Police Taught to Be Aggressive “Warriors” with a Gang Mentality
It looks like modern-day police academies are teaching recruits to act like gang members. Trying to intimidate people with their arrogant attitude. Roughing up anybody who challenges their authority, moves onto their turf, or just plain makes them mad. Seeing outsiders as enemies. That pretty much checks the boxes for a gang.
So we’ve got a gang war going on in hot spots around our country, with police whose training emphasizes a “warrior mindset.” Academics, journalists, activists, and current and former police officers have spent time over the past few years investigating exactly what that means, particularly in terms of the sometimes-lethal effects of overly aggressive policing on Black and Brown communities.
The gang is the police
In mid-2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, Godfrey “Doc” Buquet, a highly decorated, retired chief of detectives in a Louisiana police department, was running for sheriff of Terrebonne Parish. His platform focused on building back traditional community policing: walking a beat, getting to know the community, working together with compassion to solve problems instead of demanding acquiescence with threats of violence.
Describing his time on the force, Buquet told the media, “I was in a gang. It’s called the police.” Yet over the course of his work, he found that his respectful approach worked. For all the people he arrested, Buquet said, “I never had to hit a man.”
Contrast that approach with what we see all too often on our computer screens: Police pushing, shoving and beating even frail elderly people who don’t immediately follow their orders. Pepper-spraying peaceful protestors. Reacting with lethal force when citizens with mental health challenges ask them for help. These are all things that happen often in communities of color—and sometimes to white people as well.
The “warrior” mindset
All the aggression that police are learning has to end up somewhere. In recent years, police academies have emphasized the inculcation of the warrior mentality in their recruits: Your first obligation is to make sure you go home at the end of your shift. You are the constant target of people who hate you and wish you harm.
And anyone—absolutely anyone—could turn out to be a threat.
Therefore, you can’t let your guard down. You have to dominate every situation. One small misstep could mean death—to you, your partner, to your fellow officers. To your gang.
Experts studying New Mexico police training materials in 2014 found the explicit instruction to expect suspects to be “mentally prepared to react violently.” These recruits were told to anticipate that any day, any hour, any moment, they could die a violent death.
The danger of leading with fear
This mindset is certainly anchored in fear. Police academies are training recruits to be afraid, and to use aggressive tactics to forestall the possibility of being injured or killed.
Documentation shows that this is conveyed both through formalized training and through informal interactions with peers and supervisors.
A 2010 article in a trade publication called Police 1 advised officers to develop “command presence” as a survival skill. While the article urged officers to be “humble and compassionate,” it also advised them to keep in the back of their mind the possibility that they’d need to “have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
A 2020 piece in Vox magazine noted this “fatal mismatch” in police training: We want them to be “social workers” but are training them as “warriors.” And, as we know from the history of the ancient world to the present, warriors learn to be loyal to their units because it’s the best means of maintaining an effective fighting force.
As important as officer safety is, anyone who takes these jobs should acknowledge that their primary duty should be “to protect and serve.”
We hire many of our police officers right out of the military. Many are already trained in military-grade fighting skills. We equip them with military-grade, lethal-force weapons and turn them loose to operate within a culture that glorifies domination and violence.
No standards, no accountability
Until recently, many police forces wouldn’t devote the time and resources to providing training on conflict resolution, de-escalation, and relationship-building with the communities they serve.
Add in racism, structural inequalities, and unacknowledged bias, and a simple traffic stop or wellness check becomes a death sentence for an innocent civilian who fails to “comply.” Minor infractions—public intoxication, selling loose cigarettes, passing a counterfeit $20 bill—become notorious around the world because they set off a chain of aggressive behaviors from responding police.
Because police departments are typically run at the local level, there haven’t been mandatory nationwide training standards. In 2015, 34 states did not make de-escalation training routine for their police officers.
A half-step forward, but still behind
That’s starting to change, as more white Americans have been forced to acknowledge the incontrovertible evidence of extreme police brutality against communities of color.
Thanks to two years of pushing by activists, one of the U.S. House of Representatives’ final acts in 2022 was its passage of a major piece of police reform legislation, signed into law by President Biden on December 27. The bipartisan bill was written to empower police departments nationwide to initiate de-escalation training for police. It directs $70 million in annual funding to training efforts, and mandates that the Department of Justice build curricula in consultation with organizations focused on civil liberties and mental health.
There’s more work we need to do on this, though. We have yet to seriously tackle the problem of qualified immunity, which protects police from facing personal liability in civil lawsuits over most actions committed in the line of duty. That sounds like a gang right there. As the Lawfare blog put it in 2020, qualified immunity is one of several “structural factors” that make it hard for society to hold police “accountable for wrongdoing.”
In September 2022, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case that would have challenged the qualified immunity defense.
Alongside qualified immunity, we should mention police unions, which can make it impossible to break free of legislative inertia on these issues. Few legislators want to get on the bad side of the police as a voting bloc, or to appear “soft” on crime.
In 2019, even after Minneapolis banned “warrior” training—including while off-duty—for its police force, the local union announced the intention of off-duty officers to defy the ban. In Minnesota and across much of the country, the local police union’s endorsement is a coveted prize among politicians who have to win elections.
As Sue Rahr, a former sheriff and a member of the Task Force on Twenty-First Century Policing during the Obama Administration said in 2014, training police recruits to view every civilian encounter as a prelude to war does nothing but “create unnecessary resistance” and compounds the “risk of injury” to civilians and police alike.