The Man Who Teaches Our Cops To Kill

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's overthrowing the government? My everyone? Uh, this is
Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the show about bad people, UH,
recording right now in the middle of what's what's rapidly
turning into a nationwide insurrection against uh legally constituted power. Uh.

(00:23):
And my guest, as with all insurrections, is the inimitable
Jack O'Brien. Yeah, what's up, guys. How quite a year Jack. Yeah.
As you can see, I'm standing in from the flaming
police headquarters. I have a sword, my shirt is tied

(00:44):
around my head, uh, and I'm covered in blood. But yeah,
I'm I am really you know Jack, when you got
that full chest fuck the police tattoo last year, I said,
when are you going to have a chance to show
that off? And I, by god I was wrong. Yeah, man,
it's uh, it's been pretty wild. Uh. Yeah, Yeah, you've

(01:07):
been talking about the possibility of an American civil war
for a long time. Uh. I sure have converted me
into believing that was, you know, more possible than uh
we realized. And now I feel like a lot of
people are probably having that same realization. Yeah. It was
almost exactly a year ago that I put out the

(01:29):
episodes of it could Happen Here that talked about the
President potentially laying siege to American cities with US troops.
UM and uh, now now that appears to be happening.
So I didn't want to be right about that one,
but you were about to tell me what we're talking
about today. So first off, this is a bonus episode,
and it's the second bonus episode we recorded. You'll get

(01:51):
that other episode at a later point. This is a
bonus episode because back thirty thousand years ago, my listeners
raised like sixteen thousand dollars to buy diapers for poor
women in Portland and Northern Oregon. UM, poor families, people
who couldn't afford diapers, which is awesome. It was very
nice of you guys funded the diaper bank in Portland
here for the rest of the year. So that's one

(02:13):
problem among everything else that a lot of people don't
have to worry about. And I so this is a
free episode, a third episode special for all of you.
UM and I really were re recording a separate one
because this this I wanted to do something timely what
with the riots. So we're going to talk about the
bastard who trains cops to kill That is the subject
of today's podcast. Yeah. Man, yeah, it's gonna be fun.

(02:37):
Somebody's got to do it. I guess right. I not
somebody has to do it, but there must have been
somebody else. If someone is doing it, for sure, Yeah,
somebody is clearly doing it. I think we could probably
get by without someone doing this. But someone is doing
would be wonderful if somebody didn't do that, wouldn't it. Yeah,
but it it is definitely being done. Um. So yeah,

(03:00):
gonna talk about that today. Um yeah. So we're we're
all currently in the middle of a let's let's call
it a complicated moment in our the history of our
national relationship with our police. Uh. As I type this,
it's like less than twelve hours after a crowd of
activists breached, occupied, and burnt down a Minneapolis police station.
Um and this is the first time anything like this
has occurred to my knowledge since the Battle of Athens,

(03:22):
Georgia in nineteen forty six. I think it was Georgia.
Um and that was like a bunch of veterans, very
different story. We'll talk about it at some point. Protests
in marches and by this time. You know that by
the time you hear this, maybe even riots are like
cropping out all over the country. People were shot in
Louisville last night, I think also in Phoenix. Like it's
just it's going down a former Kentucky and I can't

(03:42):
let you call Louisville. It's Louisville. This is what the
Civil War is gonna be over, Jack louis or louis Yeah,
Louisville Americans banded together to fight against the pronunciation of
Louisville or for it. I don't know how most people
will break down. Um, Kentucky and the time for Yeah,

(04:04):
I apologize for interrupting. Uh no, no, what was a
very very serious and important thing you were saying. I
uh but yeah, I just couldn't do it without uh
you know my fellow Kentuckians inside my head getting very
yeah fair enough. So as we're all aware the this
this all started off like the kind of the spark

(04:26):
to all. This was the blatant and outrageous murder of
George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers on funk. I
think like Monday of this, yeah, Jess, it feels like years.
Uh good lord, um so Yeah, that was a spark, um,
and it was the spark that caught all of this.

(04:47):
But that spark was only able to catch because over
the last several years, Americans have become increasingly aware of
how often black men in particular are murdered by police
under very shady circumstances. Minneapolis itself has a particularly full
modern history of this. In two thousand ten, David Smith,
a bipolar black man, was a Minneapolis y m c
A acting bizarrely. Bizarrely is the term used to describe

(05:09):
it by people the y m c A folks uh ship.
Note here that Americans with untreated mental illnesses are sixteen
times as likely as other Americans to be killed by
the police. UM. So the police were called on Mr
Smith UH. They tased him multiple times and held him
down on the ground. One officer knelt on his back.
He asphyxiated and died. UM. There were protests as a

(05:29):
result of this UH, and the cops were eventually cleared
of all wrongdoing. No one was punished. In two thousand fifteen,
Jamark Clark, aged twenty four, was killed by police responding
to a call over domestic disturbance. They handcuffed him and
while he was on the ground, they shot him in
the head, claiming he had reached for one of their weapons.
Protesters occupied land around minneapolis Is Fourth Precinct, but the
officers were again cleared of all wrongdoing. In two thousand sixteen,

(05:52):
Philando Castile was stopped by Geronimo Jannez, a Minneapolis police officer,
case Stile was carrying a legal concealed firearm. He informed
officer Janez of this as he was required to do
so um without pausing to breathe, and As drew his
firearm and shot Castile to death in front of his girlfriend. Uh.
There were protests, you know, As was charged with manslaughter

(06:13):
and again found not guilty. I could go back further.
These are not the only examples of this. In fact,
I was doing I was trying to research earlier. You know,
there's that that video going around with that guy with
the the umbrella that some people think was an agent
provocateur the auto zone UM in Minneapolis, and we were
trying to like lockdown who it was, and I was
looking into the officer people think it is, whose name

(06:33):
I won't use just because I it's very unclear if
that's actually the person. UM but that officer was involved
in another shooting of a black man that was really sketchy.
Like you, you just keep finding these cases and like
so anyway, there's a ton of them in Minneapolis. Stop
for a second, the person. Like the theory is that
this person intentionally broke some windows to try and like

(06:57):
insight rioting. Yeah, that's that's the theory from some protesters.
I don't know how credible I think it is, like
to be honest, like other stuff was already burning at
that point. The video is weird. I'm not gonna it's
not worth getting into at this moment, Like I yeah,
so yeah, I don't think I have to establish for
anyone how often American police use force UH. In two thousand,

(07:17):
five ninety Americans were killed in mass shootings. UH. Nine
hundred and eighties seven Americans were killed by police officers.
That's one year. So every year, police officers killed about
twice as many people as die in mass shootings UM,
and that number is probably very low because most police
shootings actually are not reported in the way that you'd think.
From the Columbine shooting UM to April two, nineteen, two

(07:41):
twenty three Americans were killed in school shootings. So in
the last twenty some years, two d twenty three Americans
killed in school shootings, which means that every year American
cops killed four times as many Americans as have died
in school shootings in generation. So that's a lot of
people being shot by cops, um, American police killed. The
argument that pops into my head, coming from conservative people

(08:02):
or just people who uh the Blue Lives matter set,
would be that, well, how many of those people were
trying to kill the cops um at the time when
they were shot. But I mean, there's so many other
countries where where the cops don't kill their citizens. Uh,

(08:25):
And those those cops aren't like you know, dying by
the in by droves. They are not they are not
were This episode is about why. So the answer to
that really is that most of these cops would say
that they were in fear of their life, but that
doesn't mean that they were actually their lives were actually

(08:47):
being threatened. Um. And this episode is about helps to
explain a big part of why so many of those
cops believe they were in fear for their lives or
we'll we'll say that it may not be lying, which
doesn't mean that it's okay, but it means that like
they they are being trained to fear for their life
and react with violence UM at a a a wildly

(09:07):
disproportionate rate. And this is an episode about like how
that happens. So one of the other things I want
to note before we get into the main subject of
the day is that the rate at which our police
kill citizens seems to be accelerating. Is currently on target
to match twenty nineteen for police killings of citizens, despite
the fact that a huge portion of the country has
been trapped inside for half the year so far. So
despite the fact that people are not out nearly as often,

(09:29):
are not traveling, or not out in the street, or
not doing things nearly as often, UM, police are still
killing the same number of Americans, uh, which is striking
to me. That's that seems surprising because crime is to
got you gotta fight against all those people wielding lisol
and dangerous toilet paper packaging. Yeah. So the question, of

(09:52):
course that you were just asking is like, why are
why are things this way in America? UM? And the
answer that some of my more militant UH left is
for a would suggest probably boils down to all cops
are bastards, and um I'm not going to disagree with that,
but it's also not a satisfying answer because there are
things that make American police very different from police and
other countries. Um police and other countries have a lot

(10:13):
of the same problems as US cops, but kill a
hell of a lot fewer people per capita. Um So.
There there is a reason that American cops are particularly aggressive,
and a big part of this reason is the special
training courses offered by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, the bulletproof
mindset courses. Um SO. Officer Janez, who we talked about

(10:34):
earlier is the guy who killed Filando Castile. He had
attended a bulletproof mindset course in two thousand fourteen, two
years before he murdered Castile. More than a hundred police
departments in the US and thousands of officers, perhaps tens
of thousands, have taken Grossman's courses over more than twenty years.
His teachings have made their way into mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
UM he is probably it is said that he's probably

(10:56):
trained more American cops than any other single person. Um
he is. He is the most influential single police trainer
in the United States. So that's who we're talking about today. UM,
so he must we have, Yeah, we're we're fortunate that
we have the entirety of the Bulletproof Mindset course book
that police in Lieutenant Colonel Grossman's class take. Um. And

(11:18):
we have this thanks to the same heroic journalists who
are currently documenting the everything that's happening in Minneapolis Unicorn Riot.
And if you haven't already and you have any spare money,
go donate some cash to Unicorn Riot right now. They're
the ones fucking They should get Appealitzer for how they've
covered this. But they also got a hand of a
hold of a scanned copy of this textbook which they

(11:40):
uploaded to the Internet for everyone to see. And it
includes like the notes that the cop taking the course
took during the course, which is really interesting because you
get to see what this guy. You know, this is
a course book that's like follow along notes. So we
don't know exactly what Grossman said in his lecture, although
I found other articles written about his lectures, so we've
we've got some of that in here too. Um, but
we do know, like what this officer was taking out

(12:02):
of the course or what whoever was taking this course
was like, was like learning from it um and that
lets his piece together, like what this guy is saying
the police and what police are actually taking home from
it um. So to start us off, I want to
read how Lieutenant Colonel Grossman describes his own backstory in
the first page of his training document quote. Lieutenant Colonel

(12:22):
Dave Grossman retired from the Army after twenty three years
experience leading U S soldiers worldwide. Today, he is the
director of the Killology Research Group. He is an internationally
recognized scholar, soldier, speaker, and one of who is one
of the world's foremost experts in the field of human
aggression and the root cause cause of violence and violent crime.
Grossman is a former West Point Psychology professor, professor of

(12:43):
military science, and an Army ranger who has combined his
experiences to become the founder of a news field of
scientific endeavor which has been termed killology. That can't be real.
I mean, that's not I'd also like to point but
he does look exactly like what you would picture in

(13:03):
your head. Just it's it's certainly not a real field
of scientific endeavor. But he absolutely calls it killology, and
he somehow does that molology collapsing in on himself. Um. Now,
Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,
which sounds more impressive than it is because you can

(13:24):
nominate yourself. It's actually pretty easy to get nominated for
a Pulitzer price. Um. I don't know that he did.
I don't know who nominated him. His books are legitimately
very popular there in like part of the training for
the FBI Academy there in, like the Marine Corps Commandants
required reading list. On Killing and on Combat are the
two big books by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman. Now, based on

(13:46):
all of that very impressive biography Jack, based on his
military career and the fact that he started a scientific
discipline called killology, you might expect that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman
is a hardened combat veteran, right like the guy who
write a book on him. Nothing. Yeah, But interestingly enough,
he's seen less combat than me. Um. And for the record,

(14:09):
the combat I've seen is a tiny bit, and the
amount of combat that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has experienced is none. Um. Now,
I want to make it clear that doesn't make him
unqualified to write books on the psychological impact of killing
or of combat any more than being born in the
nineteen eighties makes me unqualified to write about Hitler. Right,
you don't have to have killed anyone or have been

(14:29):
in combat to do a very good job of writing
about it, of doing a scholarly treatise of studying it.
You know, it could even be argued that someone who
has not been in combat is the right kind of
person to try to do a scholarly analysis of how
it impacts people. Um, I'm not saying that he has
indirectly killed thousands, So he has now, yeah, killed huge
numbers of people. He should take that into onto his

(14:54):
chest and then uh and then rewrite his course. Yeah,
so I'm I'm I'm not going to say that he
shouldn't be writing about killing at all. However, I will
say that he does quite a bit more than just
write academic treatises on combat. Um. And you can judge
for yourself whether or not his record kind of makes
what he's been doing unreasonable. Um. I'm gonna start off
by quoting from a write up of him in Men's

(15:16):
Journal that kind of talks about, Um, what he believes.
Quote on combat is probably which is his most famous
book is probably best known for his assertion that people
can be divided into three groups, sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs.
And it's the sheep dogs, blessed with the gift of aggression,
as he says, who are responsible for protecting the sheep
from the wolves. The analogy has been adopted by various

(15:39):
military and gun rights groups, and Clint Eastwood's American Sniper,
the father of Navy Seal Chris Kyle, gives a fictional
Din Dinner table lecture about sheep dogs taken directly from
Grossman's writings. So this guy's attitude is very influential. Um
and it. Yeah. Uh so that's is the small artist

(16:00):
and most accurate views of humanity that start out with
the phrase, now there are three types of people. Yeah,
you can categorize three groups. I am going to serious
academic m hm is I I am? I am famous
Jack from my assertion that all of humanity can be

(16:21):
divided into two groups, people who are literally Adolf Hitler
and everyone else, which is just impossible to argue meaningless.
Yeah yeah, um yeah, So as as that might key,
you went on that paragraph Grossman is more of a
pop psychologist than an academic. He tries to portray himself

(16:41):
as a scientist, but he is not approaching us scientifically.
You can't scientifically lump people into sheep, dogs, sheep and wolves.
It's just not the way things Work's famous theory of
the sheep, dog, sheep and wolves. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.
So I've heard him compare aired to like a right
wing militant Malcolm Gladwell, and that's not far off. His

(17:05):
research is distinctly unscientific, for on combat. He gathered his
information via what he called an interactive feedback loop, which
is what everyone else would just call interviewing a bunch
of guys who have been in combat, which is fine,
but like, it's not an interact. You're you're talking to
people with relevant experiences. Just just say you interact people feedback.
Fucking christ dude. Um. So he says he interviewed a

(17:29):
thousand soldiers and cops using no particular and and then
took what he had learned from them, using no particular
scientific method or rigor, and boiled it down into his
book about killing and books about killing in combat. Now, again,
it's not necessarily a bad thing to talk to a
thousand people who have been in combat or killed people
and write a book about it. But the way he
has done it is not science. Like there's no control group,

(17:50):
there's no attempt, there's no attempt to rigorously actually learn
anything from this. He's just sort of talking to people
and giving you what he thinks about it, which is
again fine, but not science. Yeah. Question when was this
book published or released? It like the nineties? Yeah, like
the nineties. I think eighties or nineties. Yeah. Um, he

(18:10):
most of the books a couple of decades ago. My
gym teacher was given like eight years and like forced
to write a book and just like keep writing what
he thought. Yeah about It's interesting that you mentioned that, Jack,
because Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was your gym teacher and his
most famous quote is that you were not great at

(18:32):
the hundred meter dash. He's really Do you like the
implication that I still have a gym teacher. I still
go to Jim class to be humiliated by my peers.
It is a weird thing that I Heart radio requires
of us. Um, no other radio company mandates gym teachers
for their on air hosts. But what can you do? Yeah,

(18:55):
not much, I'll tell you that. In one interview, when
Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was asked for his qualifications, he cited
the quote body of information I've crafted over the years
and his ability to speak from the heart, noting that
I truly am one of the best people on the
planet in a couple of areas, whether it's preparation for
a life and death event or walking the sheep dog path,
I really feel like I'm the pre eminent authority. He

(19:18):
is the pre eminent authority on the thing he invented,
the jumble of words he just slammed together. And again,
a huge number of the police in Minneapolis right now,
if not the vast majority of them, have taken this
guy's course. So keep that in mind as we And also,
if you wind up in the streets in the next
couple of days, very good chance your cops too took

(19:39):
this guy's course. Yeah yeah, um So. That same Men's
Journal article also noted quote. Since leaving the army, Grossman
frequently introduces himself as a reserve cop. Parentheses he's the
deputy reserve coroner for St. Clair County, Illinois, and he
notes I think a lot more like a cop today

(20:01):
than I do, like a soldier. So just to set this,
coroner would be a coroner who who is the assistant
to the backup coroner in case, Yeah, you might recognize
that is not really a cop. Somebody who, in an

(20:22):
unlikely chain of circumstances and events, uh, would maybe have
to see a dead person. I mean, ironically, the chain
of circumstances and events right now, in which, like the
police in multiple Yeah, he might wind up being called
into active duty because in part because of the uprising

(20:43):
that he has helped to spark. So that's he might
get his wish. He might finally get to be on combat.
I don't know. Um, you know who's not a cop?
The products and services that support this podcast. We're back, okay,
So let's see what Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, non combat

(21:05):
veteran who has never killed anyone and not a cop,
teaches cops about combat and killing. I'm sure it's nuanced
and accurate. Uh. So the training program opens with and
this is again the Bulletproof mindset opens with a graph
on rates of violent crime, murder, and imprisonment to make
the case that the first two have dropped steadily as
the first one has gone up, So he's pointing out
to police that, like, the more people you arrest arrest,

(21:28):
the less crime there is in the United States. UM. Now,
these graphs are not technically wrong. Incarceration has broadly gone
up as crime has gone down. But just graphing those
three things together leaves out a number of other things
that have had an impact on the rate of violent crimes,
such as let exposure, internet access, availability of social programs,
average level of educational attainment, income inequality, et cetera. The

(21:52):
point of this graph is to take to show that
taking dirt bags off the streets is to make is
what makes society safer. Um And unfortunately, people who actually
study the impact of incarceration on crime disagree with Lieutenant
Colonel Grossman on this. And I'm gonna quote from the
Brennan Center for Justice. Now, between two thousands seven and
two seventeen thirty four states reduced both imprisonment and crime
rates simultaneously, showing clearly that reducing mass incarceration does not

(22:15):
come at the cost of public safety. For sources and
definitions and credit. The total number of sentenced individuals held
in state prisons across the US also decreased by six
percent over the same decade. The Very Institute of Justice
has also conducted a study looking at incarceration and crime
since two thousand. They found that between seventy five and
a percent of the drop in crime we've experienced since
the early nineteen nineties came as a result of factors

(22:37):
other than incarceration, like increased graduation rates, an aging population,
and increased consumer confidence. But Grossman's course waits waste no
time in moving on from that to a series of
pages on Indiana University brain scanned research. These pages have large,
blurry images of scanned brains purporting to show increased aggression
in kids due to violent TV movies and video games.

(22:59):
He notes, quote media violence makes violent brains. Violent TV,
movie and video game exposure head an effect on normal
kids the same as children with documented diagnosed aggressive behavior disorder. Um,
so yeah, this is the he's saying so wrong. Yeah,
it's just like you can find something incorrect and uh

(23:24):
that will justify I don't know. It almost feels like
if you've ever like been around a bully who really
wants to beat you up, and like there's just like
no arguing them out of it, like that, it just
feels like that he's just like finding his anger and uh,
you know, excuses to use uh violence are going to

(23:47):
find a way. Yeah, it's cool. It's Fox News for cops.
Yeah it is. And it's it's it's like Fox News.
It has I won't say completely, but very heavily helped
craft the my set that cops walk onto the street
with today. So UM in terms of when it comes
to this, like study on video games and violent movies

(24:08):
and stuff affecting adolescent brains, the specific studies referencings from
two thousand eleven, and it did, in fact show that
ten hours of violent video games in one week showed
reduced levels of activity and regions of their frontal lobes
responsible for cognitive function and emotional control. UM. And there
is some evidence, a decent amount, that suggests that violent
media can at least temporarily increase increase aggression. But aggression

(24:29):
is not violence, it's just the feeling of aggression. It's
an emotional response. In two thousand nineteen, a group of
researchers carried out an enormous meta analysis, which is an
analysis of basically all the studies on this, and concluded
that the increased rate of aggression from video games was present,
but small at best. Um, and again no evidence that
it has any kind of meaningful impact on violence or

(24:50):
violent crime. They were testing people right after they played
the game. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and it makes
you feel more aggressive. Um, which isn't really that surprising,
to be honest, but whatever. So, Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has
a lot invested in the idea that video games and
gory movies have turned our children into a nation of slavering,

(25:11):
blood hungry monsters. He wrote a book titled Stop Teaching
Our Kids to Kill to cash in on the Columbine massacre.
During the Bulletproof mindset training classes, he often tells his
students that, yeah, exactly, he's one of those guys. He
often tells his students that denying the link between video
games and violence will someday quote be viewed as the
moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers. Uh huh, Yeah, for sure.

(25:39):
He probably hangs out with a bunch of them. Yeah,
I'm sure he knows a few. Um. I think they're
more just Holocaust questionnaires, Jack, They're just they're just asking questions.
They're just asking questions here about the Holocaust. So to
quote again from Men's Journal. One anecdote is particularly telling.
Grossman writes about a sixteen year old and client whose

(26:00):
parents took away his copy of Halo three because they
thought it was too violent. His father locked the game
in a lock box, which also held a nine millimeter handgun.
The boy stole the key, took the game in the gun,
and shot both of his parents in the head. Grossman
blames video games for the murder. He says nothing about
the pistol, which and I'm I'm even gonna say he used,

(26:21):
he used to kill his parents, I forget he beat
them to death of a copy of Halo three Jack,
famously the heaviest video game ever published. I mean, and
I'm gonna honestly, like, if we're gonna be really fair here,
there's a lot more going on that even just the
pistol and this kid shooting his parents to death, right, Like,

(26:43):
there's a lot probably, Yeah, but obviously picking video games
over the easily available handgun is um ludicrous, uh fucking
wildly irresponsible. Um, so let's get back to the bulletproof mindset. Um.
The next age of this document is more data on
serious assaults per capita, which Grossman uses his evidence to

(27:05):
make his case that modern cities are more dangerous than ever.
Mother Jones sent a reporter to one of these classes.
He reported that in this segment of the class, Grossman
depicts the modern world as quote, a place where gang
member seat to seek to set records for killing cops,
where a kid in every school is thinking about racking
up a body count. His latest book, Assassination Generation, insists

(27:27):
that violent video games are turning the nation's youth and
the mass murderers. The recent wave of massacres is just
the beginning. Please stop calling them mass shootings. He smacks
the easels. These thump crimes. Thump are thump everywhere. He
foresees attacks on school busses and daycare centers. Kindergarteners run
about point five miles an hour and get a burst
of about twenty yards that then they're done. It won't

(27:48):
just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatches, knives
and swords. Are the kindergarteners the ones attacking. No, no,
they're the victims. And Dr David knows how easy it
and he knows how easy it is to kill kindergarteners
because he has thought a lot about how you kill kindergarteners.
So that's part of the sheep dog mindset. Yeah, sheep

(28:09):
dog always look for, always how to kill a kindergarteners.
He continues, it it being these murders of kindergarteners won't
just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatchetes, knives,
and swords. His voice drops an octave, hacking and stabbing
little kids. You don't think they will attack daycares. It's
already happening in China. When you hear about a daycare massacre,

(28:32):
he tells, he shouts at them. Tell them Grossman said
it was coming. How dare he not consider machetes? I know,
I know about a daycare massacre? Tell him Grossman said
it was coming. That's so close to like a used
car salesman's pitch being like when you see it, it's
good fucking incredible. Yeah, tell him Grossman the orange that

(28:57):
that whole thing in l A on l A l A. Yeah,
so it's worth noting that. Robert, it almost sounds like
he's unhinged. Yeah, it almost sounds like he's a dangerously
irresponsible person to be taking teaching people anything. Um, It's
worth noting that in the copy of the training documents

(29:18):
Unicorn right obtained the young cop or whoever it was
taking who's taking the class, took notes and for this segment,
for this segment. During the segment, he wrote, presumably quoting Grossman,
you are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric
of America during these dark and degenerate times, which I'm
sure Key's police up to be very responsible. So the

(29:39):
next page includes a graph on combat efficiency over time,
which shows how soldiers in combat functionally, um how their
functional efficiency efficiency changes over a period of multiple days
in combat, ranging from battle wise at about ten days
in too vegetative state at sixty days. And this is
pretty reasonable, saeming it seems pretty consistent with other things

(30:01):
I've read and and some things I've seen about like
how days of combat affect people. I have no reason
to believe that his data is inaccurate. But what we're
actually seeing with this insert is Grossman establishing the idea
that police officers in their communities are the same as
soldiers in an active war zone, which I don't know
is broadly accurate in Minneapolis now, but only because of
all the cops that these people killed because of all

(30:24):
the people these cops killed. Yeah. Now, next we get
some info on PTSD and trauma that seems broadly reasonable,
and then a full page insert on being shot and
like what to do if you're shot as an officer,
And again most of this basic information isn't wrong, but
it does advise officers to tap the power of adrenaline
and use the It uses the example of an officer
who quote shot up purp with a forty five five

(30:46):
times before the perp dropped. Later, this officer apparently told himself,
get up, get up. If he could do it, I
could do it. The page ends with a quote in
italics from Grossman himself, you have never lived until you
have almost died. For those who fight for it. Life
has a flavor that protected will never know. And again,
he's never fought for his life. What is what is

(31:07):
the flavor? David? How do you? I mean, it's fine
if you're quoting people on that, but don't make it
your quote because you don't know what that anyway of
the cops as military and a foreign land is. Yeah,
so I mean nefarious and just it's thoroughly rotten, and

(31:32):
we're we're seeing the impact of it, because now we
are at a point where the police have been acting
for a long time like they are an occupying army,
and finally the people in Minneapolis and some other places
are starting to be like, all right, well, let's let's
do what insurgents do when they're occupied by an aggressive
invading force. And yep, that's what you get. Um. So,

(31:58):
the next page of this document is the sin your
piece of Grossman's entire ideology, a biblical justification for killing.
It starts with the bold in italics or the the
bold large print letters question thou shalt not kill question mark,
and then what follows are a series of biblical quotes
thou shalt not murder underline From Exodus, Jesus said, thou

(32:21):
shalt do no murder. From matt nineteen eighteen. The Lord
gave victory to David from Second Chronicles eighteen six. David
killed his tens of thousands. From one Samuel's eighteen seven.
Trouble started when David murdered Uriah from eleven Samuel eleven
these six things God hates and including shadders of innocent blood.

(32:41):
In Proverbs six seventeen, the rich young man comes to
Jesus sell everything you have which seems out of place
in Matt nineteen one. And then the centurion comes to Jesus,
no greater faith have I found Matt eight ten. Jesus said,
by as sword Luke thirty six Matt twenty six fifty two.
Who he who lives by the sword, shall die by

(33:02):
the sword Romans thirteen four. The magistrate beareth not the
sword in vain and acts ten that which quotes the
fact that the first gentile Christian is Cornelius, a centurion
who you get the feeling like he's basically saying God
loves cops. God is okay with killing as long as
it's not the murder of innocence. And since the killing
you won't be doing is the murder of innocence, God

(33:23):
wants you to kill. That's that's the argument this page
is making, and it ends with a quote from John
Random scraps of biblical uh and incoherent scraps of biblical
nonsense John thirteen is the quote that ends this page.
Greater love has no man than this, that he give
his life for his friends, so dangerously unhinged and incoherent,

(33:48):
is how I would kind of see that but you
can get you get the mindset that this kind of
pushes in the people who listen to it. Now, following
trust somebody who came up with no first of all,
somebody people should probably look him up. His eyes are
like closer together than a flounder, and he just he
is and they're tiny, and he just like has the

(34:09):
look of a very stupid man. Um Like it's almost
like he looks like a cartoon of a young George Bush,
George W. Bush. But he h and like there's like
some putin in there too, like a splash, a little death.
But like somebody who came up with the phrase killology

(34:33):
to choose, like what I was going to have for lunch,
let alone choose who lives and dies? Yeah, I wouldn't
want him making salads, let alone teaching people in the
community with guns. I would I would feel okay with
him digging holes maybe, although I don't like him having
a Yeah, I don't like him having a shovel um

(34:58):
so yeah. Following all this, we get a page on
the Modern Warriors Edge, which includes some pretty embarrassing clip
art of a schlubby cop looking in the mirror and
seeing a muscular cop uh. It does positively note that
communication skills are the most important skills for an officer
to master, which is true, I would say. But then
it warns cops that most of their attackers will warn
or provide indicators before striking, and that predators are always

(35:21):
looking for a body count, which they find by recognizing
soft targets. And then after that we hit what is
probably the most central and important aspect of this whole
training program, the video I'm in Fear of my life.
This video is about a police officer who was killed
in nine, Deputy Kyle dink Heller. And I'm not sure

(35:41):
if I've seen the exact same video that Grossman plays
in his courses, but I did find a CNN article
on the case, and it includes a video that I
believe to be at least very similar. The article on
CNN that includes this video opens with this paragraph, Jack,
if you want to know why cops shoot people, you
can find one of many answers in those three minutes.
On Whipple's Crossing Road is where dink Keller was shot.

(36:01):
There on January twelfth, ninety eight. Deputy Kyle Dinkkeller of
the Lawrence County Sheriff's office made the final traffic stop
of his brief career, and it is striking. In short,
we're gonna play aspects of this in a bit. The
video shows a traffic stop. The deputy pulls over an
older man driving erratically. Said man is belligerent. He jumps
and he refuses commands. UM. At one point he jumps

(36:22):
up and down, yelling for the officer to shoot him. Uh.
He yells that he is a Vietnam veteran. He gets
in Dean Keller's face and he gets aggressive. The deputy
eventually hits him with a nightstick. The man is knocked down,
but he gets back up and runs to his car.
There he grabs a rifle, which he uses to shoot
Deputy dink Heller to death. UM and kind of critically,
he fires several warning shots. First Dinkkeller fires back and

(36:44):
hits him, and then he shoots dink Keller to death.
And the video is horrific. Whatever else do you think
about cops? Dink Keller does seem to have honestly tried
to do everything in his power to avoid shooting this guy,
even after the guy pulled out a rifle. It is
It is a terrible video. UM, and I guess if
we're gonna do a content warning, you're gonna hear a
man's death screams a little bit later. It's it's bad, um,

(37:05):
but it's important because this is what is This is
like one of the most important videos in police training
in the United States, even outside of of Grossman's courses.
And the CNN video of this um includes interviews with
Kyle dink Keller's dad, who trains cops now and what
din Keller's dad takes out of this video is just
as horrific as the video itself. And I'm gonna ask
you to play that clip now, Kyle. It was a

(37:27):
deputy sheriff with Lawrence County Sheriff Department in Doublin, Georgia.
He was a good officer, me and his dad. I'm
the first one to say, yeah, he made some mistakes.
He was too fair, he was too nice. That was
just him. My son pulled out his aspaton hit him
a few times. But then the first mistake he made
was letting a man get kept him on the ground

(37:48):
and yeah, this is his dad can sat back out.
He was given the guy to the last asked ditch
effort to put the gun down. He didn't want to
hurt him. It didn't work. Okay, yeah, that's probably enough.

(38:23):
So that's pretty horrific, right, those screams are that's bad. Uh,
it's it's it's a hard video to watch. It's brutal,
um and it has you can tell the impact that
it's had on his dad because he's taken out of
this the fact that his son was too kind and
gave this guy too many chances, was not violent enough. Um.

(38:43):
And that is what watching the video, that's how it's
trained to police that like you need to be shooting
faster to save your own life. Um. And that video
you can like imagine about a whole classroom full of
young cops, which is like what who this video was
played to almost every and they show that actually is
like a bunch of cops just like putting their head down.

(39:04):
I mean it's really like one of the I I
can't like that's it's like trying to amp them up
to just be as trigger happy as possible. It's like
the bad bad police porn. Like how how not the
person who's being killed in the video. But like it's

(39:25):
it's just such a specific example and like just piece
of propaganda. Yeah, and it's yeah, we're gonna be talking
about this video quite a bit. So, as you might imagine,
the dink Keller video has a powerful impact on the
police and Grossman's classes. UM. And he ties this video
and the fact that dink Keller didn't shoot earlier UM

(39:46):
to some facts from the Civil War. UM. On battlefields
in the Civil War, dropped muskets were often found loaded
with multiple balls UM. And kind of the conclusion that
Grossman and a number of people take from this is
that most soldiers weren't trying to kill the enemy. UM,
that they were basically like pretending to fire and then
fake loading their guns, which is why like there were
so many bullets in them, because they weren't willing to

(40:08):
shoot people. That is one interpretation that other people say
that like people panic in in gunfights because it's terrifying,
and they were like fucking up not realizing their gun
wasn't actually firing because they were in a panicked situation,
or they were like fucking up while loading and accidentally
sticking too many balls in. UM. There's no way to
know what the actual truth is, but Grossman ties this

(40:30):
to the fact that people's people are so naturally unwilling
to kill people that you have to really aggressively train
people like police to kill very easily, otherwise they won't
kill when they need to. Like, that's that's the lesson
he learns from this, so that they're his argument is
that the Civil War wasn't deadly enough. Kind of yeah,

(40:51):
that is part of it. Yeah, well, we'll talk more
about this in a little bit. Uh. In these classes,
the sheriff who trained dink Heller gets a lot of
guff um for the way that he trained his deputies,
which gives you an idea of kind of like some
of the pre grossman attitudes towards at least shootings of
white people. Um. And the sheriff who trained to this
cop that died was famous for telling his officers, make

(41:13):
sure that if you shoot, it's a good shoot, and
if not, you're probably gonna lose everything you've got. You've got,
plus you're probably going to go to prison. So he
was being like, don't shoot unless you're absolutely certain it's
the right thing to do, otherwise you will go to prison,
which I would say is how everyone with a gun
should feel right right like at all times, no matter

(41:34):
who you are. At all times. Yeah. Now, the way
the story goes, Webb had a minor dust up with
dink Heller a few miners a few months prior to
his death. The deputy wound up yelling at a driver
on the road while responding to an incident. That driver
was a friend of Sheriff Webb's. He told the sheriff,
and the sheriff yelled at dink Keller and made him
write a letter of apology. This humiliated dink Keller and

(41:55):
caused him to get shipped from his colleagues. So, as
the story goes, he was also super self conscious about
sucking up on the job and getting in trouble, and
that's why he didn't shoot first. This whole story in
the video of this man's death has become a seminal
moment in the history of law enforcement education. Not only
did Kyle din Keller's father start touring with the video
of his son's death and teaching classes on it, but
other trainers have adopted the video, including Grossman. It is

(42:18):
used in police training courses in at least twenty seven states.
The lesson plan that accompanies this one course or one
course notes that the video is meant to help police
quote determined when lethal force is justified, and to always
remember your life is worth more than a lawsuit. And
the thing that's not stated there, but it is true,
is that they're also saying, remember your life is worth

(42:39):
more than other people's As a cop, yeah, which is
not the I mean, you would think that becoming a
cop is like the ideal version or the best case
scenary would be that it's a calling and you're there
to serve and protect the people who for some I

(43:00):
don't know, Yeah, yeah, you would think serve and protect
would be a part of the job, like and ideally,
and I do want to stay here that Like, I'm
not saying Grossman's training had a particular impact on the
the son of a bitch who killed George Floyd, because
that whatever whatever that was, that was that was even

(43:20):
out of the pail for police murders of black men.
But obviously I think it had a huge impact on
all of the other police murders in Minneapolis and a
bunch of other parts of the United States that contributed
to George Floyd's murder kind of setting all this off,
you know, like it it's a factor buying those like
I don't know what the funk was going on with
the guy, Like that's be even be like beyond the

(43:42):
pail for police murders of people, um, which is part
of why it had the impact it did. Um. So
just so slow and yeah, deliberate and yeah, it's just
like there's so many moments where they can stop what
they're doing and they just doing it. Yeah. Yeah, the

(44:06):
kind of killing that Grossman's stuff I think really mainly
has had a major impact on. It's like the killings
of people like Philando Castile where the cop clearly without
any sort of good reason, makes a split second decision
to gun somebody down based off of like a moment
of anxiety. Um. Like that's what Grossman's impact is on.
So and again like he's not the only one who

(44:26):
uses this video in trainings, and another training company, Milo Range,
even turned to the dink Keller video into an interactive
video game played with a fake gun that gives training
cops a chance to kill the man who killed Kyle
dink Keller, which is lunacy um. According to CNN quote
at the Bartow County Sheriff's Office in Carter'sville, Georgia, Captain

(44:46):
Richie Harrold used this training machine to test more than
a hundred officers willingness to use deadly force. If an
officer waited too long to fire, Harold asked, what are
you doing? What the heck are you doing? That's good? Yeah,
So obviously the problem of absurdly aggressive police training is
wider than Grossman, but journalists have noted that as far

(45:07):
as anyone can tell, he's probably trained more cops than
any other man in the country, which is why we're
focusing on him. He is the most influential figure involved
in crafting this narrative which the Din Killer video brutally narrates,
that police are in more danger now than they've ever been.
And yeah, fatal shootings of officers by civilians have declined

(45:27):
for forty years. Yeah, like that's got to be the opposite, right, Like,
are we at the safest point we've been at? Like
pretty pretty much? There was a slight surge in like,
um as a result of like those shootings of cops
and stuff during the election. Um that we're kind of
that we're in response to the shootings by cops of

(45:48):
of black men. UM. But yeah, it's it is safer
than it's been in for of the history of this
nation for cops right now, in two officers were murdered
on the job. That's not a tiny number, but for
some context, about a hundred and eighteen retail workers were
murdered on the job. Um. Overall, police officers are number

(46:09):
fourteen in the nationwide list of jobs most likely to
get you killed. Fisherman, loggers, garbageman, and taxi drivers are
all more likely to die working, uh than police. Now
that's what the actual facts say. Yeah, fisherman, I mean
it's a dangerous to be a fisherman. Like that makes
total sense. It's that's a hard gig. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(46:34):
But like fucking garbageman and taxi drivers are at more
risk of dying on the job than cops. But the
fisherman thing did bother me. I don't know, yeah, yeah,
I mean it's not I wish less fisherman died. I
don't have a problem with fisherman. So um. So yeah,
that those are the facts. But those are not the facts,
is as Grossman relates them. I'm gonna report or quote

(46:56):
from mother Jones reporting on this bit of the seminar quote,
the number of dead cops has exploded like nothing we
have ever seen, he tells the armed citizens in Lakeport,
which is where he was doing a class. Um, this
is that is not true. The average, the average annual
number of police officers intentionally killed wall on duty in
the past decade lower than it was in the nineteen eighties.
If emergency medicine and body armor hadn't improved since the

(47:17):
nineteen seventies, Grossman claims, the number of dead cops would
be eight times what it is today. It is not
clear how he arrived at these figures, and it's also
worth noting that like that was from another a version
of the seminar that he does for civilians with guns,
which he's also started doing now because after the philand
no cast steel killing less police started using his services.
So that's good. Um, so he should be in jail, right, Yeah,

(47:43):
he should be, and he should be in jail for
a lot of reasons. Um I would I would say
there's an amount of irresponsibility that's tantamount to a crime. Um,
I don't know. There's probably not a crime on the
books that he's technically committed, but let's change the books.
Maybe I don't know. One thing, yeah, yeah, one thing
I found really interesting is that Grossman and all these

(48:05):
other police trainers tend to completely ignore the person who
killed Kyle didn Keller Andrew Brannon. And I'm gonna quote
from CNN talking about who Brandon was. Brandon spent three
years as an army officer in Vietnam, where his company
commander was blown apart by a land mine, and Brandon
never really came home from the war. The sound of
a bottle rocket sent him diving under the couch. He
left college after a nervous nervous breakdown. He couldn't hold

(48:27):
a job. He got married and divorced. He tried walking
alone in the woods from Mexico to the Canadian border,
or from Tennessee to New York on the trail. In
nineteen eight six, he wrote a postcard to his father.
I wish to thank you for being the being that
means the most to me. You have said a good
example which I am only now getting better at following.
But I will keep on going. Better to keep going
than to stop. Then his father died of cancer, and
he withdrew to a hideout in the woods of Lawrence County,

(48:49):
and in early he ran out of the medicine that
treated his depression and stabilized his moods. By January twelve,
when he met Kyle dink Keller, he had been unmedicated
for five days. There are a lot of lessons to
take out of the shooting of Kyle Kyle din Keller.
I don't think they are cops should be shooting people faster. Yes,
that's the it's you really have to work hard to

(49:12):
get that decision that wrong. Yeah. Among the lessons I
would take out of this is we shouldn't be fighting wars. Uh,
that don't concern us in any our security in any
meaningful way, and and send back thousands of young men
who have been traumatized. Uh. We shouldn't have a system
whereby somewhere for people to have their stabilizing medication. Yeah,

(49:35):
we should. We should have more therapy. We should have
a culture in which it is it is considered less
shameful for men to to to take therapy. There's a
lot of lessons to take out of this shooting. Um yeah,
um so yeah. The and and the good analyses I've
read on Britain suggests very credibly that he was trying
to commit suicide by cop firing a number of shots

(49:57):
that didn't hit din Keller before he actually shot the officer. UM,
And when he fired back it was after he had
been wounded, And kind of the theory goes that he
flipped out and went into nom mode once he got
hit and killed the deputy. UM. Yeah, the officer who
was taking the bulletproof mindset course that I'm reading from,
took this note during this section of the lecture. We

(50:20):
know what they are trying to do, kill a cop,
So why do they expect us to act differently? They
start this, but then they ask us to play by
the rules. HM. So from this point in the lecture,
Grossman goes on to lecture has now terrified and angry
students about what his research has told him about their adversaries,
which are again American citizens UM, mostly of a specific color.

(50:41):
Grossman warns that they are younger and in better shape
than police, that they have been in more gunfights and
violent encounters, which in Grossman's case, is not a high
bar at least. Uh. He states that they practice more,
which is true, UM, and states that they don't hesitate
when it comes to violence. So he's who is he
talking about? Uh? I mean, some of this is based

(51:02):
in the fact that, like an FBI study revealed that
cop killers tend to have more armed training and practice
than cops. But that's a low bar because most cops
practice very little with their side arms. UM. Like that,
it's actually an extremely low bar to practice more. I
practice more with my gun than the average US police officer. UM.
But he's also noting that, like, like, he's not just

(51:23):
saying that like this about cop killers. He's saying about
this about your adversaries, which he kind of intimates are
almost anyone you run into as a cop. UM. So
it seems like he could just be saying that everybody
who you pull over is like a trained assassin. I mean,
he called is generation assassin, assassination generation. That's what he's saying.

(51:48):
We're just gonna roll some mats now, then we're back.
Oh my god, what a day. So this is fun
stuff from their Uh. Grossman plays a video that involves
police shooting at a suspect in a car who was
driving away. Grossman to make sure his students know that

(52:09):
these were good shoots, that these cops shooting at a
car driving away were good shoots, and that if anyone
says shooting at a fleeing car is bad. It's because
of media poisoning. Um, Like, the media has poisoned their minds.
If they if they say at a fleeing car, maybe
don't shoot at a fleeing car in the middle of
a city. Um. Yeah, that's that's that's the it's media

(52:30):
mind poisoning that makes building cut that from copaganda. Yeah,
I mean, let's let's all take a moment back to
when those cops a guy with a gun like entered
the trader Joe's fleeing from the police, and they just
fired wildly into into the trader. Joe's killing a woman.
Um may be relevant to this. So the next page

(52:52):
of this booklet focuses on nonverbal communication, which Grossman's rights
rights is much more important than verbal communication. He goes
onto le sure cops about different nonverbal cues that can
help them determine who secretly means them harm. Some examples
include I am not lying. So the words I am
not lying, Grossman says, are a hint to cops that

(53:12):
you are lying in an untrustworthy person and also a
thing just a perfect description of how people talk. Hey, yes, officer,
i am not I'm not lying. I'm not lying. It's
one of those things I have. I was. I had
a very tense police interaction where they attempted to search
my car and had like it was very stressful, long night.

(53:32):
We spent like a couple of hours with them, um,
and they kept telling me that they were trained to
tell when I was lying, and they knew I was
lying about having pot in the car and I didn't
have pot in the car this time, and ironically enough,
another time when I did, I was pulled over and
had my car searched by dogs and had weed in
the car. I locked eyes with the officer and repeatedly
told him I didn't have pot, and he let me

(53:53):
go because they're trained to believe him and say, I
am not lying, I am not lying. I just said
I don't have pot. Yeah. Part of the problem with
this is that Grossman again says that like, nonverbal cues
are the most important thing to recognize as a cop,
and people are famously bad at recognizing nonverbal cues. Uh
you see. San Francisco psychologist Dr Paul Ekman conducted a

(54:16):
study in nine on people's ability to recognize a liar
from nonverbal cues, and he found that most people were
remarkably certain across the board that they were good at
telling when someone was lying. He also found that most
people across the board were very bad at telling when
other people were lying. Quote, the great majority of us
are easily mislead. It's very difficult and most people just
don't know what cues to rely on. Grossman teaches his

(54:38):
officers that people who make eye contact are more likely
to be honest and thus safe. And again this is
another misnomer. People are less likely to make eye contact
with they when they are frightened. And people are frightened
about police officers. Uh. Counter like. Counter to this, people
who are either hardened criminals or just folks like me
who wind up talking to police officers a lot, whether

(54:59):
or not we're doing the thing they're concerned about. Uh,
learn that you make eye contact with cops at all points.
You don't break eye contact when you're telling them, and
you tell them what they need to hear. That's how
you deal with cops. You make eye contact, you keep
your hands open, you tell them what they need to
hear for you to go home. Like that's what you do.
It sounds like you're talking about dealing with an angry dog. Yeah,

(55:21):
that is that is I deal with police and angry
having been at hands where you can see them slow moves. Well,
you don't want to make eye contact with an angry
dog because that that's seen as confrontational a little bit.
But you do want to very yeah, um, but you do. Yeah,
it's it's. The best teacher I ever had was my
speech and debate coach for one semester until he got
fired for his past history of selling pot. But the

(55:43):
thing he told us was that as adults, what we
needed to know is that anytime you're dealing with an
authority figure who has the ability to punish you, the
only thing, whether he said, whether it's a judge or
a police officer, you make eye contact with them and
you tell them slowly and calmly whatever they need to
hear for you to go home. And that that advice
has never led me astray. That that that that I mean.

(56:06):
And again, I'm a tall, white guy, which helps a lot.
But um, that's that's the best advice I ever got
as a kid from a teacher. Really, the only advice
I ever got as a kid from a teacher that
I remember, Uh, shout out to coach Gonzalez of fucking Clark. Um, yeah,
so yeah, again, he's he's telling people that, like, yeah,

(56:27):
so he's some people that all these nonverbal cues mean
folks are lying and this stuff is like just straight
up not true. And part of what he is doing
is he's getting officers to expect that people who express
fear of police officers often by fidgeting or not making
eye contact, and these people could be afraid for completely
legitimate reasons, like the fact that they're black residents of Minneapolis.
That people who do this are a threat for doing

(56:49):
the things that science tells us are normal behaviors for
scared people. Um, that's what he's training cops to believe. Now,
this is probably the least salacious part. This next part
is probably this part is probably the least salacious part
of his training, but it might be the most dangerous one.
Grossman doesn't come across directly and say if someone fails
to meet your eye or acts nervous, shoot them, but

(57:09):
he does tell officers that they are they are under
risk of deadly assault at all waking moments, that people
are lurking in the shadows constantly ready to kill them,
that they should err on the side of violence and that,
oh yeah, you can tell who's dangerous if that by
the fact that they won't meet your eyes. And then
he says, ship like this, we fight violence, what do
we fight it with? Superior violence? Righteous violence? Jesus, it's

(57:33):
that great, Jack. I don't ye, I don't like this either.
Not a fan. For the record, They're they're allowed to
carry gout like, yep, they can legally murder you. And
if you act nervous when they walk up to you

(57:55):
with their hand on the gun that they can legally
murder you with, they will legally murder you. Yep. Yeah.
That doesn't seem like a healthy system for divining the
truth and innocence of any given situation. Yeah, Like, like

(58:18):
Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, I'm not a cop, Jack, but I
would agree with you that seems unreasonable as well. So
much much of Grossman's analysis is based on a series
of studies conducted after World War Two and through the
Vietnam Era, and the short summary of these studies studies
that researchers after World War Two found that U S
soldiers in combat only shot at the enemy like fifteen

(58:40):
or twenty of the time. Most troops would fire above
the enemy's heads or pretend to fire anything they could
do to avoid actually killing somebody. And so the military
had to create a rigorous new training method to teach
soldiers to aim and shoot at human bodies automatically without thinking.
And by Vietnam, you know, soldiers who were trained properly
no longer hesitated before at human beings. And this research

(59:02):
is very famous. It is cited by a lot of
folks outside of Grossman. I'm not going to get into
this in detail because the veracity of it is heavily debated,
and there are a lot of reasons to question those
old World War two studies, a lot of people who
will say their bogus. I'm there's too much of his
topic for us to get into. Now. What's important is
that Grossman believes it. I found in a two thousand
four PBS interview with him in which he really lays

(59:25):
out his mindset on this, and I want to remind
you all he's talking about this because he views what
he's saying as a good thing that he does, as
a positive service that he provides two cops quote prior preparation.
Is that one variable in the equation that we can
control ahead of time, and one of the key things
is embracing the responsibility to kill. Modern training makes you

(59:46):
kill without conscious thought. We are making it possible for
people to kill without conscious thought, and thankfully and frankly,
at the moment of truth, they need to be able
to do that. Those who are not properly trained are
going to be killed killed, and so we're teaching them
to kill without anxious thought. And they, at an unconscious level,
at the muscle memory level, reflex level, have grasped killing. Gun, Shoot,

(01:00:07):
he's dead. I can trick your body into killing, but
if your mind is not ready to come along on
this ride, who's the next victim? You are? I have
tricked your body into doing something that your mind is
not ready to do. So when I teach, one of
the things I believe we need to do is embrace
this word kill. You will read a hundred military manuals
and you'll never see the word kill. It's a dirty,

(01:00:28):
four letter word, it's an obscene word, and yet it's
what we do. Assuming there's no stress inoculation in a
normal human being. At the moment when you want to fire,
the four brain shuts down the midbrain takes over and
you slam head on into a resistance to killing your
own kind. The only way to overcome that resistance is
through operant conditioning, to make killing a condition reflex. And

(01:00:48):
we've done that. That's the worst. That's real bad. It's
it's human engineering, like able engineering to murder on behalf
of the people who are designed, who whose function in
this like, according to the social contract, is to protect. Yes,

(01:01:14):
that is exactly contradiction. He contradiction. He also is like
you know, yeah, he's like, you know, the war that
we should try and imitate is the one that America
like that completely psychologically damaged, damaged Americans as America as

(01:01:36):
a nation. Uh, let's go after that one. Because World
War two was dead not deadly enough. Yeah, we didn't
are clearly our soldiers didn't do a good enough job
of defeating fascism on a global scale. Um, and the
way we fought in Vietnam was much more effective, like

(01:01:56):
the war that we famously lost. Its I was like
that built in uh you know yeah, physical and psychological. Uh,
stop that you hit when you're trying to kill someone,
is there for a reason. Yeah, it's almost like maybe
maybe the fact that US soldiers in World War Two

(01:02:17):
were less aggressive, played into the fact that we were
so clearly the good guys in that war. I mean,
the genocides committed by the Nazis probably were more of
a factor. But it is weird to take out of that. Oh,
we gotta get people to kill more better, we gotta
get people to kill more. Um. Yeah, obviously, Jack, I'm
not an expert killologist. You know, I haven't studied killology

(01:02:40):
as much as as Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman. But that
seems terrified. Your horrible to me everything I've just read.
You have your masters in killology, but you don't. You
don't have your pH you know, Jack, I never I
never finished my master's thesis on killology. I've got everything
but the thesis. Yeah, I you know, I dropped out.

(01:03:00):
I just didn't have I couldn't afford it. You know.
After a certain while that was cheology. Uh Loan grants
just weren't enough. Um So maybe if I have reminds
me of the Da Vinci Code when they're when they
make up the thing that the Star is good at.
It's like a puzzleologist or something cryptologist, which I think

(01:03:25):
is a real thing. But it's like cryptology is I
don't think he's basically he's basically a word jumble expert. Um.
It's that's all horrible to me. Um and I I
might say that anyone bragging about doing that to people's heads, UM,
especially the heads of people whose job is to protect
and interface with members of the community, that seems incredibly irresponsible. UM.

(01:03:50):
And Grossman himself, in this interview with PBS even acknowledges
that his trainings can funk up the heads of the
police who take his advice. Quote, if we haven't prepared
ourselves emotionally for the act ahead of time, and we
just tricked you into killing, the magnitude of the trauma
can be significant because we're having to live with something
your body says is not right and you don't want
to do. And you were simply tricked into killing David

(01:04:11):
Jesus Jesus fucking Christ. So the thing you don't want
to do, we tricked you into it, and that fux
your head up. I'm gonna make this my entire life.
I'm gonna make doing this my whole like it's one
of those things. Again. Yeah, this is clearly not the
time to express sympathy with cops. But he is talking

(01:04:34):
about gaslighting and emotionally abusing police officer, abusing police officers
like that is what he's doing. He's he's talking very
directly about that. It's not good, Like it's not good.
I am. I'm taking a firm anti killology stance here. Jack.
It seems it seems like that I'm gonna, Yeah, I'm

(01:04:58):
gonna I'm gonna stand next to you on that. I'm
gonna stand with you that I am someone who whenever
I walk out the door, I have a gun on me,
a loaded and chambered firearm with with a bullet ready
to fire when I pull the trigger. That that is
an everyday thing for me, because death threats are pretty
much in every week thing for me at this point. Um,
I think a lot about what would happen if I

(01:05:20):
had to draw a gun and shoot a human being. Um,
And I can tell you, like I lose sleep over it.
There is nothing that scares me more. And the people
I'm specifically thinking about shooting potentially are fucking Nazis. Like
that's realistically who I'm worried about because of the threat,
and it's not I'm not particularly like I'm not horribly
traumatized at the fact that I might have to kill

(01:05:40):
someone who is attempting to kill me. I am terrified
about the fact that people miss regularly, and stressful situations
like gunfights and bullets don't stop because you miss, and
the idea of firing. Anyone who carries a gun should
be scared every time that they go into public with
that gun. It should be something that worries them. It
should be a it should be uncomfortable. It is a

(01:06:03):
necessity for some people. And I'm not saying it's bad
to carry a concealed handgun or something. I do it,
but you should. It should be a weight on your shoulders.
It should not be something you trained to not think about.
You should never stop thinking about it. Um. That's my
attitude as a guy who was thankfully never had to
shoot anybody and hopes like how he never has to, Um,

(01:06:26):
but who does go into the world armed regularly. Uh
you know, so, uh this is all great. Uh ah.
So we need to work on your your reflexes so
that you have a little bit more killology. Uh yeah,

(01:06:49):
expertise before the next time you walk out that door. Bro.
So the murder of Mr. Castile did not spell the
end of Grossman's business, but it did impact it. The
sheer Off of Santa Clara County, California canceled an upcoming
training session after Mr Castile's murder. Um and she said
that her officers were peacemaker's first and warriors second. Uh.

(01:07:10):
There was an avalanche of criticism against Grossman. He lost
a decent amount of business um and this is what
kind of inspired mother Jones to take that class and
to write that article about him. And they wrote they
interviewed a number of other like experts on law enforcement
and even law enforcement trainers who are critical of Grossman.
I'm going to read that paragraph now. Grossman's trainings are
fear porn, says Craig Atkinson, a filmmaker who attended one

(01:07:32):
for his documentary on police military terrorization, Do Not Resist.
He wonders how the Castile incident may have played out
if Officer Jana's hadn't heard Dave Grossman tell him that
every single traffic stop could might be the last stop
you ever make in your life. Grossman is more of
a motivational speaker than a trainer, says Seth Stoughton, a
former cop in law professor at the University of South
Carolina who studies the regulation of police and Grossman's worldview.

(01:07:54):
Stouton says the officer is the hero, the warrior, the
noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear
to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and
who does so by imposing their will on the civilians
they deal with. This approach to policing is outdated and ineffective,
says Stoughton, and some of it is dangerously wrong. Samuel Walker,
a criminal justice professor an expert on police accountability, says

(01:08:14):
the bulletproof Warrior approaches okay for green berets, but unacceptable
for domestic policing. The best police chiefs in the country
don't want anything to do with this. Grossman and his
business partner deny that what they provide as anything like
military training, or that it treats cops as warriors, even
though it repeatedly refers to them as frontline troops and
shows them training materials that are also used by military
trainers to prep soldiers. Yeah, it is really impossible to

(01:08:40):
over emphasize how much bulletproof mindset training focuses on building
an image of the world is irredeemably aggressive towards random cops.
This Bloomberg right up describes how the class is open.
Quote forty cops are in a classroom watching recent footage
of protesters in San Francisco denouncing the police. Your children
are ashamed of you. A black woman in the video
tells a black officer who looks away, cow word. Others shout.

(01:09:01):
A young demonstrator walks up to a cop and sticks
out his middle finger. A female officer trips, and the
demonstrators laugh. The volume is way up, and the cops
in the room are leaning back in their chairs, crossing
their arms and getting tents. David Grossman's partner in this
steps into the front of the room and stops the video.
Glennon fifty nine but twenty nine years as an officer
in Lombard suburbs of Chicago, where they tortured people and

(01:09:21):
at one point running accounting homicide investigations. He's six ft
one pounds and has the gravelly voice and bearing of
the desk sergeant on the nineteen eighties TV show Hill
Street Blues, who told cops to be careful out there
before the squad cars rolled. Welcome to our world. Glennon says,
it's as bad as it's been since the sixties and seventies.
And again, obviously that's not fucking true. That's objectively not true. Um.

(01:09:42):
I mean, you could argue that within the last three
or four days it might be starting to be true,
but it's because the cops treated people like enemy insurgents
and murdered a bunch of them. Um. Yeah, And even then,
no cops have been killed yet in this at least
as of the recording of this fucking episode. Who knows
where we'll be, you know, uh, in another couple of days. Um.

(01:10:03):
But yeah, this is what cops believe. Um. And if
it's not what the man who murdered George Floyd believed,
it's probably what the other three cops he was with,
who stood by and who helped him murder George Floyd believed.
Minnesota police love Grossman's courses, and he has taught a
lot of minnes of Minnesota cops, a lot of Minneapolis cops. Uh.
And as you might expect, he does not teach officers

(01:10:25):
positive things about groups like Black Lives Matter. He calls
b l M protests treason, and he says that bl
m has blood on its hands for encouraging people to
kill police. The media, he teaches his cops are bastards
for their unfair coverage of police violence. When homicide cropped
up ever so slightly in two, he blamed it on
what he called the Ferguson effect. And his hypothesis is

(01:10:48):
that after those police protests, protests, after those protests, cops
were scared to do their jobs, and so they let
more crimes happen. I guess it is not a very
coherent belief system, but in Grossman's head it all makes sense.
Just his sheep dog metaphor makes sense. Quote. The sheep dog,
he says, looks a lot like a wolf. He has
fangs in the capacity for violence. The difference that the

(01:11:08):
sheep dog must not, cannot, and will not ever harm
the sheep. Any sheep dog who intentionally harms the lowliest
little lamb will be punished and removed. Now, of course,
Grossman doesn't think cops ever actually intentionally harm innocent people. Uh.
The author of that Men's Journal article up quoted from
got a chance to interview him, and he brought that up.

(01:11:29):
And here's his quote about this. Of all the recent
high profile police killings, Grossman se is almost none that
he believes were unjustified. Take Eric Garner, the Staten Island
man who died after an a legal chokehold from the
NYPD and whose last words were, I can't breathe. If
you can talk, you can breathe. Grossman said that guy
had a heart condition. The lesson is, don't fight cops
when you have a heart condition. Jesus Christ. By the way,

(01:11:53):
one of the things that was said to George Floyd
by the police when he said that he couldn't breathe
is that if he could talk, he could breathe. Um, yep.
This guy is like or take Tamir Rice, the twelve
year old Cleveland boy who was fatally shot at a
park while playing with a toy air soft gun. If
you had a gun pointed at you, Grossman says, sympathizing

(01:12:14):
with the cop, who for the record, did not have
a gun pointed at him, that one's borderline. I'm not
going to give you that one. Yes, the instant shooting
of a twelve year old with a toy is borderline. Yes. Yes.
Grossman does not believe that police have any kind of
bias against blackman that makes them more likely to shoot
black men instead. He says, the far greater bias in

(01:12:35):
our society today is a bias against cops. In ten
in ten thousand TV shows, in five movies, black people
are almost never the bad guys. Name me one cop
movie in the last thirty years that didn't have a
bad cop. Now. In total fairness, Jack to David Grossman,
he does think there's one way in which policing could
be reformed. Um and he he even agrees that policing

(01:12:55):
is broke. Do you know what do you want to know?
Do you know what he thinks is broken about policing, Jack?
They're too hemmed in by restrictions and they need to
be able to more freely use violence. He does think that, clearly,
but what he says is actually even dumber. When people
tell you law enforcement is broken, they're right, And what's
broken asleep. He believes that when cops shoot wrongly, it's

(01:13:18):
not because they're biased, are scared, or in need of
better training, or have been trained to shoot people much
more regularly. It's because they're tired, because they've been working
too many long shifts and taking too much overtime, uh
sleep deprivation. He says is the number one predictor of
judgment errors, ethical problems, and used to force problems. If
I could change one thing in the world right now
to make law enforcement better, it would be mandating sleep.

(01:13:42):
I mean, the bulletproof mindset does sound like a douchey
diet among Silicone Valley people, like where it's like bulletproof caveman,
where you like only eat meat and sleep for twenty
minutes five times an hour. Um, that that would be

(01:14:04):
too many Uh yeah, but yeah, it's I can see.
I figured I was waiting for there to be some
sort of bio hacking element to it, and we snuck
it in right at the end. Yeah, I want to
I want to close this jack with an anecdote from
my own experiences, um, because it's one of the things

(01:14:26):
that was most striking to me when I was in
Iraq and Mosle during the fighting against Isis. Now, the
the Iraqi army has a long history of doing fucked
up shit, um, both before and after the invasion, right, Like,
there's a lot of brutality from a number of different
Iraqi military units. Um. But I something I saw when
I was up at the very front. One of my

(01:14:47):
last days in Mosel, I was at the the very
edge of the advance. So I was standing at the
end of a block of bombed out buildings, and the
next block ten feet away was technically Isis territory, like
they were fighting over that next block, and they were
just waves of refugees whose houses had been blown up,
in some cases seconds earlier by bombs, fleeing towards us.

(01:15:07):
And these huge lines of people with everything they owned
on their backs, who had been in Isis territory minutes earlier.
And I was with this line of Iraqi police who
were meeting these these fleeing people and were searching them
for bombs, and they had they had explosives detectors. All
of these guys had friends who had been killed within
days by Isis suicide bombers. And this was just a

(01:15:27):
crowd of undifferentiated people walking out of Isis territory with
huge bags on their backs and in their hands. It
was a fucking tense situation, um. And there were numerous
times where I saw young officer, young Iraqi soldiers walk
up with metal detectors and guns to take someone's bags
to search them, and the person would grab their bag

(01:15:48):
and pull away, which is a I was terrified because
that looks like a guy about to like fucking detonate
a bomb that's in his bag or something. At no
point did I see any of those Iraqi soldiers point
their guns at a civilian so much as point their
guns at one. And these are eighteen nineteen year old

(01:16:08):
boys with virtually no training, um, who are scared as hell,
and who have had friends killed in similar circumstances. And
I would have expected US cops in the same situation
to have reacted much more violently and much more poorly.
And that's something that stayed with me ever since. It's
almost like it's almost like we're the we're the worst,
almost like like we're doing a real bad job. Ya Um,

(01:16:33):
way to go. David gross Man, David gross Man, Gross,
that's at Jack. You know, I think this is the
end of gross most David nasty Pants. Yeah, good, David
nasty pants. Suck on that Davy plug. Yeah. I'm Jack O'Brien.

(01:17:02):
I host a daily, twice daily podcast with Miles Gray.
It's called The Daily Zeitgeist. Uh and Yeah. In the morning,
we go through and try and tell you what's happening
in the Zeitgeist that day in the afternoon in the Zeitgeist, Jack,

(01:17:22):
I'll tell you it's pretty bad in the after today,
but yeah, um, check out the day. It's a lot
of fun. It doesn't it won't totally destroy your soul,
although we're having more and more trouble, uh, sticking to
that this week. But yeah, come, we we watched the

(01:17:45):
whatever is in the Netflix top ten. We tell you
about that, so you don't have to watch the bad stuff.
It ends up being a lot of fun. Uh, So yeah,
check it out. You can follow me on Twitter, Jack
Underscore O'Brien, check out Jack under or O'Brien at the
Twitter um, and and check out the Daily Zeitgeist. And

(01:18:06):
you know, obviously there will be more protests all around
the United States. Um by the time this this finally drops, Um,
My advice to everyone who's asking it, because I've gotten
so many emails from people asking is to go out
and express your legal right to protest and to be
furious about the the situation we find ourselves in the
many situations we find ourselves in, utilize your legal rights,

(01:18:30):
protect yourself, and remember, most importantly, if you get tear gas,
just use water to wash your eyes out. People have
a lot of fancy fucking tear gas recipes. Just use water.
It is idiot proof and it's fine. Bring water, pour
it in your eyes outwards, from the eye from like
the inside of the eye out. Don't fucking don't make
it complicated. Don't go buy in gallons of milk. Just

(01:18:51):
use water. If you use If you get tear gas,
that's that's or put a traffic cone on on top
of the tear gas can. Yeah, or some water in. Yeah.
That's some good Hong Kong tactics right there. So um,
good luck everybody, stay powerful. Good luck to you, Robert.
Don't get killed. Yeah h h

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Man Who Teaches Our Cops To Kill