Police training fails

Aaron Malin has a rather disturbing article at Reason: Drug War Propaganda Counts as State Police Training

In Missouri, sworn law enforcement officers are required to take 48 credit hours of Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) continuing education every three years. While some specific courses are required for all officers, such as mandatory firearms classes, the majority are elective courses that simply must add up to a minimum of 48 credit hours. […]

As it turns out, some of the classes offered aren’t exactly what you might consider official law enforcement training. At the annual conference this past March, one course was titled, “Marijuana Legalization: The Issues.” It was taught by Tom Gorman—a drug cop from Colorado who travels the country on what seems to be a never-ending anti-legalization crusade.

Read the article to see the table of contents from the course and some of the really outrageous things that Gorman teaches as part of that course. Reefer madness, indeed.

I think it’s great that police officers are required to complete ongoing education, but not if it’s taxpayer-funded propaganda.

It would be nice if they had courses like: “How To Interact With Unfamiliar Dogs Without Using A Gun” or “The Fourth Amendment: It’s Not A Myth.”

What other courses would you recommend?

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37 Responses to Police training fails

  1. primus says:

    How to Interact with the Public Without Breaching Their Civil Rights. This one should be mandatory, and annual updates should be required. Then there would be a much higher expectation of professionalism on the part of the cops. When an event occurs where the citizen’s rights are breached by the cops, should be more easy to sue them, because they “Know or should have known” what those rights are, and how to avoid breaching them. When a ‘professional peace officer’ breaches the citizen’s civil rights, that officer’s prosecutorial immunity must be waived by the courts, for that same reason.

    • Windy says:

      I’ve seen a LOT of comments, lately, concerning how cops should have their “qualified immunity” revoked and instead be required to carry personal liability insurance (premiums paid by each individual officer rather than the department or the city, county, State, or federal taxpayers). Such a requirement would ensure that bad cops cannot remain on the job, as each incident of abuse that occurs, the premiums would increase and after a certain number, the cop would be uninsurable, guaranteeing the loss of the job and that there would be no future job in this field (public OR private).

  2. claygooding says:

    Our government has “bought” our law enforcement agencies with funding,,in order to “qualify” they must dance the way the fiddler leads,,as competition and demand for funding increases the dance gets faster with less control and more danger for other dancers and spectators,,this dance must be shut down,,we,the people must take this power from our government by passing the taxes and local funding requirements of our police and just say no to federal grants programs.
    It will be much cheaper,in tax dollars than federal funding,,,unless of course you feel your town needs an armored vehicle to make an arrest.

  3. Randy says:

    A course entitled “Walk a Mile in my Shoes” might be beneficial, and I don’t mean the shoes of the LEO.

    But to count Gorman’s propaganda course as real a POST course is ridiculous.

  4. darkcycle says:

    Brown, black, yellow: how not to shoot when you see color.
    Or…Shooting people or using vacation time?…how to get that fishing trip without killing somebody.

  5. Jean Valjean says:

    I’d like to know how much money Gorman rakes in from the public purse for this boondoggle? The drug war should be taught in economics classes as an example of Darwinian niche building. Gorman exemplifies this perfectly. He’s a panda in his own bamboo patch.

  6. Servetus says:

    Recommended New Police Training Courses:

    ● Distinguishing Marijuana from Hemp Plants (comes with handy chromatography kit)

    ● Marijuana Etiquette: Know How to Interact Peacefully with the Marijuana Consumer

    ● How to Retrain Your K-9 to Stop Alerting to Marijuana

    ● Countering Marijuana Dispensary Robberies – Security Updates and Strategies

    ● The History and Psychology of Moral Panics Involving Recreational Drugs – From 395 C.E. to the Present

    • Windy says:

      Great comment by Swazi-x:

      The worst thing about this mindless brutality is these cowardly dickless morons will never have to answer for their mistake – because “drugs” have been so demonized, anyone connected with them effectively loses most of their Constitutional rights and this bizarre rationalization allows the idiots who run worthless black holes of tax revenue like the D.E.A. to treat any “suspect” citizen like an enemy combatant, assuming guilt and handing out punishment all before even confirming their search warrant is valid for that address.

      Defund the D.E.A. and bring all of them before our courts to answer for their crimes. A badge doesn’t allow the wearer to murder, maim and terrorize without consequence – or at least it damned well shouldn’t in any real democracy.

  7. Jose says:

    I was thinking a required curriculum assembled and taught by LEAP which would include plenty of q&a time.

  8. Dave in IL says:

    Some course recommendations:

    –Drug Dealers Love Prohibition: The Danger of Government-Created Black Markets

    –Use of Force Continuum Review: Chokeholds Are Not Option # 1

    –Something Old and Something New: The Advantages of Foot Patrol in 21st Century Policing (Includes discussion on the work of Professor Peter Moskos)

    –The Camera is Not Your Enemy: Policing and Transparency

  9. primus says:

    How the Drug War is a Waste of Police Resources 101

  10. Shit I pulled out of my ass! says:

    Tom Gormon’s “training” is a series of setup Straw-man questions and answers based on shit he pulled out of his ass.

    Do you have to be BRAIN DEAD to be a narcotics officer?

  11. Duncan20903 says:

    .
    .

    This is very strange, 109 comments under the article but not a one condemning the ratification of the 21st Amendment:
    http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/dying-ga-mom-saves-baby-hiding-toilet-article-1.1946161

    Can you imagine the fallout if hubby had been getting high? (Can we please just pretend that such an event would be an extreme statistical outlier for the sake of argument? Or heck, how about just having hubby have the wrong inert metabolites in his urine coincidentally to being shit faced drunk?)

    • Duncan20903 says:

      .
      .

      Bah, “Can we please just pretend that such an event would be an extreme statistical outlier for the sake of argument?” in the post above should have read, “Can we please just pretend that such an event would not be an extreme statistical outlier for the sake of argument?”

  12. Nunavut Tripper says:

    My buddies 30 year old son is on the local Hamilton police force.
    His son’s knowledge of marijuana is laughably absurd….basically he’s still back in the 1930’s.

    People like to believe in whatever is convenient to them.

  13. Sukoi says:

    “The American public is not your enemy nor your prey; they are your employer and YOU are their servant”

  14. John says:

    When Vehicle Searches Are Actually Appropriate – Hint: It’s Not Every Motorist You Pull Over

  15. Duncan20903 says:

    .
    .

    How to avoid promulgating the perception that prohibitionists, and in particular sworn peace officers, are bald faced liars with a personal agenda.

    If that is honestly your ultimate goal then here’s an example of something that doesn’t help and which should be avoided:

    Legalized recreational marijuana use draws homeless Texans to Colorado

    Sept. 22, 2014: Colorado is seeing a significant increase in the number of homeless people arriving from Texas and the head of two homeless shelters say a big reason for the increase is homeless people wanting to smoke pot. Jace Larson reports.

    Since when do toilets talk?

    • Crut says:

      I found it funny how the newscasters after were totally oblivious to the ground shifting underneath their feet. The “debates” are over, the only remaining obstacles are incompetence and ignorance.

  16. Windy says:

    How to Police Without Violating the Constitution, the Unalienable Rights of the People, and Your Oath of Office.

  17. CJ says:

    hey, i havent been around in a long time, well summer is basically the best time of year for a junkie in NYC and the worst time is basically right after, everybody is either scrambling to get enough opiates to leave town for the warm south, get on a methadone program, or if youre a real fool a suboxone program… no, to be totally honest, that is what someone who actually makes plans and carries them out does. in most of our cases, the reality is actually, we’re all trying to find as much money as we can as FAST as we can then find an abandoned building in brooklyn to stay in when it gets cold, so, movies in thompkins sq. park, all day on the LES spanging, running into friends, getting high, whose in jail, whose dead, whose left the city, whose coming in, who wants to jump on the train to PA where the dope is strong and cheaper, who wants to make 60$ a day getting the bus up to MA to get the free 60$ book of coupons for the homeless, then walk around the corner to the huge group of old ladies willing to buy them off you for 100$ *and you can do this everyday, its the 4 hour bus ride that is the pain in the ass*

    so its the busy season for a junkie. to be totally honest, my guy is usually around at 5am and i usually, if i dont have a good supply, cannot sleep past 1am because i wake up very sick, but usually i get what i need, however, i couldnt yesterday and it gets harder this time of year, so, 40 minutes ago i wanted to call for a spot job [im sure in the pot world, the spot happens too, no? pretty much all dealers youve got a good relationship with who arent assmonkeys that make you wait 3 hours, if their good peoples and timely, i feel like credit is universal? ive had my guy now for 2 years, every day without fail, so he trusts me up to 50 dollars in credit every week, i pay him back sundays, i havent taken a single dollar of credit yet this week, but sometimes he can be a bit fickle about it… so ive been nervous but the longer i wait the less likely its gonna happen, he lives an ahour away and im not even dressed yet… but i promise to try, what do i have to lose, what, hell say no, ill either have enough money or hell do it tomorrow… ah well..

    anyway the reason im writing is because you know i was worried, my master plan of going to england with my EU citizenship to get on heroin maintenance was in jeopardy with that Scottish Independence because the word was if Scotland seperated from England, England would pull out of the EU and then my legal means to get into England would have been screwed but thank God that didnt happen.

    Anyhow, i saw the prior post and the McDonald coke spooons they are very efficient. What pete said about the rose things that is true, thats what everybody i know uses to smoke crack. I do enjoy crack, probably too much, im lucky to be able to only do crack once or twice a month at the very most. When I do do it, i use lemon juice usually to break it down, i only inject it.

    At any rate, it got me thinking to more so called paraphenelia (sp.)

    lol, i remember one time homeless in FLA, you know, the part of FLA i was in at the time it was West Palm Beach and the cops harassed me nonstop, i was told it was an “INCORPORATED CITY” so that meant no homelessness allowed, if they saw me sleeping anywhere they’d F with me. Well eventually they just said get in the car well drive you someplace you can sleep but before they let me in they searched my backpack.. the thing is, many hours prior before my first encounter with this particular cop (who’d been a native of Long Island, NY and thus why he said he was bein kind to me – a fellow NYC’er that I am) i had noticed him stalking me and he was very very subtle, very good at it, he wouldve busted me IF I WASNT BETTER. yes he was trying to catch me making a purchase because i didnt know anybody and i was out trying to score, so i was able to score, he couldnt catch me but i knew he was onto me and in my backpack i had burnt spoons, syringes etc. i ditched the bag in a pharmacy public garbage but i was thinking how my life might be different if that hadnt happened and they caught me with that. i mean, it wouldnt have been my first arrest by any means but i probably wouldnt have gotten out of FLA as fast as I did…

    ah well, hope everybodies good. wish me luck with this phone call.

    cj

    • Crut says:

      Good luck CJ. You make the phrase “daily struggle” come to life so eloquently. I hope you are able to get yourself to England and in a better place!

    • jean valjean says:

      i dont think you re going to get much help with opiate maintenance in england. those days are long gone thanks to US drug war mandates disguised as single treaty UN law. the best you might hope for is a few months of methodone. in some ways britain is even more hard core than the us with no reform in sight with any political parties. the are no voter initiatives either. the only area where they are more liberal is in sentencing for drug offences. there no mmj and britain bucked the trend by reclassifying cannabis to higher schedule in 2007. gordon browns pathetic attempt to appeal to dail mail readers.

  18. Chris says:

    “Screaming ‘Stop Resisting!’ While Beating the Snot Out of Suspect: You’re Not Fooling Anyone”

    • B. Snow says:

      Oh, they should take lessons from that, that guy from the Ferguson thing = Lt. Ray Albers -aka- “Officer Go Fuck Yourself” – the jackass with the AR-22 he was pointing at a crowd of people because he saw what was later determined to be a BB gun (IIRC I’m ~98% sure that was the case.)

      Which would be appropriate – Only in that this Idiot had gone & had an AR-15 or 16(?) which normally holds .556 caliber ammo – He had it re-chambered for .22 caliber long-rifle ammo, which was really cheap at one-point – not long after the school shooting in CT.

      Which was fine except that store ran outta the .22 LR shells PDQ, because of other cheap ass-hats who thought this was a smart move.

      It’s cheap (normally) and it’s the stuff reserved for boy-scouts & summer-camp target practice & general “this is how you handle a rifle” gun-safety classes.

      Problem is that’s a rimfire cartridge and it’s not normally made all that often anymore – they make a bunch and stock it away and eventually they get around to making it when they catch-up on everything else OR when they have people really desperate to teach cub-scouts to shoot rifles and respect the fact that guns are dangerous tools.

      It’s to help get them used to the recoil/nervousness/surprise before they take them out to actually hunt quail or deer or whatever is in season… at some point down the road – maybe a few years later. Please spare me the story about the guy who let a little girl fire an uzi at a gun range = his family wrote to console her about the incident – he screwed up. Sad tragic but it happens.

      Tragedies are in fact tragic & people feel for everyone involved normally = except for the “stop resisting me” *thud*,*thump*, *whump* assholes – And ‘special’ people like “officer go f*ck yourself”. Maybe, Fox will sponsor his kids boy-scout camp next summer… and thee asshole can get there credits that way?

  19. Dave in IL says:

    Officers should also get an hour of CE if they read and reflect upon this talk by Boise, Idaho Police Chief Mike Masterson:

    http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/09/12/3371686_masterson-focuses-on-courage-and.html?sp=/99/1687/&rh=1

  20. Hope says:

    A course called, “You really are a civilian”.

    By the way, Dave, I agree. That is a wonderful speech. I hope they paid attention.

  21. chip says:

    Masterson is and was selected because he knows how to lick and polish every goody goody’s boot among the largely passive California migrant dipshits. He’s wrong about the 911 shit. Ditto the six million jews. America didn’t hurt the natives or the imported slaves or indentured prisoners in bondage these were brave men laying it on the line …gag. All cops do anymore is buy time for the big lockdown the real owners are about to call. Get off the commercial medicine flower if you want to be around much longer. Grow your own and share but never buy that paraquat enhanced commercial shit.

  22. CJ says:

    Hey, THANK YOU CRUT! 🙂

    I am pleased to say that, after some serious anxiety, things did work out yesterday morning. I did get up yesterday in a world of pain and came over here, I was worried because it is only mid week (as of wednesday, yesterday) and the whole credit thing works with a 50$ max that need be paid back on Sunday, so with so much time left in the week and him knowing me, I was worried he wouldnt do it, since he probably figures I’ll be calling him again in similar straits before Sunday. I was so nervous about the whole thing that I wasn’t even gonna try, but after writing about the situation here, I felt better about it and I did try. I called, I left him a VM then, it was i dont recall, a few minutes after I posted here literally, and I left, took the 1 train from the BX down to Broadway Lafeyette in Manhattan, trying to get me hustle on lads if ye know what I mean, the man had not returned my call immediately, which is how he normally does so I figured I was screwed but as some of you know, out here in NYC theres really no reception in the subway. Shortly after getting out at Broadway Lafeyette there was a return call and the man was very nice, very gracious and very willing to help, needless to say I was smiling wide as I passed the passerbys on their daily grind, with an extra pep to the step, if you will. In fact, I even got a bit emotional, so sue me, lol, because after I saw him I wrote him this ridiculous text (I did use the restroom for non typical restroom purposes at the nearby park before sending this text so I may have been definitely more “open/happy/vulnerable” then normal as Im sure we all understand)telling him how after nearly 13 years doing this, the past 2 with him how he was definitely my favorite to do business with and a true friend. I did have an emo moment I apologize =(.

    Anyway so thank you yes things did go well yesterday! But I’m here today because I read something over at stop the drug war . org it was just this passing line in an article it was about this thing called TARGINIQ which, maybe the other opiate lovers know about it, have known about it, but I swear I’d never heard of it until today. I was immediately infuriated. This TARGINIQ is apparently OXYCODONE with NALOXONE.

    Now to be clear, I’ve always said over the years how much I hate and hate the inventors of BUPRENORPHINE/SUBOXONE/SUBUTEX. my word if Dante’s hell is real I hope Satan can grow another head and just chew on them to the end of days.

    but what Suboxone is is BUPRENORPHINE and NALOXONE thats it. Thats what that hellish strip/biscuit is.

    Well this TARGINIQ, this RIDICULOUS TARGINIQ is apparently OXYCODONE and NALOXONE…

    Do you think out there anybody is trying to invent……. WATER…. WITH FIRE? or…. FIRE… WITH WATER! ALL IN ONE EASY TO USE PACKAGE!

    I hate it.

    So what I did was I went looking for info about it and it somehow lead me to this other blog id never seen before called pharmaciststeve and this is the post I left over there I just figured Id share it here.

    hey, i just found this site, I am curious. Well, I have a long history of being involved in the drug war debate/drug war community, especially online where I am apart of some of the active communities. To be totally frank, in recent times, disillusionment and other things have caused me to drastically cut back on my involvement but for a very long time I was involved on a daily basis and in the most humble way possible i had lots of calls to start my own site etc. because what I’d been saying was popular and popularly debated/hated too… what it is is that I am a very proud, very boisterous opiate lover. I absolutely hate the 12 step community root and stem everywhere in every form. I feel the same way about the drug war, about the so called rehab business and I’ve been very vocal about loving drugs and drug use, even though at times, I maintain, that prohibition has rendered me utterly destitute, literally homeless in the streets of NYC (bond st, great jones and others, to be specific if anybody here is from NYC.) Well after almost 13 years of daily involvement in the amateur pharm world if you will, one becomes a bit of a amateur pharmacist, though I understand the potential harms in that, nevertheless it’s all very fascinating to me. I found this particularly page on this blog because of a search on Targiniq. I just heard about targiniq today. For the longest time I’ve often said how to me one of the most disgusting inventions ever created in this war on drugs has been buprenorphine aka suboxone/subutex. I mean, I hate methadose/methadone with a passion too but there is nothing quite as dispicable and horrible and repugnant as bupe.

    I had the great fortune once to be briefly seeing a doctor who was prescribing me roxicodone and at the same time suboxone. I never took the subs she was providing me and the fact of the matter is, she was prescribing me about 600-800 mgs of Roxi that was to last a month but would not last me a day. It was totally not worth the cost of seeing the doctor. The thing people dont generally know is that there are opiate maintenance programs in the world that are actually opiate maintenance programs, NOT BOGUS ones like our American methadone program but programs in Europe and England that actually give the patient heroin / diacetylmorphine. Not some bogus oral heroin but pre-ready injectable ampules of diacetylmorphine and if youre preference is to smoke it for your pain relief or emotional relief or both well the idea out there is that they actually give the patient what the patient prefers. However, it is difficult to get into the heroin program, however, it is much easier to get into a morphine/oxycodone/oxycontin/hydrocodone/dilaudid etc. maintenance program. You see in America we have this thing where a doctor would be committing a crime by knowingly prescribing a narcotic to a so called “addict” (boy do i hate that word) to treat the addiction. This is a unique thing to America. It is called the Harrison narcotics act. Before it came about we actually had Heroin maintenance clinics in America. It was a half a decade period but it existed. Anyhow, the point is, other countries dont have that restriction which is why you can get a daily dose of morphine/opiates ive listed and not be a criminal. The results for using the real opiates vs our ridiculous methadone clinic / buprenorphine model is incredible. A 92% success rate vs often 64% for methadone and lower for bupe. There are even studies, easy to find with google, comparing morphine or diacetylmorphine vs methadone or buprenorphine and the subjects using the heroin or morphine always do much better than their counterparts.

    The big thing about it all that needs to be understood is that the AVERAGE dose of opiates that you get on these programs, is actually 500 milligrams PER DOSE PER DAY up to 4x a day, sometimes only 2x though. The thing is, my doctor here in America was prescribing me like i said 600-800mgs FOR A MONTH, 500mgs being the average dose per day, well, no kidding things didnt work out. No kidding we have this misguided concept so often said by so called experts that the “opiate addict is never satisfied” well if the body requires 500mgs of something, and you are given a script for a vicodin 5mg pill 1x every 6 hours, well no kidding somethings not freaking gonna work. No kidding theres a problem here and how wrong they all are about “fine line between restricting abuse and giving access to patients who need.” lol. this whole opiate situation is a nightmare. the war on drugs is a nightmare. I love pharmacists, thank you for your involvement in the worlds most beautiful profession. be well.

    cj

    what an insane world, this world with the war on drugs….. i dont even know what to say anymore. It’s 630 am on a cold NYC morning and I gotta get going. be well all!

  23. kaptinemo says:

    OT: WRT sniffer dogs, THIS is a much better use! LOL!

    (The KLM airline uses a sniffer dog to return small items forgotten or lost on aircraft to their owners, by sniffing the owner’s scent on the item, a Human puts it in a dog’s carry vest, and then the dog tracks for the owner in the airport and delivers the item; ingenious, and the dog seems to like its work.)

    Vastly better than putting innocent Fido’s life on the line for a dubious cause.

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