White Cops Just *Hate* Don't-Be-Racist Training

It really gets in the way of doing their job.

With the five-year anniversary of Michael Brown's killing coming up tomorrow, Aug. 9, CBS News did an i nvestigation of 155 police departments' efforts to teach officers to try not to be quite so racist and shooty. And along the way, the reporters also managed to get a couple of white cops talking on video about just how much they despise any attempt to address implicit bias. The cops' faces are hidden and their voices are altered, but their racism is clear as day: Implicit bias training is bad for morale because it might prevent cops from administering beatdowns to black people who need beatdowns. Yes, we're paraphrasing, but only a bit. The training, they complain, is worthless because it reinforces a mean stereotype that "the police are racist, but specifically the white male police are racist." The poor dears!

Here's the video from CBS; the same report with a slightly different intro and discussion ran on "CBS This Morning" yesterday.

CBS News investigates police reforms including implicit-bias training    www.youtube.com 

When asked if the implicit bias training was effective, the cops agreed: No it was not. "The content was the absolute worst training I've ever had." And why was that? Well, you see, the training aims at helping people recognize that our own assumptions and biases may affect how we interact with others, and that's just not fair to white cops. 

The training includes controversial claims like "People are inclined to stereotype black individuals as more aggressive," and apparently that was just too much for Officers Breitbart and Duke:

"It's reinforcing the minority of society that has that blanket opinion about Caucasian males," one of the officers said. "One of the first videos introduced in that training was reaffirming that you're born a victim if you're a minority."

"Alright, so what do you think the agenda is?" asked CBS News correspondent Jeff Pegues.

"Reinforcing that the police are racist, but specifically the white male police are racist," the officer responded.

 'Elp, 'elp, I'm being repressed, he added, protesting the anti-white violence inherent in the system. Mesa cops appear to have a wee bit of an excessive force problem, what with several highly publicized excessive force cases, like when five cops brutally beat a black man, Robert Johnson, for not sitting down quickly enough; roughed up Gabriel Ramirez, a 15-year-old robbery suspect;   beat up an 84-year-old woman ; and hogtied a man who reported a break-in at his home (he had an outstanding warrant, so he deserved anything he got). Oh, yes, and then there was the guy who was on his hands and knees begging for his life when a cop shot and killed him for crawling in a threatening manner -- that cop was fired and charged with murder, but was acquitted at trial.

A 2018 Arizona Republic   review of excessive force complaints against Mesa cops found that only two percent of 158 internal affairs investigations since 2014 ended up determining cops had been in the wrong. In the meantime, the city paid over a million dollars to settle lawsuits over excessive force.

Shown video and asked to comment on three of those cases, one of the thin blue hate crimers insisted everything looked by the book to him: "There is nothing that those officers did that was outside of the training that they had received."

Pegues: That Robert Johnson video -- is that what you're taught to do?

Cop: We're taught to handle the situation.

Pegues: Was that handling the situation or was that excessive force?

Cop: That was handling the situation.

In fact, training cops to try to get their racism under control is very very bad, one cop said, which makes sense since it's obvious they don't have a racist bone in their bodies, nor in the heavy flashlight they might need to beat you with.

Trying to change what we have done, that has worked overwhelmingly effectively, becomes an officer safety issue, causing officers to second guess themselves, which is a complete change to when we first started.

Beating people is overwhelmingly effective, and how dare the department try to change that. The cops are very sad they have to waste their time at all on this stuff; one said it was an awful waste of time and money, and that it "kills morale," because instead of doing important stuff like firearms training, the cops have to sit for "this little show" aimed at making the public think cops are bad and need to stop being bad.

Fortunately, said the cops, the training is presented with a friendly wink and nod, because nobody takes it seriously:

They start the video with saying, "We are not telling you to do this. We are here to present it."

Mesa Police told CBS News that's not the case, and that the training is meant to be taken seriously.

One matter the CBS story didn't get into was just how widespread such attitudes are in the Mesa Police; the police union held a no confidence vote in June against Chief Ramon Batista, and 95 percent of officers wanted him gone -- only 23 of the 564 police employees supported his staying. A statement from the head of the police union sounded like it could have come from one of those officers in the CBS piece:

"Everybody talks about the victims. Well, our officers are the victims," said Will Biascoechea, President of the Mesa Fraternal Order of Police. "We are paid to win. When we show up to a call, do you pay your officers to lose? No, you pay them to win. So when we go there, we take action and we win. Now if you don't comply, we're still going to win."

It's the police against the public, and don't you dare try to change that.

[ CBS News / CBS News / Arizona Republic / KSAZ-TV ]

Yr Wonkette is entirely supported by reader donations. Stop resisting our calls for you to donate!