Critics have blamed the training program for fostering a culture of aggressive policing that stretches back decades.
Retired Minneapolis Deputy Chief Greg Hestness wondered how much of Lane and Kueng’s trainers may have rubbed off on the rookie officers, saying he was struck by how quickly their arrest of Floyd over a fake $20 bill escalated into Lane yelling at Floyd to “show me your [expletive] hands!”
“Where does that come from on Day 4?” he asked.
“A really cynical but deserving question is would Chauvin have knelt on him for that long if he wasn’t training the officers at that time?” said Michael Friedman, a former executive director of the Legal Rights Center, saying it seemed Chauvin was “trying to demonstrate how to control a person.”
Gerald Moore, a retired 30-plus-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department, said that because rookie officers must pass regular evaluations before they can go out on their own, it can create unhealthy power dynamics with their training officers.
To some, the larger problem is a tendency of some officers not to question and intervene when a colleague — particularly a senior officer — uses excessive force.
After Floyd’s death, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo announced a stricter “duty to intervene” policy that says officers who witness another officer “use any prohibited force, or inappropriate or unreasonable force” must attempt to “safely intervene by verbal and physical means.”
For years, groups like Communities United Against Police Brutality have pushed for the department to adopt a peer intervention training program developed by the New Orleans Police Department that is based on the premise that there is a tendency for officers not to intervene when they see a colleague engage in misconduct.
The program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, or EPIC, is built on the premise that intervention must be taught through training and role-playing and must be continually reinforced through more training to the point that it infuses the departmental culture.
St. Paul police participate in the training, but Minneapolis has not. The debate over police training has been brewing in Minneapolis in recent years after a series of high-profile on-duty killings of civilians.