Being a police officer is a pretty safe career choice. However, many police officers seem to think that everybody is out to get them. Why might that be? Perhaps it has something to do with the training they receive:
[Grossman] views the world as almost unrecognizably dangerous: a place where gang members 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 that violent video games are turning the nation’s youth into 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 buses and day care centers. “Kindergartners run about point-five miles an hour and get a burst of about 20 yards and then they’re done.” It won’t just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatchets, knives, and swords. His voice jumps an octave: “Hacking and stabbing little kids! You don’t think they’ll attack day cares? It’s already happening in China. When you hear about a day care massacre,” he shouts, “tell them Grossman said it was coming!”
That’s not the end of it. “More people are signing up with ISIS than we can count,” Grossman says. He predicts a terrorist organization will soon detonate a nuclear bomb off the West Coast. “We have never been more likely to be nuked, and we have never been less prepared!” Terrorists will send “suicide bio-bombers” across the border to spread deadly diseases. “The day will come,” Grossman insists. “Folks, it is very, very bad out there!”
This is the guy who has trained more U.S. police officers than anyone else. The guy who, more than anyone else, has instructed cops on what mind-set they should bring to their jobs.
David Grossman, for those who don’t recognize his name, is the dumbass that brought us the idiotic wolves, sheep, and sheep dogs parable. In his world view there are three categories of people. The first is the sheep, which is composed of everybody who doesn’t agree with his paranoid worldview. The second is the wolves, which include everybody from ISIS to kids in schools who are obsessed with racking up a body count. The third is the sheep dogs, which is composed of everybody who shares his paranoid worldview.
When you realize he’s paranoid and the man who has taught more police officers than anybody else you start to understand how police transformed from peacekeepers to professional soldiers waging a war. How can you have a peacekeeping force, which is what the police are always sold as, when its standard training involves telling members that everybody they look at in the world is planning to murder them?
If people really want to reform policing in the United States, a goal that I don’t think is possible at this point, they need to advocate for giving police realistic training.