“What psychological or psychiatric methods are still being
taught police for racial profiling and training police officers. Clearly, what
is being used is not working and is adversely impacting—sometimes lethally—not
just minorities but also the police.” – Rev. Frederick Shaw
With numerous articles exposing
the dangers of “fear-based warrior-training” recently, CCHR’s Task Force
Against Racism adds information to its website, calling on police to
investigate the link between psychological training and use of unnecessary
force.
By
CCHR International
The Mental Health Industry Watchdog
September 15, 2020
The Citizens
Commission on Human Rights International’s Task Force Against Racism &
Modern-Day Eugenics launched a
new educational page and
warning on its website about a psychological training program used by police
which may induce rather than reduce violence.
Craig Atkinson,
filmmaker and director of the 2016 Tribeca Award-winning documentary, Do Not Resist, believed
the decades-old “fear-based,” “warrior training 100 percent has to be put under
a microscope and analyzed” and “less people would die.”[1] Four years later, Task Force
founder, Rev. Frederick Shaw, a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy,
reiterates this need.
Shaw
wants to know: “What psychological or psychiatric methods are still being
taught police for racial profiling and training police officers. Clearly, what
is being used is not working and is adversely impacting—sometimes lethally—not
just minorities but also the police.”
“Fear-based”
police officer training was developed by former West Point professor of psychology,
the former Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.[2] He invented the term and theory of
“killology,” defined as: “the scholarly study of the destructive act.”
Teaching it for more
than 20 years, the premise is that police officers are “at war” on the domestic
front and need psychological training to become “warriors” to overcome their
natural resistance to killing.[3] It “often runs the risk of the use
of unnecessary, and sometimes, fatal force,” a Mother
Jones article reported in May 2020.[4]
The training
teaches officers to be “emotionally” and “psychologically” prepared to kill. If
you’re prepared to kill, Grossman said, it’s “just not that big of a deal.”[5] In a 2004 interview with PBS’s
Frontline, Grossman said, “The only way to overcome that resistance [to
killing] is through operate conditioning, to make killing a condition reflex.
And we’ve done that.” [6]
The July 6,
2016 shooting of a 32-year-old African American man, killed by a Minnesota
police officer during a traffic stop, raised the alarm about “warrior”
training. The officer had undergone 56 hours of warrior training in 2014.[7] Atkinson called warrior training the
“number-one issue” that’s getting people unnecessarily killed by police.[8]
Shaw
says that with all police killings, investigations should include whether
officers involved were subjected to this type of training. “I am a former law
enforcement officer and have been racially profiled for being Black. But not
all cops are bad. Most are good, decent people. But we know that racial
profiling has been occurring since slavery and eugenics. When this is
incorporated into law enforcement training, Black lives can be at serious risk.
Police need to know this.”
The Task
Force website details the history of behavioral scientists in law enforcement
from 1916, when eugenics thrived in the U.S.[9] During the Civil Rights Movement in
the sixties, psychologists worked with police agencies following “urban riots.”[10] African Americans marching against
racism and injustice were labeled with a mental disorder, “protest psychosis.” The International Journal of Social
Psychiatry reported that Blacks developed delusions of
grandiosity and “dangerous aggressive dealings” when they joined civil rights
sit-ins.[11]
Another
leading U.S. police psychologist has come under question, including in a 2015 New York Times article,
when his theories were heavily criticized as pseudoscience, “invalid and
unreliable.” The Justice Department denounced the psychologist’s findings
as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is
selling dangerous ideas. “People die because of this stuff,” said John Burton,
a California lawyer.[12]
Another
psychologist, Professor of Criminology and Statistics and a police trainer
interviewed for Atkinson’s documentary, takes profiling to a whole new
frightening level, Shaw said. The professor purports to be able to forecast
criminal behavior using statistical/machine learning procedures.[13] He also claims it can be predicted
at someone’s birth how likely they are to commit a crime by aged 18.[14]
Shaw said
that a recent article in The Trace showed
“the very real concerns we should have.” It stated that “the warrior narrative
has existed in law enforcement circles for decades,” with thousands of dollars
spent “to teach tactics more suited for war than for civil society.”[15] “Racist training and stereotyping
and now infant predictions of who will be become a criminal, is Brave New World at
its worst,” Shaw added.
“How
much of this is psychiatric or psychological-eugenics based is important to
know,” Shaw said. “Racism creates a mindset that is hard to penetrate when its
perpetrators are unwittingly programmed and convinced—through ‘science’ and
‘authoritative’ training—that what they are doing wrong is ‘right.’ It masks
oppression and violence as ‘protection’ and ‘justice.’ This must change,
starting with psychological methods of police training being investigated.”
References:
[1] “One of America’s
most popular police trainers is teaching officers how to kill,” Insider, 2 Jun.
2020, https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-trainer-teaching-officers-how-to-kill-2020-6;
https://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/award-screening-best-documentary-2016;
https://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/award-screening-best-documentary-2016
[2] https://www.killology.com/bio
[3] Fear-based
training for police officers is challenged, Star
Tribune, 11 Jul. 2018, https://www.startribune.com/fear-based-training-for-police-officers-is-challenged/487958041/;
“The Role of Police Psychology in Controlling Excessive Force,” U.S. Dept. of
Justice, National Institute of Justice, Apr. 1994, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/146206NCJRS.pdf
[4] “Minneapolis
Banned Warrior-Style Police Training. Its Police Union Kept Offering It
Anyway,” Mother Jones, 28
May 2020, https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/05/bob-kroll-minneapolis-warrior-police-training/
[5] “One of America’s
most popular police trainers is teaching officers how to kill,” Insider, 2 Jun.
2020, https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-trainer-teaching-officers-how-to-kill-2020-6
[6] Interview, David
Grossman, PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/heart/interviews/grossman.html
[7] https://apnews.com/4645f857141943118b5ad6fb57552b3b;
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/philando-castile-case-ex-officer-involved-fatal-shooting-gets-48-n781636
[8] https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-trainer-teaching-officers-how-to-kill-2020-6;
[9] http://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/forensic-psychology/history-of-forensic-psychology/police-psychology/
[10] “The Role of
Police Psychology in Controlling Excessive Force,” U.S. Dept. of Justice,
National Institute of Justice, Apr. 1994, https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=168114
[11] https://bringmethenews.com/news/former-mn-professors-defense-of-deadly-force-by-police-is-used-often-but-criticized;
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html
[12] “Training Officers
to Shoot First, and He Will Answer Questions Later,” New
York Times, 2 Aug. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html
[13] “Predicting prison
terms and parole,” Downtown News Magazine, 24 Mar. 2020, https://www.downtownpublications.com/single-post/2020/03/24/Predicting-prison-terms-and-parole
[14] “This Guy Trains
Computers to Find Future Criminals: Richard Berk says his algorithms take the
bias out of criminal justice. But could they make it worse?” Bloomberg, 18 Jul,
2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-richard-berk-future-crime/
[15] “The ‘Warrior Cop’
Is a Toxic Mentality. And a Lucrative Industry,” The
Trace, 19 June 2020, https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/warrior-cop-mentality-police-industry/
Reverend Frederick Shaw
is the Director of Public Affairs and Spokesperson for the Citizens Commission
on Human Rights International (CCHR), a more than 50-year mental health
industry watchdog. He’s also the President of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay
Branch in California, with a long history of working with NAACP.
He is the President of NAACP Inglewood/South Bay, as well as past President of the Compton Branch
of the NAACP, where he was the first President from Compton to be
appointed to a California State Chair overseeing “The Children’s Taskforce.”
Working in both the Compton and Inglewood-South Bay chapters, he met with many
members of the U.S. Congress alongside CCHR International to get the Child
Medication Safety Act passed, a federal law which prohibits schools from
forcing students to take psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their education.
This reinforces parents’ rights to refuse psychiatric drugs for their children
and to determine their children’s healthcare needs.
In 2020, Rev. Shaw
started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry,
comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, members of the
clergy, medical doctors, psychologists and educators. The Task Force reminds
African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing
minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protestors as mentally
ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African
Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the
foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.
Rev. Shaw is
a native of Compton, CA and has worked in Compton for most of his life as a
fierce advocate for children and adults in Civic and Human Rights. He has
advocated and stressed the importance of education, and the reduction of
poverty and drug addiction. His late mother, Marcine Shaw, was a sergeant in
the Women’s Army Corp in 1950. For 18 years she was Senior Deputy to Los
Angeles County Supervisors Kenneth Hahn and Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke and a
Compton City Council member for six years and was described as a “foot soldier
for human rights.”
- After attending Pepperdine
University, he was ordained in Religious Science in 1975.
- Between 1980-1993, Rev. Shaw
was a Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputy from, which included organizing
and implementing the Sheriff’s Youth Athletic League.
- In 1992, he was the co-founder
and President of the World Literacy Crusade, an international organization
with the purpose of eradicating poverty and hopelessness in the inner
cities through education.
- In 2005, The State of the African
American Male and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation honored Rev.
Shaw as one of their recipients of the MEN WHO CARE AWARD, along with
actor Jaime Fox. He received this award for his demonstrated NAACP
leadership skills and dedicated persistence to eliminate the drugging of
children.
- Rev Shaw co-founded the Basic
Life Institute, an organization contracted with the State of California
and County of Los Angeles serving at-risk youth from ages 12 – 18 years
old. The LA County Board of Supervisors awarded him for his work
with foster care children and youth on probation.
- For nearly three decades, Rev.
Shaw has worked closely with CCHR International and is now its
international spokesman while he also continues to work with NAACP.
From these positions, he has:
1. Helped obtain three national Resolutions, two
from the NAACP and one from the National Caucus of Black State Legislators that
supported children’s rights not to be subjected coercive psychotropic drugs, to
stop the psychotropic of foster care children and to prohibit electroshock.
2. He traveled to South Africa in 1997 to attend
the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigating apartheid crimes
where he helped CCHR present evidence to the TRC about the role of psychiatric
and psychological racism in introducing and maintaining apartheid, and how
Africans were allowed to die from easily treatable medical conditions when
locked up in slave labor psychiatric camps during apartheid.
3. In November 2016, he led a march in South
Africa against African children being subjected to dangerous psychotropic drugs
and protested the World Psychiatric Association congress being held in the
country.
4. He has delivered seminars and speeches across
the U.S. and is a regular guest on community radio shows and is quoted in press
newswires, reaching millions.
5. Rev Shaw also lends his powerful voice in
defense of children around the world and continues to lead CCHR marches against
the electroshocking of children.
Email him at FShawJr@yahoo.com
Sponsored by Walter Davis of Wealthwave
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