analysis of basically all the studies on this, and concluded
Speaker 1: that the increased rate of aggression from video games was present,
Speaker 1: but small at best. Um, and again no evidence that
Speaker 1: it has any kind of meaningful impact on violence or
Speaker 1: violent crime. They were testing people right after they played
Speaker 1: the game. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and it makes
Speaker 1: you feel more aggressive. Um, which isn't really that surprising,
Speaker 1: to be honest, but whatever. So, Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has
Speaker 1: a lot invested in the idea that video games and
Speaker 1: gory movies have turned our children into a nation of slavering,
Speaker 1: blood hungry monsters. He wrote a book titled Stop Teaching
Speaker 1: Our Kids to Kill to cash in on the Columbine massacre.
Speaker 1: During the Bulletproof mindset training classes, he often tells his
Speaker 1: students that, yeah, exactly, he's one of those guys. He
Speaker 1: often tells his students that denying the link between video
Speaker 1: games and violence will someday quote be viewed as the
Speaker 1: moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers. Uh huh, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: He probably hangs out with a bunch of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure he knows a few. Um. I think they're
Speaker 1: more just Holocaust questionnaires, Jack, They're just they're just asking questions.
Speaker 1: They're just asking questions here about the Holocaust. So to
Speaker 1: quote again from Men's Journal. One anecdote is particularly telling.
Speaker 1: Grossman writes about a sixteen year old and client whose
Speaker 1: parents took away his copy of Halo three because they
Speaker 1: thought it was too violent. His father locked the game
Speaker 1: in a lock box, which also held a nine millimeter handgun.
Speaker 1: The boy stole the key, took the game in the gun,
Speaker 1: and shot both of his parents in the head. Grossman
Speaker 1: blames video games for the murder. He says nothing about
Speaker 1: the pistol, which and I'm I'm even gonna say he used,
Speaker 1: he used to kill his parents, I forget he beat
Speaker 1: them to death of a copy of Halo three Jack,
Speaker 1: famously the heaviest video game ever published. I mean, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna honestly, like, if we're gonna be really fair here,
Speaker 1: there's a lot more going on that even just the
Speaker 1: pistol and this kid shooting his parents to death, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot probably, Yeah, but obviously picking video games
Speaker 1: over the easily available handgun is um ludicrous, uh fucking
Speaker 1: wildly irresponsible. Um, so let's get back to the bulletproof mindset. Um.
Speaker 1: The next age of this document is more data on
Speaker 1: serious assaults per capita, which Grossman uses his evidence to
Speaker 1: make his case that modern cities are more dangerous than ever.
Speaker 1: Mother Jones sent a reporter to one of these classes.
Speaker 1: He reported that in this segment of the class, Grossman
Speaker 1: depicts the modern world as quote, a place where gang
Speaker 1: member seat to seek to set records for killing cops,
Speaker 1: where a kid in every school is thinking about racking
Speaker 1: up a body count. His latest book, Assassination Generation, insists
Speaker 1: that violent video games are turning the nation's youth and
Speaker 1: the mass murderers. The recent wave of massacres is just
Speaker 1: the beginning. Please stop calling them mass shootings. He smacks
Speaker 1: the easels. These thump crimes. Thump are thump everywhere. He
Speaker 1: foresees attacks on school busses and daycare centers. Kindergarteners run
Speaker 1: about point five miles an hour and get a burst
Speaker 1: of about twenty yards that then they're done. It won't
Speaker 1: just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatches, knives
Speaker 1: and swords. Are the kindergarteners the ones attacking. No, no,
Speaker 1: they're the victims. And Dr David knows how easy it
Speaker 1: and he knows how easy it is to kill kindergarteners
Speaker 1: because he has thought a lot about how you kill kindergarteners.
Speaker 1: So that's part of the sheep dog mindset. Yeah, sheep
Speaker 1: dog always look for, always how to kill a kindergarteners.
Speaker 1: He continues, it it being these murders of kindergarteners won't
Speaker 1: just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatchetes, knives,
Speaker 1: and swords. His voice drops an octave, hacking and stabbing
Speaker 1: little kids. You don't think they will attack daycares. It's
Speaker 1: already happening in China. When you hear about a daycare massacre,
Speaker 1: he tells, he shouts at them. Tell them Grossman said
Speaker 1: it was coming. How dare he not consider machetes? I know,
Speaker 1: I know about a daycare massacre? Tell him Grossman said
Speaker 1: it was coming. That's so close to like a used
Speaker 1: car salesman's pitch being like when you see it, it's
Speaker 1: good fucking incredible. Yeah, tell him Grossman the orange that
Speaker 1: that whole thing in l A on l A l A. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's worth noting that. Robert, it almost sounds like
Speaker 1: he's unhinged. Yeah, it almost sounds like he's a dangerously
Speaker 1: irresponsible person to be taking teaching people anything. Um, It's
Speaker 1: worth noting that in the copy of the training documents
Speaker 1: Unicorn right obtained the young cop or whoever it was
Speaker 1: taking who's taking the class, took notes and for this segment,
Speaker 1: for this segment. During the segment, he wrote, presumably quoting Grossman,
Speaker 1: you are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric
Speaker 1: of America during these dark and degenerate times, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure Key's police up to be very responsible. So the
Speaker 1: next page includes a graph on combat efficiency over time,
Speaker 1: which shows how soldiers in combat functionally, um how their
Speaker 1: functional efficiency efficiency changes over a period of multiple days
Speaker 1: in combat, ranging from battle wise at about ten days
Speaker 1: in too vegetative state at sixty days. And this is
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable, saeming it seems pretty consistent with other things
Speaker 1: I've read and and some things I've seen about like
Speaker 1: how days of combat affect people. I have no reason
Speaker 1: to believe that his data is inaccurate. But what we're
Speaker 1: actually seeing with this insert is Grossman establishing the idea
Speaker 1: that police officers in their communities are the same as
Speaker 1: soldiers in an active war zone, which I don't know
Speaker 1: is broadly accurate in Minneapolis now, but only because of
Speaker 1: all the cops that these people killed because of all
Speaker 1: the people these cops killed. Yeah. Now, next we get
Speaker 1: some info on PTSD and trauma that seems broadly reasonable,
Speaker 1: and then a full page insert on being shot and
Speaker 1: like what to do if you're shot as an officer,
Speaker 1: And again most of this basic information isn't wrong, but
Speaker 1: it does advise officers to tap the power of adrenaline
Speaker 1: and use the It uses the example of an officer
Speaker 1: who quote shot up purp with a forty five five
Speaker 1: times before the perp dropped. Later, this officer apparently told himself,
Speaker 1: get up, get up. If he could do it, I
Speaker 1: could do it. The page ends with a quote in
Speaker 1: italics from Grossman himself, you have never lived until you
Speaker 1: have almost died. For those who fight for it. Life
Speaker 1: has a flavor that protected will never know. And again,
Speaker 1: he's never fought for his life. What is what is
Speaker 1: the flavor? David? How do you? I mean, it's fine
Speaker 1: if you're quoting people on that, but don't make it
Speaker 1: your quote because you don't know what that anyway of
Speaker 1: the cops as military and a foreign land is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I mean nefarious and just it's thoroughly rotten, and
Speaker 1: we're we're seeing the impact of it, because now we
Speaker 1: are at a point where the police have been acting
Speaker 1: for a long time like they are an occupying army,
Speaker 1: and finally the people in Minneapolis and some other places
Speaker 1: are starting to be like, all right, well, let's let's
Speaker 1: do what insurgents do when they're occupied by an aggressive
Speaker 1: invading force. And yep, that's what you get. Um. So,
Speaker 1: the next page of this document is the sin your
Speaker 1: piece of Grossman's entire ideology, a biblical justification for killing.
Speaker 1: It starts with the bold in italics or the the
Speaker 1: bold large print letters question thou shalt not kill question mark,
Speaker 1: and then what follows are a series of biblical quotes
Speaker 1: thou shalt not murder underline From Exodus, Jesus said, thou
Speaker 1: shalt do no murder. From matt nineteen eighteen. The Lord
Speaker 1: gave victory to David from Second Chronicles eighteen six. David
Speaker 1: killed his tens of thousands. From one Samuel's eighteen seven.
Speaker 1: Trouble started when David murdered Uriah from eleven Samuel eleven
Speaker 1: these six things God hates and including shadders of innocent blood.
Speaker 1: In Proverbs six seventeen, the rich young man comes to
Speaker 1: Jesus sell everything you have which seems out of place
Speaker 1: in Matt nineteen one. And then the centurion comes to Jesus,
Speaker 1: no greater faith have I found Matt eight ten. Jesus said,
Speaker 1: by as sword Luke thirty six Matt twenty six fifty two.
Speaker 1: Who he who lives by the sword, shall die by
Speaker 1: the sword Romans thirteen four. The magistrate beareth not the
Speaker 1: sword in vain and acts ten that which quotes the
Speaker 1: fact that the first gentile Christian is Cornelius, a centurion
Speaker 1: who you get the feeling like he's basically saying God
Speaker 1: loves cops. God is okay with killing as long as
Speaker 1: it's not the murder of innocence. And since the killing
Speaker 1: you won't be doing is the murder of innocence, God
Speaker 1: wants you to kill. That's that's the argument this page
Speaker 1: is making, and it ends with a quote from John
Speaker 1: Random scraps of biblical uh and incoherent scraps of biblical
Speaker 1: nonsense John thirteen is the quote that ends this page.
Speaker 1: Greater love has no man than this, that he give
Speaker 1: his life for his friends, so dangerously unhinged and incoherent,
Speaker 1: is how I would kind of see that but you
Speaker 1: can get you get the mindset that this kind of
Speaker 1: pushes in the people who listen to it. Now, following
Speaker 1: trust somebody who came up with no first of all,
Speaker 1: somebody people should probably look him up. His eyes are
Speaker 1: like closer together than a flounder, and he just he
Speaker 1: is and they're tiny, and he just like has the
Speaker 1: look of a very stupid man. Um Like it's almost
Speaker 1: like he looks like a cartoon of a young George Bush,
Speaker 1: George W. Bush. But he h and like there's like
Speaker 1: some putin in there too, like a splash, a little death.
Speaker 1: But like somebody who came up with the phrase killology
Speaker 1: to choose, like what I was going to have for lunch,
Speaker 1: let alone choose who lives and dies? Yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: want him making salads, let alone teaching people in the
Speaker 1: community with guns. I would I would feel okay with
Speaker 1: him digging holes maybe, although I don't like him having
Speaker 1: a Yeah, I don't like him having a shovel um
Speaker 1: so yeah. Following all this, we get a page on
Speaker 1: the Modern Warriors Edge, which includes some pretty embarrassing clip
Speaker 1: art of a schlubby cop looking in the mirror and
Speaker 1: seeing a muscular cop uh. It does positively note that
Speaker 1: communication skills are the most important skills for an officer
Speaker 1: to master, which is true, I would say. But then
Speaker 1: it warns cops that most of their attackers will warn
Speaker 1: or provide indicators before striking, and that predators are always
Speaker 1: looking for a body count, which they find by recognizing
Speaker 1: soft targets. And then after that we hit what is
Speaker 1: probably the most central and important aspect of this whole
Speaker 1: training program, the video I'm in Fear of my life.
Speaker 1: This video is about a police officer who was killed
Speaker 1: in nine, Deputy Kyle dink Heller. And I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if I've seen the exact same video that Grossman plays
Speaker 1: in his courses, but I did find a CNN article
Speaker 1: on the case, and it includes a video that I
Speaker 1: believe to be at least very similar. The article on
Speaker 1: CNN that includes this video opens with this paragraph, Jack,
Speaker 1: if you want to know why cops shoot people, you
Speaker 1: can find one of many answers in those three minutes.
Speaker 1: On Whipple's Crossing Road is where dink Keller was shot.
Speaker 1: There on January twelfth, ninety eight. Deputy Kyle Dinkkeller of
Speaker 1: the Lawrence County Sheriff's office made the final traffic stop
Speaker 1: of his brief career, and it is striking. In short,
Speaker 1: we're gonna play aspects of this in a bit. The
Speaker 1: video shows a traffic stop. The deputy pulls over an
Speaker 1: older man driving erratically. Said man is belligerent. He jumps
Speaker 1: and he refuses commands. UM. At one point he jumps
Speaker 1: up and down, yelling for the officer to shoot him. Uh.
Speaker 1: He yells that he is a Vietnam veteran. He gets
Speaker 1: in Dean Keller's face and he gets aggressive. The deputy
Speaker 1: eventually hits him with a nightstick. The man is knocked down,
Speaker 1: but he gets back up and runs to his car.
Speaker 1: There he grabs a rifle, which he uses to shoot
Speaker 1: Deputy dink Heller to death. UM and kind of critically,
Speaker 1: he fires several warning shots. First Dinkkeller fires back and
Speaker 1: hits him, and then he shoots dink Keller to death.
Speaker 1: And the video is horrific. Whatever else do you think
Speaker 1: about cops? Dink Keller does seem to have honestly tried
Speaker 1: to do everything in his power to avoid shooting this guy,
Speaker 1: even after the guy pulled out a rifle. It is
Speaker 1: It is a terrible video. UM, and I guess if
Speaker 1: we're gonna do a content warning, you're gonna hear a
Speaker 1: man's death screams a little bit later. It's it's bad, um,
Speaker 1: but it's important because this is what is This is
Speaker 1: like one of the most important videos in police training
Speaker 1: in the United States, even outside of of Grossman's courses.
Speaker 1: And the CNN video of this um includes interviews with
Speaker 1: Kyle dink Keller's dad, who trains cops now and what
Speaker 1: din Keller's dad takes out of this video is just
Speaker 1: as horrific as the video itself. And I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: you to play that clip now, Kyle. It was a
Speaker 1: deputy sheriff with Lawrence County Sheriff Department in Doublin, Georgia.
Speaker 1: He was a good officer, me and his dad. I'm
Speaker 1: the first one to say, yeah, he made some mistakes.
Speaker 1: He was too fair, he was too nice. That was
Speaker 1: just him. My son pulled out his aspaton hit him
Speaker 1: a few times. But then the first mistake he made
Speaker 1: was letting a man get kept him on the ground
Speaker 1: and yeah, this is his dad can sat back out.
Speaker 1: He was given the guy to the last asked ditch
Speaker 1: effort to put the gun down. He didn't want to
Speaker 1: hurt him. It didn't work. Okay, yeah, that's probably enough.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty horrific, right, those screams are that's bad. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a hard video to watch. It's brutal,
Speaker 1: um and it has you can tell the impact that
Speaker 1: it's had on his dad because he's taken out of
Speaker 1: this the fact that his son was too kind and
Speaker 1: gave this guy too many chances, was not violent enough. Um.
Speaker 1: And that is what watching the video, that's how it's
Speaker 1: trained to police that like you need to be shooting
Speaker 1: faster to save your own life. Um. And that video
Speaker 1: you can like imagine about a whole classroom full of
Speaker 1: young cops, which is like what who this video was
Speaker 1: played to almost every and they show that actually is
Speaker 1: like a bunch of cops just like putting their head down.
Speaker 1: I mean it's really like one of the I I
Speaker 1: can't like that's it's like trying to amp them up
Speaker 1: to just be as trigger happy as possible. It's like
Speaker 1: the bad bad police porn. Like how how not the
Speaker 1: person who's being killed in the video. But like it's
Speaker 1: it's just such a specific example and like just piece
Speaker 1: of propaganda. Yeah, and it's yeah, we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about this video quite a bit. So, as you might imagine,
Speaker 1: the dink Keller video has a powerful impact on the
Speaker 1: police and Grossman's classes. UM. And he ties this video
Speaker 1: and the fact that dink Keller didn't shoot earlier UM
Speaker 1: to some facts from the Civil War. UM. On battlefields
Speaker 1: in the Civil War, dropped muskets were often found loaded
Speaker 1: with multiple balls UM. And kind of the conclusion that
Speaker 1: Grossman and a number of people take from this is
Speaker 1: that most soldiers weren't trying to kill the enemy. UM,
Speaker 1: that they were basically like pretending to fire and then
Speaker 1: fake loading their guns, which is why like there were
Speaker 1: so many bullets in them, because they weren't willing to
Speaker 1: shoot people. That is one interpretation that other people say
Speaker 1: that like people panic in in gunfights because it's terrifying,
Speaker 1: and they were like fucking up not realizing their gun
Speaker 1: wasn't actually firing because they were in a panicked situation,
Speaker 1: or they were like fucking up while loading and accidentally
Speaker 1: sticking too many balls in. UM. There's no way to
Speaker 1: know what the actual truth is, but Grossman ties this
Speaker 1: to the fact that people's people are so naturally unwilling
Speaker 1: to kill people that you have to really aggressively train
Speaker 1: people like police to kill very easily, otherwise they won't
Speaker 1: kill when they need to. Like, that's that's the lesson
Speaker 1: he learns from this, so that they're his argument is
Speaker 1: that the Civil War wasn't deadly enough. Kind of yeah,
Speaker 1: that is part of it. Yeah, well, we'll talk more
Speaker 1: about this in a little bit. Uh. In these classes,
Speaker 1: the sheriff who trained dink Heller gets a lot of
Speaker 1: guff um for the way that he trained his deputies,
Speaker 1: which gives you an idea of kind of like some
Speaker 1: of the pre grossman attitudes towards at least shootings of
Speaker 1: white people. Um. And the sheriff who trained to this
Speaker 1: cop that died was famous for telling his officers, make
Speaker 1: sure that if you shoot, it's a good shoot, and
Speaker 1: if not, you're probably gonna lose everything you've got. You've got,
Speaker 1: plus you're probably going to go to prison. So he
Speaker 1: was being like, don't shoot unless you're absolutely certain it's
Speaker 1: the right thing to do, otherwise you will go to prison,
Speaker 1: which I would say is how everyone with a gun
Speaker 1: should feel right right like at all times, no matter
Speaker 1: who you are. At all times. Yeah. Now, the way
Speaker 1: the story goes, Webb had a minor dust up with
Speaker 1: dink Heller a few miners a few months prior to
Speaker 1: his death. The deputy wound up yelling at a driver
Speaker 1: on the road while responding to an incident. That driver
Speaker 1: was a friend of Sheriff Webb's. He told the sheriff,
Speaker 1: and the sheriff yelled at dink Keller and made him
Speaker 1: write a letter of apology. This humiliated dink Keller and
Speaker 1: caused him to get shipped from his colleagues. So, as
Speaker 1: the story goes, he was also super self conscious about
Speaker 1: sucking up on the job and getting in trouble, and
Speaker 1: that's why he didn't shoot first. This whole story in
Speaker 1: the video of this man's death has become a seminal
Speaker 1: moment in the history of law enforcement education. Not only
Speaker 1: did Kyle din Keller's father start touring with the video
Speaker 1: of his son's death and teaching classes on it, but
Speaker 1: other trainers have adopted the video, including Grossman. It is
Speaker 1: used in police training courses in at least twenty seven states.
Speaker 1: The lesson plan that accompanies this one course or one
Speaker 1: course notes that the video is meant to help police
Speaker 1: quote determined when lethal force is justified, and to always
Speaker 1: remember your life is worth more than a lawsuit. And
Speaker 1: the thing that's not stated there, but it is true,
Speaker 1: is that they're also saying, remember your life is worth
Speaker 1: more than other people's As a cop, yeah, which is
Speaker 1: not the I mean, you would think that becoming a
Speaker 1: cop is like the ideal version or the best case
Speaker 1: scenary would be that it's a calling and you're there
Speaker 1: to serve and protect the people who for some I
Speaker 1: don't know, Yeah, yeah, you would think serve and protect
Speaker 1: would be a part of the job, like and ideally,
Speaker 1: and I do want to stay here that Like, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying Grossman's training had a particular impact on the
Speaker 1: the son of a bitch who killed George Floyd, because
Speaker 1: that whatever whatever that was, that was that was even
Speaker 1: out of the pail for police murders of black men.
Speaker 1: But obviously I think it had a huge impact on
Speaker 1: all of the other police murders in Minneapolis and a
Speaker 1: bunch of other parts of the United States that contributed
Speaker 1: to George Floyd's murder kind of setting all this off,
Speaker 1: you know, like it it's a factor buying those like
Speaker 1: I don't know what the funk was going on with
Speaker 1: the guy, Like that's be even be like beyond the
Speaker 1: pail for police murders of people, um, which is part
Speaker 1: of why it had the impact it did. Um. So
Speaker 1: just so slow and yeah, deliberate and yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like there's so many moments where they can stop what
Speaker 1: they're doing and they just doing it. Yeah. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: kind of killing that Grossman's stuff I think really mainly
Speaker 1: has had a major impact on. It's like the killings
Speaker 1: of people like Philando Castile where the cop clearly without
Speaker 1: any sort of good reason, makes a split second decision
Speaker 1: to gun somebody down based off of like a moment
Speaker 1: of anxiety. Um. Like that's what Grossman's impact is on.
Speaker 1: So and again like he's not the only one who
Speaker 1: uses this video in trainings, and another training company, Milo Range,
Speaker 1: even turned to the dink Keller video into an interactive
Speaker 1: video game played with a fake gun that gives training
Speaker 1: cops a chance to kill the man who killed Kyle
Speaker 1: dink Keller, which is lunacy um. According to CNN quote
Speaker 1: at the Bartow County Sheriff's Office in Carter'sville, Georgia, Captain
Speaker 1: Richie Harrold used this training machine to test more than
Speaker 1: a hundred officers willingness to use deadly force. If an
Speaker 1: officer waited too long to fire, Harold asked, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? What the heck are you doing? That's good? Yeah,
Speaker 1: So obviously the problem of absurdly aggressive police training is
Speaker 1: wider than Grossman, but journalists have noted that as far
Speaker 1: as anyone can tell, he's probably trained more cops than
Speaker 1: any other man in the country, which is why we're
Speaker 1: focusing on him. He is the most influential figure involved
Speaker 1: in crafting this narrative which the Din Killer video brutally narrates,
Speaker 1: that police are in more danger now than they've ever been.
Speaker 1: And yeah, fatal shootings of officers by civilians have declined
Speaker 1: for forty years. Yeah, like that's got to be the opposite, right, Like,
Speaker 1: are we at the safest point we've been at? Like
Speaker 1: pretty pretty much? There was a slight surge in like,
Speaker 1: um as a result of like those shootings of cops
Speaker 1: and stuff during the election. Um that we're kind of
Speaker 1: that we're in response to the shootings by cops of
Speaker 1: of black men. UM. But yeah, it's it is safer
Speaker 1: than it's been in for of the history of this
Speaker 1: nation for cops right now, in two officers were murdered
Speaker 1: on the job. That's not a tiny number, but for
Speaker 1: some context, about a hundred and eighteen retail workers were
Speaker 1: murdered on the job. Um. Overall, police officers are number
Speaker 1: fourteen in the nationwide list of jobs most likely to
Speaker 1: get you killed. Fisherman, loggers, garbageman, and taxi drivers are
Speaker 1: all more likely to die working, uh than police. Now
Speaker 1: that's what the actual facts say. Yeah, fisherman, I mean
Speaker 1: it's a dangerous to be a fisherman. Like that makes
Speaker 1: total sense. It's that's a hard gig. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But like fucking garbageman and taxi drivers are at more
Speaker 1: risk of dying on the job than cops. But the
Speaker 1: fisherman thing did bother me. I don't know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's not I wish less fisherman died. I
Speaker 1: don't have a problem with fisherman. So um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that those are the facts. But those are not the facts,
Speaker 1: is as Grossman relates them. I'm gonna report or quote
Speaker 1: from mother Jones reporting on this bit of the seminar quote,
Speaker 1: the number of dead cops has exploded like nothing we
Speaker 1: have ever seen, he tells the armed citizens in Lakeport,
Speaker 1: which is where he was doing a class. Um, this
Speaker 1: is that is not true. The average, the average annual
Speaker 1: number of police officers intentionally killed wall on duty in
Speaker 1: the past decade lower than it was in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: If emergency medicine and body armor hadn't improved since the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, Grossman claims, the number of dead cops would
Speaker 1: be eight times what it is today. It is not
Speaker 1: clear how he arrived at these figures, and it's also
Speaker 1: worth noting that like that was from another a version
Speaker 1: of the seminar that he does for civilians with guns,
Speaker 1: which he's also started doing now because after the philand
Speaker 1: no cast steel killing less police started using his services.
Speaker 1: So that's good. Um, so he should be in jail, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he should be, and he should be in jail for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons. Um I would I would say
Speaker 1: there's an amount of irresponsibility that's tantamount to a crime. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. There's probably not a crime on the
Speaker 1: books that he's technically committed, but let's change the books.
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know. One thing, yeah, yeah, one thing
Speaker 1: I found really interesting is that Grossman and all these
Speaker 1: other police trainers tend to completely ignore the person who
Speaker 1: killed Kyle didn Keller Andrew Brannon. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from CNN talking about who Brandon was. Brandon spent three
Speaker 1: years as an army officer in Vietnam, where his company
Speaker 1: commander was blown apart by a land mine, and Brandon
Speaker 1: never really came home from the war. The sound of
Speaker 1: a bottle rocket sent him diving under the couch. He
Speaker 1: left college after a nervous nervous breakdown. He couldn't hold
Speaker 1: a job. He got married and divorced. He tried walking
Speaker 1: alone in the woods from Mexico to the Canadian border,
Speaker 1: or from Tennessee to New York on the trail. In
Speaker 1: nineteen eight six, he wrote a postcard to his father.
Speaker 1: I wish to thank you for being the being that
Speaker 1: means the most to me. You have said a good
Speaker 1: example which I am only now getting better at following.
Speaker 1: But I will keep on going. Better to keep going
Speaker 1: than to stop. Then his father died of cancer, and
Speaker 1: he withdrew to a hideout in the woods of Lawrence County,
Speaker 1: and in early he ran out of the medicine that
Speaker 1: treated his depression and stabilized his moods. By January twelve,
Speaker 1: when he met Kyle dink Keller, he had been unmedicated
Speaker 1: for five days. There are a lot of lessons to
Speaker 1: take out of the shooting of Kyle Kyle din Keller.
Speaker 1: I don't think they are cops should be shooting people faster. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the it's you really have to work hard to
Speaker 1: get that decision that wrong. Yeah. Among the lessons I
Speaker 1: would take out of this is we shouldn't be fighting wars. Uh,
Speaker 1: that don't concern us in any our security in any
Speaker 1: meaningful way, and and send back thousands of young men
Speaker 1: who have been traumatized. Uh. We shouldn't have a system
Speaker 1: whereby somewhere for people to have their stabilizing medication. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we should. We should have more therapy. We should have
Speaker 1: a culture in which it is it is considered less
Speaker 1: shameful for men to to to take therapy. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of lessons to take out of this shooting. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: um so yeah. The and and the good analyses I've
Speaker 1: read on Britain suggests very credibly that he was trying
Speaker 1: to commit suicide by cop firing a number of shots
Speaker 1: that didn't hit din Keller before he actually shot the officer. UM,
Speaker 1: And when he fired back it was after he had
Speaker 1: been wounded, And kind of the theory goes that he
Speaker 1: flipped out and went into nom mode once he got
Speaker 1: hit and killed the deputy. UM. Yeah, the officer who
Speaker 1: was taking the bulletproof mindset course that I'm reading from,
Speaker 1: took this note during this section of the lecture. We
Speaker 1: know what they are trying to do, kill a cop,
Speaker 1: So why do they expect us to act differently? They
Speaker 1: start this, but then they ask us to play by
Speaker 1: the rules. HM. So from this point in the lecture,
Speaker 1: Grossman goes on to lecture has now terrified and angry
Speaker 1: students about what his research has told him about their adversaries,
Speaker 1: which are again American citizens UM, mostly of a specific color.
Speaker 1: Grossman warns that they are younger and in better shape
Speaker 1: than police, that they have been in more gunfights and
Speaker 1: violent encounters, which in Grossman's case, is not a high
Speaker 1: bar at least. Uh. He states that they practice more,
Speaker 1: which is true, UM, and states that they don't hesitate
Speaker 1: when it comes to violence. So he's who is he
Speaker 1: talking about? Uh? I mean, some of this is based
Speaker 1: in the fact that, like an FBI study revealed that
Speaker 1: cop killers tend to have more armed training and practice
Speaker 1: than cops. But that's a low bar because most cops
Speaker 1: practice very little with their side arms. UM. Like that,
Speaker 1: it's actually an extremely low bar to practice more. I
Speaker 1: practice more with my gun than the average US police officer. UM.
Speaker 1: But he's also noting that, like, like, he's not just
Speaker 1: saying that like this about cop killers. He's saying about
Speaker 1: this about your adversaries, which he kind of intimates are
Speaker 1: almost anyone you run into as a cop. UM. So
Speaker 1: it seems like he could just be saying that everybody
Speaker 1: who you pull over is like a trained assassin. I mean,
Speaker 1: he called is generation assassin, assassination generation. That's what he's saying.
Speaker 1: We're just gonna roll some mats now, then we're back.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, what a day. So this is fun
Speaker 1: stuff from their Uh. Grossman plays a video that involves
Speaker 1: police shooting at a suspect in a car who was
Speaker 1: driving away. Grossman to make sure his students know that
Speaker 1: these were good shoots, that these cops shooting at a
Speaker 1: car driving away were good shoots, and that if anyone
Speaker 1: says shooting at a fleeing car is bad. It's because
Speaker 1: of media poisoning. Um, Like, the media has poisoned their minds.
Speaker 1: If they if they say at a fleeing car, maybe
Speaker 1: don't shoot at a fleeing car in the middle of
Speaker 1: a city. Um. Yeah, that's that's that's the it's media
Speaker 1: mind poisoning that makes building cut that from copaganda. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, let's let's all take a moment back to
Speaker 1: when those cops a guy with a gun like entered
Speaker 1: the trader Joe's fleeing from the police, and they just
Speaker 1: fired wildly into into the trader. Joe's killing a woman.
Speaker 1: Um may be relevant to this. So the next page
Speaker 1: of this booklet focuses on nonverbal communication, which Grossman's rights
Speaker 1: rights is much more important than verbal communication. He goes
Speaker 1: onto le sure cops about different nonverbal cues that can
Speaker 1: help them determine who secretly means them harm. Some examples
Speaker 1: include I am not lying. So the words I am
Speaker 1: not lying, Grossman says, are a hint to cops that
Speaker 1: you are lying in an untrustworthy person and also a
Speaker 1: thing just a perfect description of how people talk. Hey, yes, officer,
Speaker 1: i am not I'm not lying. I'm not lying. It's
Speaker 1: one of those things I have. I was. I had
Speaker 1: a very tense police interaction where they attempted to search
Speaker 1: my car and had like it was very stressful, long night.
Speaker 1: We spent like a couple of hours with them, um,
Speaker 1: and they kept telling me that they were trained to
Speaker 1: tell when I was lying, and they knew I was
Speaker 1: lying about having pot in the car and I didn't
Speaker 1: have pot in the car this time, and ironically enough,
Speaker 1: another time when I did, I was pulled over and
Speaker 1: had my car searched by dogs and had weed in
Speaker 1: the car. I locked eyes with the officer and repeatedly
Speaker 1: told him I didn't have pot, and he let me
Speaker 1: go because they're trained to believe him and say, I
Speaker 1: am not lying, I am not lying. I just said
Speaker 1: I don't have pot. Yeah. Part of the problem with
Speaker 1: this is that Grossman again says that like, nonverbal cues
Speaker 1: are the most important thing to recognize as a cop,
Speaker 1: and people are famously bad at recognizing nonverbal cues. Uh
Speaker 1: you see. San Francisco psychologist Dr Paul Ekman conducted a
Speaker 1: study in nine on people's ability to recognize a liar
Speaker 1: from nonverbal cues, and he found that most people were
Speaker 1: remarkably certain across the board that they were good at
Speaker 1: telling when someone was lying. He also found that most
Speaker 1: people across the board were very bad at telling when
Speaker 1: other people were lying. Quote, the great majority of us
Speaker 1: are easily mislead. It's very difficult and most people just
Speaker 1: don't know what cues to rely on. Grossman teaches his
Speaker 1: officers that people who make eye contact are more likely
Speaker 1: to be honest and thus safe. And again this is
Speaker 1: another misnomer. People are less likely to make eye contact
Speaker 1: with they when they are frightened. And people are frightened
Speaker 1: about police officers. Uh. Counter like. Counter to this, people
Speaker 1: who are either hardened criminals or just folks like me
Speaker 1: who wind up talking to police officers a lot, whether
Speaker 1: or not we're doing the thing they're concerned about. Uh,
Speaker 1: learn that you make eye contact with cops at all points.
Speaker 1: You don't break eye contact when you're telling them, and
Speaker 1: you tell them what they need to hear. That's how
Speaker 1: you deal with cops. You make eye contact, you keep
Speaker 1: your hands open, you tell them what they need to
Speaker 1: hear for you to go home. Like that's what you do.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you're talking about dealing with an angry dog. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is that is I deal with police and angry
Speaker 1: having been at hands where you can see them slow moves. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't want to make eye contact with an angry
Speaker 1: dog because that that's seen as confrontational a little bit.
Speaker 1: But you do want to very yeah, um, but you do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's. The best teacher I ever had was my
Speaker 1: speech and debate coach for one semester until he got
Speaker 1: fired for his past history of selling pot. But the
Speaker 1: thing he told us was that as adults, what we
Speaker 1: needed to know is that anytime you're dealing with an
Speaker 1: authority figure who has the ability to punish you, the
Speaker 1: only thing, whether he said, whether it's a judge or
Speaker 1: a police officer, you make eye contact with them and
Speaker 1: you tell them slowly and calmly whatever they need to
Speaker 1: hear for you to go home. And that that advice
Speaker 1: has never led me astray. That that that that I mean.
Speaker 1: And again, I'm a tall, white guy, which helps a lot.
Speaker 1: But um, that's that's the best advice I ever got
Speaker 1: as a kid from a teacher. Really, the only advice
Speaker 1: I ever got as a kid from a teacher that
Speaker 1: I remember, Uh, shout out to coach Gonzalez of fucking Clark. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, again, he's he's telling people that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's some people that all these nonverbal cues mean
Speaker 1: folks are lying and this stuff is like just straight
Speaker 1: up not true. And part of what he is doing
Speaker 1: is he's getting officers to expect that people who express
Speaker 1: fear of police officers often by fidgeting or not making
Speaker 1: eye contact, and these people could be afraid for completely
Speaker 1: legitimate reasons, like the fact that they're black residents of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: That people who do this are a threat for doing
Speaker 1: the things that science tells us are normal behaviors for
Speaker 1: scared people. Um, that's what he's training cops to believe. Now,
Speaker 1: this is probably the least salacious part. This next part
Speaker 1: is probably this part is probably the least salacious part
Speaker 1: of his training, but it might be the most dangerous one.
Speaker 1: Grossman doesn't come across directly and say if someone fails
Speaker 1: to meet your eye or acts nervous, shoot them, but
Speaker 1: he does tell officers that they are they are under
Speaker 1: risk of deadly assault at all waking moments, that people
Speaker 1: are lurking in the shadows constantly ready to kill them,
Speaker 1: that they should err on the side of violence and that,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, you can tell who's dangerous if that by
Speaker 1: the fact that they won't meet your eyes. And then
Speaker 1: he says, ship like this, we fight violence, what do
Speaker 1: we fight it with? Superior violence? Righteous violence? Jesus, it's
Speaker 1: that great, Jack. I don't ye, I don't like this either.
Speaker 1: Not a fan. For the record, They're they're allowed to
Speaker 1: carry gout like, yep, they can legally murder you. And
Speaker 1: if you act nervous when they walk up to you
Speaker 1: with their hand on the gun that they can legally
Speaker 1: murder you with, they will legally murder you. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That doesn't seem like a healthy system for divining the
Speaker 1: truth and innocence of any given situation. Yeah, Like, like
Speaker 1: Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, I'm not a cop, Jack, but I
Speaker 1: would agree with you that seems unreasonable as well. So
Speaker 1: much much of Grossman's analysis is based on a series
Speaker 1: of studies conducted after World War Two and through the
Speaker 1: Vietnam Era, and the short summary of these studies studies
Speaker 1: that researchers after World War Two found that U S
Speaker 1: soldiers in combat only shot at the enemy like fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty of the time. Most troops would fire above
Speaker 1: the enemy's heads or pretend to fire anything they could
Speaker 1: do to avoid actually killing somebody. And so the military
Speaker 1: had to create a rigorous new training method to teach
Speaker 1: soldiers to aim and shoot at human bodies automatically without thinking.
Speaker 1: And by Vietnam, you know, soldiers who were trained properly
Speaker 1: no longer hesitated before at human beings. And this research
Speaker 1: is very famous. It is cited by a lot of
Speaker 1: folks outside of Grossman. I'm not going to get into
Speaker 1: this in detail because the veracity of it is heavily debated,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of reasons to question those
Speaker 1: old World War two studies, a lot of people who
Speaker 1: will say their bogus. I'm there's too much of his
Speaker 1: topic for us to get into. Now. What's important is
Speaker 1: that Grossman believes it. I found in a two thousand
Speaker 1: four PBS interview with him in which he really lays
Speaker 1: out his mindset on this, and I want to remind
Speaker 1: you all he's talking about this because he views what
Speaker 1: he's saying as a good thing that he does, as
Speaker 1: a positive service that he provides two cops quote prior preparation.
Speaker 1: Is that one variable in the equation that we can
Speaker 1: control ahead of time, and one of the key things
Speaker 1: is embracing the responsibility to kill. Modern training makes you
Speaker 1: kill without conscious thought. We are making it possible for
Speaker 1: people to kill without conscious thought, and thankfully and frankly,
Speaker 1: at the moment of truth, they need to be able
Speaker 1: to do that. Those who are not properly trained are
Speaker 1: going to be killed killed, and so we're teaching them
Speaker 1: to kill without anxious thought. And they, at an unconscious level,
Speaker 1: at the muscle memory level, reflex level, have grasped killing. Gun, Shoot,
Speaker 1: he's dead. I can trick your body into killing, but
Speaker 1: if your mind is not ready to come along on
Speaker 1: this ride, who's the next victim? You are? I have
Speaker 1: tricked your body into doing something that your mind is
Speaker 1: not ready to do. So when I teach, one of
Speaker 1: the things I believe we need to do is embrace
Speaker 1: this word kill. You will read a hundred military manuals
Speaker 1: and you'll never see the word kill. It's a dirty,
Speaker 1: four letter word, it's an obscene word, and yet it's
Speaker 1: what we do. Assuming there's no stress inoculation in a
Speaker 1: normal human being. At the moment when you want to fire,
Speaker 1: the four brain shuts down the midbrain takes over and
Speaker 1: you slam head on into a resistance to killing your
Speaker 1: own kind. The only way to overcome that resistance is
Speaker 1: through operant conditioning, to make killing a condition reflex. And
Speaker 1: we've done that. That's the worst. That's real bad. It's
Speaker 1: it's human engineering, like able engineering to murder on behalf
Speaker 1: of the people who are designed, who whose function in
Speaker 1: this like, according to the social contract, is to protect. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is exactly contradiction. He contradiction. He also is like
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, he's like, you know, the war that
Speaker 1: we should try and imitate is the one that America
Speaker 1: like that completely psychologically damaged, damaged Americans as America as
Speaker 1: a nation. Uh, let's go after that one. Because World
Speaker 1: War two was dead not deadly enough. Yeah, we didn't
Speaker 1: are clearly our soldiers didn't do a good enough job
Speaker 1: of defeating fascism on a global scale. Um, and the
Speaker 1: way we fought in Vietnam was much more effective, like
Speaker 1: the war that we famously lost. Its I was like
Speaker 1: that built in uh you know yeah, physical and psychological. Uh,
Speaker 1: stop that you hit when you're trying to kill someone,
Speaker 1: is there for a reason. Yeah, it's almost like maybe
Speaker 1: maybe the fact that US soldiers in World War Two
Speaker 1: were less aggressive, played into the fact that we were
Speaker 1: so clearly the good guys in that war. I mean,
Speaker 1: the genocides committed by the Nazis probably were more of
Speaker 1: a factor. But it is weird to take out of that. Oh,
Speaker 1: we gotta get people to kill more better, we gotta
Speaker 1: get people to kill more. Um. Yeah, obviously, Jack, I'm
Speaker 1: not an expert killologist. You know, I haven't studied killology
Speaker 1: as much as as Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. But that
Speaker 1: seems terrified. Your horrible to me everything I've just read.
Speaker 1: You have your masters in killology, but you don't. You
Speaker 1: don't have your pH you know, Jack, I never I
Speaker 1: never finished my master's thesis on killology. I've got everything
Speaker 1: but the thesis. Yeah, I you know, I dropped out.
Speaker 1: I just didn't have I couldn't afford it. You know.
Speaker 1: After a certain while that was cheology. Uh Loan grants
Speaker 1: just weren't enough. Um So maybe if I have reminds
Speaker 1: me of the Da Vinci Code when they're when they
Speaker 1: make up the thing that the Star is good at.
Speaker 1: It's like a puzzleologist or something cryptologist, which I think
Speaker 1: is a real thing. But it's like cryptology is I
Speaker 1: don't think he's basically he's basically a word jumble expert. Um.
Speaker 1: It's that's all horrible to me. Um and I I
Speaker 1: might say that anyone bragging about doing that to people's heads, UM,
Speaker 1: especially the heads of people whose job is to protect
Speaker 1: and interface with members of the community, that seems incredibly irresponsible. UM.
Speaker 1: And Grossman himself, in this interview with PBS even acknowledges
Speaker 1: that his trainings can funk up the heads of the
Speaker 1: police who take his advice. Quote, if we haven't prepared
Speaker 1: ourselves emotionally for the act ahead of time, and we
Speaker 1: just tricked you into killing, the magnitude of the trauma
Speaker 1: can be significant because we're having to live with something
Speaker 1: your body says is not right and you don't want
Speaker 1: to do. And you were simply tricked into killing David
Speaker 1: Jesus Jesus fucking Christ. So the thing you don't want
Speaker 1: to do, we tricked you into it, and that fux
Speaker 1: your head up. I'm gonna make this my entire life.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make doing this my whole like it's one
Speaker 1: of those things. Again. Yeah, this is clearly not the
Speaker 1: time to express sympathy with cops. But he is talking
Speaker 1: about gaslighting and emotionally abusing police officer, abusing police officers
Speaker 1: like that is what he's doing. He's he's talking very
Speaker 1: directly about that. It's not good, Like it's not good.
Speaker 1: I am. I'm taking a firm anti killology stance here. Jack.
Speaker 1: It seems it seems like that I'm gonna, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna stand next to you on that. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna stand with you that I am someone who whenever
Speaker 1: I walk out the door, I have a gun on me,
Speaker 1: a loaded and chambered firearm with with a bullet ready
Speaker 1: to fire when I pull the trigger. That that is
Speaker 1: an everyday thing for me, because death threats are pretty
Speaker 1: much in every week thing for me at this point. Um,
Speaker 1: I think a lot about what would happen if I
Speaker 1: had to draw a gun and shoot a human being. Um,
Speaker 1: And I can tell you, like I lose sleep over it.
Speaker 1: There is nothing that scares me more. And the people
Speaker 1: I'm specifically thinking about shooting potentially are fucking Nazis. Like
Speaker 1: that's realistically who I'm worried about because of the threat,
Speaker 1: and it's not I'm not particularly like I'm not horribly
Speaker 1: traumatized at the fact that I might have to kill
Speaker 1: someone who is attempting to kill me. I am terrified
Speaker 1: about the fact that people miss regularly, and stressful situations
Speaker 1: like gunfights and bullets don't stop because you miss, and
Speaker 1: the idea of firing. Anyone who carries a gun should
Speaker 1: be scared every time that they go into public with
Speaker 1: that gun. It should be something that worries them. It
Speaker 1: should be a it should be uncomfortable. It is a
Speaker 1: necessity for some people. And I'm not saying it's bad
Speaker 1: to carry a concealed handgun or something. I do it,
Speaker 1: but you should. It should be a weight on your shoulders.
Speaker 1: It should not be something you trained to not think about.
Speaker 1: You should never stop thinking about it. Um. That's my
Speaker 1: attitude as a guy who was thankfully never had to
Speaker 1: shoot anybody and hopes like how he never has to, Um,
Speaker 1: but who does go into the world armed regularly. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, so, uh this is all great. Uh ah.
Speaker 1: So we need to work on your your reflexes so
Speaker 1: that you have a little bit more killology. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: expertise before the next time you walk out that door. Bro.
Speaker 1: So the murder of Mr. Castile did not spell the
Speaker 1: end of Grossman's business, but it did impact it. The
Speaker 1: sheer Off of Santa Clara County, California canceled an upcoming
Speaker 1: training session after Mr Castile's murder. Um and she said
Speaker 1: that her officers were peacemaker's first and warriors second. Uh.
Speaker 1: There was an avalanche of criticism against Grossman. He lost
Speaker 1: a decent amount of business um and this is what
Speaker 1: kind of inspired mother Jones to take that class and
Speaker 1: to write that article about him. And they wrote they
Speaker 1: interviewed a number of other like experts on law enforcement
Speaker 1: and even law enforcement trainers who are critical of Grossman.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read that paragraph now. Grossman's trainings are
Speaker 1: fear porn, says Craig Atkinson, a filmmaker who attended one
Speaker 1: for his documentary on police military terrorization, Do Not Resist.
Speaker 1: He wonders how the Castile incident may have played out
Speaker 1: if Officer Jana's hadn't heard Dave Grossman tell him that
Speaker 1: every single traffic stop could might be the last stop
Speaker 1: you ever make in your life. Grossman is more of
Speaker 1: a motivational speaker than a trainer, says Seth Stoughton, a
Speaker 1: former cop in law professor at the University of South
Speaker 1: Carolina who studies the regulation of police and Grossman's worldview.
Speaker 1: Stouton says the officer is the hero, the warrior, the
Speaker 1: noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear
Speaker 1: to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and
Speaker 1: who does so by imposing their will on the civilians
Speaker 1: they deal with. This approach to policing is outdated and ineffective,
Speaker 1: says Stoughton, and some of it is dangerously wrong. Samuel Walker,
Speaker 1: a criminal justice professor an expert on police accountability, says
Speaker 1: the bulletproof Warrior approaches okay for green berets, but unacceptable
Speaker 1: for domestic policing. The best police chiefs in the country
Speaker 1: don't want anything to do with this. Grossman and his
Speaker 1: business partner deny that what they provide as anything like
Speaker 1: military training, or that it treats cops as warriors, even
Speaker 1: though it repeatedly refers to them as frontline troops and
Speaker 1: shows them training materials that are also used by military
Speaker 1: trainers to prep soldiers. Yeah, it is really impossible to
Speaker 1: over emphasize how much bulletproof mindset training focuses on building
Speaker 1: an image of the world is irredeemably aggressive towards random cops.
Speaker 1: This Bloomberg right up describes how the class is open.
Speaker 1: Quote forty cops are in a classroom watching recent footage
Speaker 1: of protesters in San Francisco denouncing the police. Your children
Speaker 1: are ashamed of you. A black woman in the video
Speaker 1: tells a black officer who looks away, cow word. Others shout.
Speaker 1: A young demonstrator walks up to a cop and sticks
Speaker 1: out his middle finger. A female officer trips, and the
Speaker 1: demonstrators laugh. The volume is way up, and the cops
Speaker 1: in the room are leaning back in their chairs, crossing
Speaker 1: their arms and getting tents. David Grossman's partner in this
Speaker 1: steps into the front of the room and stops the video.
Speaker 1: Glennon fifty nine but twenty nine years as an officer
Speaker 1: in Lombard suburbs of Chicago, where they tortured people and
Speaker 1: at one point running accounting homicide investigations. He's six ft
Speaker 1: one pounds and has the gravelly voice and bearing of
Speaker 1: the desk sergeant on the nineteen eighties TV show Hill
Speaker 1: Street Blues, who told cops to be careful out there
Speaker 1: before the squad cars rolled. Welcome to our world. Glennon says,
Speaker 1: it's as bad as it's been since the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: And again, obviously that's not fucking true. That's objectively not true. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could argue that within the last three
Speaker 1: or four days it might be starting to be true,
Speaker 1: but it's because the cops treated people like enemy insurgents
Speaker 1: and murdered a bunch of them. Um. Yeah, And even then,
Speaker 1: no cops have been killed yet in this at least
Speaker 1: as of the recording of this fucking episode. Who knows
Speaker 1: where we'll be, you know, uh, in another couple of days. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, this is what cops believe. Um. And if
Speaker 1: it's not what the man who murdered George Floyd believed,
Speaker 1: it's probably what the other three cops he was with,
Speaker 1: who stood by and who helped him murder George Floyd believed.
Speaker 1: Minnesota police love Grossman's courses, and he has taught a
Speaker 1: lot of minnes of Minnesota cops, a lot of Minneapolis cops. Uh.
Speaker 1: And as you might expect, he does not teach officers
Speaker 1: positive things about groups like Black Lives Matter. He calls
Speaker 1: b l M protests treason, and he says that bl
Speaker 1: m has blood on its hands for encouraging people to
Speaker 1: kill police. The media, he teaches his cops are bastards
Speaker 1: for their unfair coverage of police violence. When homicide cropped
Speaker 1: up ever so slightly in two, he blamed it on
Speaker 1: what he called the Ferguson effect. And his hypothesis is
Speaker 1: that after those police protests, protests, after those protests, cops
Speaker 1: were scared to do their jobs, and so they let
Speaker 1: more crimes happen. I guess it is not a very
Speaker 1: coherent belief system, but in Grossman's head it all makes sense.
Speaker 1: Just his sheep dog metaphor makes sense. Quote. The sheep dog,
Speaker 1: he says, looks a lot like a wolf. He has
Speaker 1: fangs in the capacity for violence. The difference that the
Speaker 1: sheep dog must not, cannot, and will not ever harm
Speaker 1: the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest
Speaker 1: little lamb will be punished and removed. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: Grossman doesn't think cops ever actually intentionally harm innocent people. Uh.
Speaker 1: The author of that Men's Journal article up quoted from
Speaker 1: got a chance to interview him, and he brought that up.
Speaker 1: And here's his quote about this. Of all the recent
Speaker 1: high profile police killings, Grossman se is almost none that
Speaker 1: he believes were unjustified. Take Eric Garner, the Staten Island
Speaker 1: man who died after an a legal chokehold from the
Speaker 1: NYPD and whose last words were, I can't breathe. If
Speaker 1: you can talk, you can breathe. Grossman said that guy
Speaker 1: had a heart condition. The lesson is, don't fight cops
Speaker 1: when you have a heart condition. Jesus Christ. By the way,
Speaker 1: one of the things that was said to George Floyd
Speaker 1: by the police when he said that he couldn't breathe
Speaker 1: is that if he could talk, he could breathe. Um, yep.
Speaker 1: This guy is like or take Tamir Rice, the twelve
Speaker 1: year old Cleveland boy who was fatally shot at a
Speaker 1: park while playing with a toy air soft gun. If
Speaker 1: you had a gun pointed at you, Grossman says, sympathizing
Speaker 1: with the cop, who for the record, did not have
Speaker 1: a gun pointed at him, that one's borderline. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to give you that one. Yes, the instant shooting
Speaker 1: of a twelve year old with a toy is borderline. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1: Grossman does not believe that police have any kind of
Speaker 1: bias against blackman that makes them more likely to shoot
Speaker 1: black men instead. He says, the far greater bias in
Speaker 1: our society today is a bias against cops. In ten
Speaker 1: in ten thousand TV shows, in five movies, black people
Speaker 1: are almost never the bad guys. Name me one cop
Speaker 1: movie in the last thirty years that didn't have a
Speaker 1: bad cop. Now. In total fairness, Jack to David Grossman,
Speaker 1: he does think there's one way in which policing could
Speaker 1: be reformed. Um and he he even agrees that policing
Speaker 1: is broke. Do you know what do you want to know?
Speaker 1: Do you know what he thinks is broken about policing, Jack?
Speaker 1: They're too hemmed in by restrictions and they need to
Speaker 1: be able to more freely use violence. He does think that, clearly,
Speaker 1: but what he says is actually even dumber. When people
Speaker 1: tell you law enforcement is broken, they're right, And what's
Speaker 1: broken asleep. He believes that when cops shoot wrongly, it's
Speaker 1: not because they're biased, are scared, or in need of
Speaker 1: better training, or have been trained to shoot people much
Speaker 1: more regularly. It's because they're tired, because they've been working
Speaker 1: too many long shifts and taking too much overtime, uh
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation. He says is the number one predictor of
Speaker 1: judgment errors, ethical problems, and used to force problems. If
Speaker 1: I could change one thing in the world right now
Speaker 1: to make law enforcement better, it would be mandating sleep.
Speaker 1: I mean, the bulletproof mindset does sound like a douchey
Speaker 1: diet among Silicone Valley people, like where it's like bulletproof caveman,
Speaker 1: where you like only eat meat and sleep for twenty
Speaker 1: minutes five times an hour. Um, that that would be
Speaker 1: too many Uh yeah, but yeah, it's I can see.
Speaker 1: I figured I was waiting for there to be some
Speaker 1: sort of bio hacking element to it, and we snuck
Speaker 1: it in right at the end. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: I want to close this jack with an anecdote from
Speaker 1: my own experiences, um, because it's one of the things
Speaker 1: that was most striking to me when I was in
Speaker 1: Iraq and Mosle during the fighting against Isis. Now, the
Speaker 1: the Iraqi army has a long history of doing fucked
Speaker 1: up shit, um, both before and after the invasion, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of brutality from a number of different
Speaker 1: Iraqi military units. Um. But I something I saw when
Speaker 1: I was up at the very front. One of my
Speaker 1: last days in Mosel, I was at the the very
Speaker 1: edge of the advance. So I was standing at the
Speaker 1: end of a block of bombed out buildings, and the
Speaker 1: next block ten feet away was technically Isis territory, like
Speaker 1: they were fighting over that next block, and they were
Speaker 1: just waves of refugees whose houses had been blown up,
Speaker 1: in some cases seconds earlier by bombs, fleeing towards us.
Speaker 1: And these huge lines of people with everything they owned
Speaker 1: on their backs, who had been in Isis territory minutes earlier.
Speaker 1: And I was with this line of Iraqi police who
Speaker 1: were meeting these these fleeing people and were searching them
Speaker 1: for bombs, and they had they had explosives detectors. All
Speaker 1: of these guys had friends who had been killed within
Speaker 1: days by Isis suicide bombers. And this was just a
Speaker 1: crowd of undifferentiated people walking out of Isis territory with
Speaker 1: huge bags on their backs and in their hands. It
Speaker 1: was a fucking tense situation, um. And there were numerous
Speaker 1: times where I saw young officer, young Iraqi soldiers walk
Speaker 1: up with metal detectors and guns to take someone's bags
Speaker 1: to search them, and the person would grab their bag
Speaker 1: and pull away, which is a I was terrified because
Speaker 1: that looks like a guy about to like fucking detonate
Speaker 1: a bomb that's in his bag or something. At no
Speaker 1: point did I see any of those Iraqi soldiers point
Speaker 1: their guns at a civilian so much as point their
Speaker 1: guns at one. And these are eighteen nineteen year old
Speaker 1: boys with virtually no training, um, who are scared as hell,
Speaker 1: and who have had friends killed in similar circumstances. And
Speaker 1: I would have expected US cops in the same situation
Speaker 1: to have reacted much more violently and much more poorly.
Speaker 1: And that's something that stayed with me ever since. It's
Speaker 1: almost like it's almost like we're the we're the worst,
Speaker 1: almost like like we're doing a real bad job. Ya Um,
Speaker 1: way to go. David gross Man, David gross Man, Gross,
Speaker 1: that's at Jack. You know, I think this is the
Speaker 1: end of gross most David nasty Pants. Yeah, good, David
Speaker 1: nasty pants. Suck on that Davy plug. Yeah. I'm Jack O'Brien.
Speaker 1: I host a daily, twice daily podcast with Miles Gray.
Speaker 1: It's called The Daily Zeitgeist. Uh and Yeah. In the morning,
Speaker 1: we go through and try and tell you what's happening
Speaker 1: in the Zeitgeist that day in the afternoon in the Zeitgeist, Jack,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you it's pretty bad in the after today,
Speaker 1: but yeah, um, check out the day. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun. It doesn't it won't totally destroy your soul,
Speaker 1: although we're having more and more trouble, uh, sticking to
Speaker 1: that this week. But yeah, come, we we watched the
Speaker 1: whatever is in the Netflix top ten. We tell you
Speaker 1: about that, so you don't have to watch the bad stuff.
Speaker 1: It ends up being a lot of fun. Uh, So yeah,
Speaker 1: check it out. You can follow me on Twitter, Jack
Speaker 1: Underscore O'Brien, check out Jack under or O'Brien at the
Speaker 1: Twitter um, and and check out the Daily Zeitgeist. And
Speaker 1: you know, obviously there will be more protests all around
Speaker 1: the United States. Um by the time this this finally drops, Um,
Speaker 1: My advice to everyone who's asking it, because I've gotten
Speaker 1: so many emails from people asking is to go out
Speaker 1: and express your legal right to protest and to be
Speaker 1: furious about the the situation we find ourselves in the
Speaker 1: many situations we find ourselves in, utilize your legal rights,
Speaker 1: protect yourself, and remember, most importantly, if you get tear gas,
Speaker 1: just use water to wash your eyes out. People have
Speaker 1: a lot of fancy fucking tear gas recipes. Just use water.
Speaker 1: It is idiot proof and it's fine. Bring water, pour
Speaker 1: it in your eyes outwards, from the eye from like
Speaker 1: the inside of the eye out. Don't fucking don't make
Speaker 1: it complicated. Don't go buy in gallons of milk. Just
Speaker 1: use water. If you use If you get tear gas,
Speaker 1: that's that's or put a traffic cone on on top
Speaker 1: of the tear gas can. Yeah, or some water in. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's some good Hong Kong tactics right there. So um,
Speaker 1: good luck everybody, stay powerful. Good luck to you, Robert.
Speaker 1: Don't get killed. Yeah h h