Robert Evans and Jack O'Brien dissect Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman's controversial "Bulletproof Mindset" training, which teaches thousands of officers to overcome natural hesitation through "killology." They critique his use of the 1998 Kyle Dinkheller shooting video to justify lethal force, his dismissal of systemic bias in favor of the "Ferguson effect," and his claim that police face unprecedented danger despite data showing officer fatalities have declined for forty years. Ultimately, the episode argues this warrior mentality transforms officers into soldiers in an occupying force, directly contributing to excessive use of force incidents like those during the George Floyd protests. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Accelerating Police Killings00:15:07
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10-10 shots fired in city hall building.
Did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
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This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
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What's overthrowing the government, my everyone?
This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show about bad people, recording right now in the middle of what's rapidly turning into a nationwide insurrection against legally constituted power.
And my guest, as with all insurrections, is the inimitable Jack O'Brien.
Yeah.
What's up, guys?
How's it going?
Quite a year, Jack.
Yeah.
As you can see, I'm standing in front of a flaming police headquarters.
I have a sword.
My shirt is tied around my head.
And I'm covered in blood.
But it's yeah, I am really, you know, Jack, when you got that full chest fuck the police tattoo last year, I said, when are you going to have a chance to show that off?
And I, by God, I was wrong.
Yeah, man.
It's been pretty wild.
Yeah.
Yeah, you've been talking about the possibility of an American Civil War for a long time.
I sure have.
Converted me into believing that was, you know, more possible than we realized.
And now I feel like a lot of people are probably having that same realization.
Yeah, it was almost exactly a year ago that I put out the episodes of It Could Happen Here that talked about the president potentially laying siege to American cities with U.S. troops.
And now that appears to be happening.
So I didn't want to be right about that one.
But you were about to tell me what we're talking about today.
So first off, this is a bonus episode, and it's the second bonus episode we recorded.
You'll get that other episode at a later point.
This is a bonus episode because back 30,000 years ago, my listeners raised like $16,000 to buy diapers for poor women in Portland and Northern Oregon.
Poor families, people who couldn't afford diapers, which is awesome.
That was very nice of you guys.
Funded the diaper bank in Portland here for the rest of the year.
So that's one problem among everything else that a lot of people don't have to worry about.
So this is a free episode, a third episode special for all of you.
And we're re-recording a separate one because I wanted to do something timely.
What with the riots?
So we're going to talk about the bastard who trains cops to kill.
That is the subject of today's podcast.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, it's going to be fun.
Somebody's got to do it, I guess, right?
Not somebody has to do it, but there must have been somebody else.
Someone is doing it for sure.
Yeah, somebody's clearly doing it.
I think we could probably get by without someone doing this, but someone is doing it.
It would be wonderful if somebody didn't do that, wouldn't it?
Yeah, but it is definitely being done.
So yeah, we're going to talk about that today.
Yeah, so we're all currently in the middle of a, let's call it a complicated moment in the history of our national relationship with our police.
As I type this, it's like less than 12 hours after a crowd of activists breached, occupied, and burnt down a Minneapolis police station.
And this is the first time anything like this has occurred to my knowledge since the Battle of Athens, Georgia in 1946.
I think it was Georgia.
And that was like a bunch of veterans.
Very different story.
We'll talk about it at some point.
Protests and marches.
And by this time, you know, by the time you hear this, maybe even riots are like cropping out all over the country.
People were shot in Louisville last night.
I think also in Phoenix.
Like, it's just going down.
As a former Kentuckian, I can't let you call it Louisville.
It's Louisville.
Robert.
This is what the Civil War is going to be over, Jack.
Lewis or Louis?
Yeah.
Louisville.
Americans banded together to fight against the pronunciation of Louisville or for it.
I don't know how most people would break down.
Sorry, Kentucky.
Yeah.
This is the time for...
I apologize for interrupting.
No, no.
What was a very, very serious and important thing you were saying?
But I just couldn't do it without my fellow Kentuckians inside my head getting very mad.
Fair enough.
So as we're all aware, this all started off, like the kind of the spark to all this was the blatant and outrageous murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers on, fuck, I think like Monday of this, like the 25th.
A couple days ago.
Yeah.
Jesus, it feels like years.
Oh, good lord.
So yeah, that was a spark.
And it was the spark that caught all of this.
But that spark was only able to catch because over the last several years, Americans have become increasingly aware of how often black men in particular are murdered by police under very shady circumstances.
Minneapolis itself has a particularly full modern history of this.
In 2010, David Smith, a bipolar black man, was at a Minneapolis YMCA acting bizarrely.
Bizarrely is the term used to describe it by people, the YMCA folks.
I should note here that Americans with untreated mental illnesses are 16 times as likely as other Americans to be killed by the police.
So the police were called on Mr. Smith.
They tased him multiple times and held him down on the ground.
One officer knelt on his back.
He asphyxiated and died.
There were protests as a result of this, and the cops were eventually cleared of all wrongdoing.
No one was punished.
In 2015, Jamar Clark, aged 24, was killed by police responding to a call over a domestic disturbance.
They handcuffed him, and while he was on the ground, they shot him in the head, claiming he had reached for one of their weapons.
Protesters occupied land around Minneapolis' fourth precinct, but the officers were, again, cleared of all wrongdoing.
In 2016, Philando Castile was stopped by Geronimo Yanez, a Minneapolis police officer.
Castile was carrying a legal concealed firearm.
He informed Officer Yanez of this as he was required to do so.
Without pausing to breathe, Yanez drew his firearm and shot Castile to death in front of his girlfriend.
There were protests.
Yanez was charged with manslaughter and again found not guilty.
I could go back further.
These are not the only examples of this.
In fact, I was doing, I was trying to research earlier.
You know, there's that video going around of that guy with the umbrella that some people think was an agent provocateur at the auto zone in Minneapolis.
And we were trying to lock down who it was.
And I was looking into the officer people think it is, whose name I won't use just because it's very unclear if that's actually the person.
But that officer was involved in another shooting of a black man that was really sketchy.
Like you just keep finding these cases.
And like, so anyway, there's a ton of them in Minneapolis.
Stop for a second.
The person, like, the theory is that this person intentionally broke some windows to try and like incite rioting.
Yes.
Yeah, that's that's the theory from some protesters.
I don't know how credible I think it is.
Like to be honest, like other stuff was already burning at that point.
The video is weird.
I'm not going to, it's not worth getting into at this moment.
Like I, yeah.
So yeah, I don't think I have to establish for anyone how often American police use force.
In 2018, 590 Americans were killed in mass shootings.
987 Americans were killed by police officers.
That's one year.
So every year, police officers kill about twice as many people as die in mass shootings.
And that number is probably very low because most police shootings actually are not reported in the way that you'd think.
From the Columbine shooting to April 2019, 223 Americans were killed in school shootings.
So in the last 20-some years, 223 Americans killed in school shootings, which means that every year American cops kill four times as many Americans as have died in school shootings in a generation.
So that's a lot of people being shot by cops.
American police killed the argument that pops into my head coming from conservative people or just people who the Blue Lives Matter set would be that, well, how many of those people were trying to kill the cops at the time when they were shot?
But I mean, there are so many other countries where the cops don't kill their citizens.
And those cops aren't like, you know, dying by droves.
They are not.
They are not.
This episode is about why.
So the answer to that really is that most of these cops would say that they were in fear of their life, but that doesn't mean that they were actually, their lives were actually being threatened.
And this episode is about, helps to explain a big part of why so many of those cops believe they were in fear for their lives or will say that.
And may not be lying, which doesn't mean that it's okay, but it means that like they are being trained to fear for their life and react with violence at a wildly disproportionate rate.
And this is an episode about how that happens.
So one of the other things I want to note before we get into the main subject of the day is that the rate at which our police kill citizens seems to be accelerating.
2020 is currently on target to match 2019 for police killings of citizens, despite the fact that a huge portion of the country has been trapped inside for half the year so far.
So despite the fact that people are not out nearly as often, are not traveling, are not out in the street, are not doing things nearly as often, police are still killing the same number of Americans, which is striking to me.
That seems surprising.
Yeah.
Because crime is declining.
You gotta fight against all those people wielding Lysol and dangerous toilet paper packaging.
Yeah.
So the question, of course, that you were just asking is like, why are things this way in America?
And the answer that some of my more militant leftist friends would suggest probably boils down to all cops are bastards.
And I'm not going to disagree with that, but it's also not a satisfying answer because there are things that make American police very different from police in other countries.
Police in other countries have a lot of the same problems as U.S. cops, but kill a hell of a lot fewer people per capita.
So there is a reason that American cops are particularly aggressive.
And a big part of this reason is the special training courses offered by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, the Bulletproof Mindset Courses.
So Officer Yanez, who we talked about earlier, is the guy who killed Philando Castile.
He had attended a bulletproof mindset course in 2014, two years before he murdered Castile.
More than 100 police departments in the U.S. and thousands of officers, perhaps tens of thousands, have taken Grossman's courses over more than 20 years.
His teachings have made their way into mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
He is probably, it is said that he's probably trained more American cops than any other single person.
He is the most influential single police trainer in the United States.
So that's who we're talking about today.
So he must be very proud.
Yeah, we're fortunate that we have the entirety of the Bulletproof Mindset course book that police in Lieutenant Colonel Grossman's class take.
And we have this thanks to the same heroic journalists who are currently documenting everything that's happening in Minneapolis, Unicorn Riot.
And if you haven't already and you have any spare money, go donate some cash to Unicorn Riot right now.
They're the ones fucking, they should get a Pulitzer for how they've covered this.
But they also got a hold of a scanned copy of this textbook, which they uploaded to the internet for everyone to see.
And it includes like the notes that the cop taking the course took during the course, which is really interesting because you get to see what this guy, you know, this is a course book that's like follow-along notes.
So we don't know exactly what Grossman said in his lecture, although I found other articles written about his lectures.
So we've got some of that in here too.
But we do know like what this officer was taking out of the course or what whoever was taking this course was like, was like learning from it.
And that lets us piece together like what this guy is saying to police and what police are actually taking home from it.
So to start us off, I want to read how Lieutenant Colonel Grossman describes his own backstory in the first page of his training document.
Quote, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman retired from the Army after 23 years experience leading U.S. soldiers worldwide.
Today, he is the director of the Killology Research Group.
He is an internationally recognized scholar, soldier, speaker, and one of who is one of the world's foremost experts in the field of human aggression and the root cause of violence and violent crime.
Grossman is a former West Point psychology professor, professor of military science, and an Army Ranger who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor, which has been termed killology.
That can't be real, Robert.
The Wolf Among Sheep00:08:48
I mean, that's not a thing.
I'd also like to say that he does look exactly like what you would picture in your head, just so you guys know.
It's certainly not a real field of scientific endeavor, but he absolutely calls it killology.
And he somehow does that.
Killology.
Collapsing in on himself.
Now, Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, which sounds more impressive than it is because you can nominate yourself.
It's actually pretty easy to get nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
I don't know that he did.
I don't know who nominated him.
His books are legitimately very popular.
They're in like part of the training for the FBI Academy.
They're in like the Marine Corps Commandant's Required Reading List.
On Killing and On Combat are the two big books by Lieutenant Colonel Grossman.
Now, based on all of that very impressive biography, Jack, based on his military career and the fact that he started a scientific discipline called killology, you might expect that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman is a hardened combat veteran, right?
Like the guy who writes a book on nothing of this sort.
Interestingly enough, he's seen less combat than me.
And for the record, the combat I've seen is a tiny bit.
And the amount of combat that Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has experienced is none.
Now, I want to make it clear: that doesn't make him unqualified to write books on the psychological impact of killing or of combat any more than being born in the 1980s makes me unqualified to write about Hitler, right?
You don't have to have killed anyone or been in combat to do a very good job of writing about it, of doing a scholarly treatise, of studying it.
You know, it could even be argued that someone who has not been in combat is the right kind of person to try to do a scholarly analysis of how it impacts people.
I'm not saying although he has indirectly killed thousands.
So he has now killed huge numbers of people.
He should take that into his chest and then rewrite his course.
Yeah.
So I'm not going to say that he shouldn't be writing about killing at all.
However, I will say that he does quite a bit more than just write academic treatises on combat.
And you can judge for yourself whether or not his record kind of makes what he's been doing unreasonable.
I'm going to start off by quoting from a write-up of him in Min's Journal that kind of talks about what he believes.
Quote: On combat is probably, which is his most famous book, is probably best known for his assertion that people can be divided into three groups: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs.
And it's the sheepdogs, blessed with the gift of aggression, as he says, who are responsible for protecting the sheep from the wolves.
The analogy has been adopted by various military and gun rights groups.
In Clint Eastwood's American sniper, the father of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle gives a fictional dinner table lecture about sheepdogs taken directly from Grossman's writings.
So this guy's attitude is very influential.
And it, yeah.
So that's interesting.
There's always the smartest and most accurate views of humanity that start out with the phrase, now there are three types of people.
Yeah, you can categorize every human being into three groups.
I am a serious academic.
Is going to be a problem.
Yeah, I mean, I am famous, Jack, for my assertion that all of humanity can be divided into two groups: people who are literally Adolf Hitler and everyone else.
Which is almost impossible to argue.
It's just meaningless.
Yeah.
So as that might key you in on that paragraph, Grossman is more of a pop psychologist than an academic.
He tries to portray himself as a scientist, but he is not approaching this scientifically.
You can't scientifically lump people into sheepdogs, sheep, and wolves.
It's just not the way things work.
Freud's famous theory of the sheepdog, sheep, and wolves.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I've heard him compared to like a right-wing militant Malcolm Gladwell, and that's not far off.
His research is distinctly unscientific.
For on combat, he gathered his information via what he called an interactive feedback loop, which is what everyone else would just call interviewing a bunch of guys who have been in combat, which is fine, but like it's not an interaction.
You're talking to people with relevant experiences.
Just say you interact with people.
Feedback loop.
Fucking Christ, dude.
So he says he interviewed a thousand soldiers and cops using no particular, and then took what he'd learned from them using no particular scientific method or rigor and boiled it down into his book about killing and books about killing and combat.
Now, again, it's not necessarily a bad thing to talk to a thousand people who have been in combat or killed people and write a book about it, but the way he has done it is not science.
Like there's no control group.
There's no attempt.
There's no attempt to rigorously actually learn anything from this.
He's just sort of talking to people and giving you what he thinks about it, which is again fine, but not science.
Yeah.
Question: When was this book published or released?
Like the 90s.
Yeah, like the 90s, I think.
80s or 90s.
Yeah.
Most of his books were published a couple of decades ago.
My gym teacher was given like eight years and like forced to write a book and just like keep writing what he thought about.
It's interesting that you mentioned that, Jack, because Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was your gym teacher.
And his most famous quote is that you were not great at the 100-meter dash.
He's really like the implication that I still have a gym teacher.
I still go to gym class to be humiliated by my peers.
It is a weird thing that iHeartRadio requires of us.
No other radio company mandates gym teachers for their on-air hosts, but what can you do?
Not much, I'll tell you that.
In one interview, when Lieutenant Colonel Grossman was asked for his qualifications, he cited the quote body of information I've crafted over the years and his ability to speak from the heart, noting that I truly am one of the best people on the planet in a couple of areas, whether it's preparation for a life and death event or walking the sheepdog path.
I really feel like I'm the preeminent authority.
He is the preeminent authority on the thing he invented.
The thing that the jumble of words he just slammed together.
And again, a huge number of the police in Minneapolis right now, if not the vast majority of them, have taken this guy's course.
So keep that in mind as we and also if you wind up in the streets in the next couple of days, very good chance your cops too took this guy's course.
Yeah.
Be careful, people.
Yeah.
So that same Men's Journal article also noted, quote, since leaving the Army, Grossman frequently introduces himself as a reserve cop.
Parentheses, he's the deputy reserve coroner for St. Clair County, Illinois.
And he notes, I think a lot more like a cop today than I do like a soldier.
So just to set this off.
The deputy reserve coroner would be a coroner who does who is the assistant to the backup coroner in case of emergency.
Yeah, you might recognize that as not really a cop.
Somebody who, in an unlikely chain of circumstances and events, would maybe have to see a dead person.
I mean, ironically, the chain of circumstances and events right now in which like the police in that multiple are being called into active duty because in part because of the uprising that he has helped to spark.
So that's he might get his wish.
He might finally get to be on combat.
I don't know.
You know who's not a cop?
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10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
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This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Murder at City Hall00:02:50
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
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This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
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Media Violence and Massacre00:14:10
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We're back!
Okay, so let's see what Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a non-combat veteran who has never killed anyone and not a cop, teaches cops about combat and killing.
I'm sure it's nuanced and accurate.
So the training program opens with, and this is again, the bulletproof mindset, opens with a graph on rates of violent crime, murder, and imprisonment to make the case that the first two have dropped steadily as the first one has gone up.
So he's pointing out to police that like the more people you arrest, the less crime there is in the United States.
Now, these graphs are not technically wrong.
Incarceration has broadly gone up as crime has gone down.
But just graphing those three things together leaves out a number of other things that have had an impact on the rate of violent crime, such as lead exposure, internet access, availability of social programs, average level of educational attainment, income inequality, etc.
The point of this graph is to show that taking dirtbags off the streets is what makes society safer.
And unfortunately, people who actually study the impact of incarceration on crime disagree with Lieutenant Colonel Grossman on this.
And I'm going to quote from the Brennan Center for Justice now.
Between 2007 and 2017, 34 states reduced both imprisonment and crime rates simultaneously, showing clearly that reducing mass incarceration does not come at the cost of public safety.
For sources and definitions on crime, sorry, the total number of sentenced individuals held in state prisons across the U.S. also decreased by 6% over the same decade.
The Vera Institute of Justice has also conducted a study looking at incarceration and crime since 2000.
They found that between 75 and 100% of the drop in crime we've experienced since the early 1990s came as a result of factors other than incarceration, like increased graduation rates, an aging population, and increased consumer confidence.
But Grossman's course wastes no time in moving on from that to a series of pages on Indiana University brain scan research.
These pages have large blurry images of scanned brains purporting to show increased aggression in kids due to violent TV, movies, and video games.
He notes, quote, media violence makes violent brains.
Violent TV, movie, and video game exposure had an effect on normal kids the same as children with documented, diagnosed aggressive behavior disorder.
So yeah, this is the opening argument.
He's saying is so wrong.
Yeah, it's just like you can find something incorrect and that will justify, I don't know, it almost feels like if you've ever like been around a bully who really wants to beat you up and like there's just like no arguing them out of it, like that it just feels like that.
He's just like finding his anger and excuses to use violence are going to find a way.
Yeah, it's cool.
It's Fox News for cops.
Yeah, it is.
And it's like Fox News, it has, I won't say completely, but very heavily helped craft the mindset that cops walk onto the street with today.
So in terms of when it comes to this like study on video games and violent movies and stuff affecting adolescent brains, the specific study he's referencing is from 2011.
And it did in fact show that 10 hours of violent video games in one week showed reduced levels of activity in regions of their frontal lobes responsible for cognitive function and emotional control.
And there is some evidence, a decent amount, that suggests that violent media can at least temporarily increase aggression.
But aggression is not violence.
It's just the feeling of aggression.
It's an emotional response.
In 2019, a group of researchers carried out an enormous meta-analysis, which is an analysis of basically all the studies on this and concluded that the increased rate of aggression from video games was present but small at best.
And again, no evidence that it has any kind of meaningful impact on violence or violent crime.
Right.
They were testing people right after they played the game?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it makes you feel more aggressive, which isn't really that surprising, to be honest, but whatever.
So, Lieutenant Colonel Grossman has a lot invested in the idea that video games and gory movies have turned our children into a nation of slavering, blood-hungry monsters.
In 1998, he wrote a book titled Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill to cash in on the Columbine Massacre.
During the bulletproof mindset training classes, he often tells his students that, yeah, exactly.
He's one of those guys.
He often tells his students that denying the link between video games and violence will someday, quote, be viewed as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, no, for sure.
For sure.
And he was a good person since he probably hangs out with a bunch of them.
Yeah, I'm sure he knows a few.
I think they're more just Holocaust questionnaires, Jack.
They're just asking questions.
They're just asking questions here.
About the Holocaust.
So to quote again from Men's Journal, one anecdote is particularly telling.
Grossman writes about a 16-year-old in Cleveland whose parents took away his copy of Halo 3 because they thought it was too violent.
His father locked the game in a lockbox, which also held a 9mm handgun.
The boy stole the key, took the game and the gun, and shot both of his parents in the head.
Grossman blames video games for the murder.
He says nothing about the pistol, which...
And I'm even going to say that.
What word did he use to kill his parents?
I forget.
He beat them to death with a copy of Halo 3, Jack.
Right, of course.
Famously, the heaviest video game ever published.
I mean, and I'm going to honestly, like, if we're going to be really fair here, there's a lot more going on than even just the pistol in this kid shooting his parents to death, right?
Like, a lot was probably on, yeah.
But obviously, picking video games over the easily available handgun is ludicrous, fucking wildly irresponsible.
So let's get back to the bulletproof mindset.
The next page of this document is more data on serious assaults per capita, which Grossman uses as evidence to make his case that modern cities are more dangerous than ever.
Mother Jones sent a reporter to one of these classes.
He reported that in this segment of the class, Grossman depicts the modern world as, quote, a place where gang members seek to set records for killing cops, where a kid in every school is thinking about racking up a body count.
His latest book, Assassination Generation, insists that violent video games are turning the nation's youth into mass murderers.
The recent wave of massacres is just the beginning.
Please stop calling them mass shootings.
He smacks the easels.
These thump crimes thump are thump everywhere.
He foresees attacks on school buses and daycare centers.
Kindergartners run about 0.5 miles an hour and get a burst of about 20 yards that then they're done.
It won't just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatches, knives, and swords.
Wait, are the kindergartners the ones attacking?
No, no, they're the victims.
And Dr. David Grossman knows how easy it is.
And he knows how easy it is to kill kindergartners because he has thought a lot about how you kill kindergartners.
What?
That's part of the sheepdog mindset.
Yeah.
Sheepdogs always looking for how far.
Always thinking about how to kill a kindergartner.
He continues, it, it being these murders of kindergartners won't just happen with guns, but with hammers, axes, hatches, knives, and swords.
His voice drops an octave.
Hacking and stabbing little kids.
You don't think they'll attack daycares?
It's already happening in China.
When you hear about a daycare massacre, he shouts at them.
Tell them Grossman said it was coming.
How dare he not consider machetes?
I hear about a daycare massacre.
Tell them Grossman said it was coming.
That's so close to like a used car salesman's pitch being like, when you see it, it's fucking incredible.
Yeah.
Tell them Grossman said it was coming.
Tell him orange that that whole thing in LA on LA LA.
Yeah.
So it's worth noting that.
Robert, it almost sounds like he's unhinged.
It almost sounds like he's a dangerously irresponsible person to be teaching people anything.
It's worth noting that in the copy of the training documents Unicorn Riot obtained, the young cop or whoever it was who's taking the class took notes.
And for this segment, for this segment, during this segment, he wrote, presumably quoting Grossman, you are the thin line of heroes preserving the fabric of America during these dark and degenerate times.
Which I'm sure keys police up to be very responsible.
So the next page includes a graph on combat efficiency over time, which shows how soldiers in combat functionally, how their functional efficiency changes over a period of multiple days in combat, ranging from battle-wise at about 10 days in to vegetative state at 60 days.
And this is pretty reasonable, seeming.
It seems pretty consistent with other things I've read and some things I've seen about how days of combat affect people.
I have no reason to believe that his data is inaccurate.
But what we're actually seeing with this insert is Grossman establishing the idea that police officers in their communities are the same as soldiers in an active war zone, which, I don't know, is broadly accurate in Minneapolis now, but only because of all the cops that these people killed.
Right.
Because of all the people these cops killed.
Yeah.
Now, next we get some info on PTSD and trauma that seems broadly reasonable, and then a full-page insert on being shot and like what to do if you're shot as an officer.
And again, most of this basic information isn't wrong, but it does advise officers to tap the power of adrenaline and use the, it uses the example of an officer who, quote, shot a perp with a 45 five times before the perp dropped.
Later, this officer apparently told himself, get up, get up.
If he could do it, I could do it.
The page ends with a quote in italics from Grossman himself.
You have never lived until you have almost died.
For those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected will never know.
And again, he's never fought for his life.
Right.
What is his explanation?
What is the flavor, David?
How do you...
I mean, it's fine if you're quoting people on that, but don't make it your quote because you don't know that.
Anyway, it's fine.
The view of the cops as military in a foreign land is so nefarious and just thoroughly rotten.
And we're seeing the impact of it because now we are at a point where the police have been acting for a long time like they are an occupying army.
And finally, the people in Minneapolis and some other places are starting to be like, all right, well, let's do what insurgents do when they're occupied by an aggressive invading force.
Of course.
And yup.
Like, that's what you get.
So the next page of this document is the centerpiece of Grossman's entire ideology, a biblical justification for killing.
It starts with the bold and italicized or the bold large print letters question, thou shalt not kill?
Question mark.
And then what follows are a series of biblical quotes.
Thou shalt not murder, underline from Exodus 20, 13.
Jesus said, thou shalt do no murder from Matt 19, 18.
The Lord gave victory to David from 2 Chronicles 18, 6.
David killed his tens of thousands from 1 Samuel 18.7.
Trouble started when David murdered Uriah from 11 Samuel 11.
These six things God hates, including shedders of innocent blood in Proverbs 6, 17.
The rich young man comes to Jesus, sell everything you have, which seems out of place in Matt 19, 21.
And then the centurion comes to Jesus.
No greater faith have I found.
Matt 8.10.
Jesus said, by a sword, Luke 22, 36.
Matt 26, 52, he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.
Romans 13, 4, the magistrate beareth not the sword in vain.
And Acts 10, which quotes the fact that the first Gentile Christian is Cornelius, a centurion, who you get the feeling, like, he's basically saying, God loves cops.
God is okay with killing as long as it's not the murder of innocence.
And since the killing you won't be doing is the murder of innocence, God wants you to kill.
That's the argument this page is making.
And it ends with a quote from John.
There's random scraps of biblical Bible.
And incoherent scraps of biblical nonsense.
John 15, 13 is the quote that ends this page.
Greater love has no man than this, that he give his life for his friends.
So dangerously unhinged and incoherent is how I would kind of see that.
But you get the mindset that this kind of pushes in the people who listen to it.
Now, following this.
I trust somebody who came up with...
No, first of all, somebody, people should probably look him up.
His eyes are like closer together than a flounder.
And he just and they're tiny.
He just like has the look of a very stupid man.
Like a, it's almost like he looks like a cartoon of a young George Bush, George W. Bush.
But he.
Yeah.
And like Putin, there's like some Putin in there too, like a splash of dash.
Yep.
Irresponsible Split-Second Decisions00:15:19
I wouldn't have to.
Putin asked somebody who came up with the phrase killology to choose like what I was going to have for lunch, let alone choose who lives and dies.
Yeah, I wouldn't want him making salads, let alone teaching people in the community with guns.
I would feel okay with him digging holes, maybe.
Although I don't like him having a shovel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't like him having a shovel.
So yeah, following all this, we get a page on the modern warrior's edge, which includes some pretty embarrassing clip art of a schlubby cop looking in the mirror and seeing a muscular cop.
It does positively note that communication skills are the most important skills for an officer to master, which is true, I would say.
But then it warns cops that most of their attackers will warn or provide indicators before striking, and that predators are always looking for a body count, which they find by recognizing soft targets.
And then after that, we hit what is probably the most central and important aspect of this whole training program.
The video, I'm in fear of my life.
This video is about a police officer who was killed in 1998, Deputy Kyle Dinkheller.
And I'm not sure if I've seen the exact same video that Grossman plays in his courses, but I did find a CNN article on the case, and it includes a video that I believe to be at least very similar.
The article on CNN that includes this video opens with this paragraph, Jack.
If you want to know why cops shoot people, you can find one of many answers in those three minutes on Whipple's Crossing Road, which is where Dinkheller was shot.
There on January 12th, 1988, 98, Deputy Kyle Dinkheller of the Lawrence County Sheriff's Office made the final traffic stop of his brief career.
And it is striking.
In short, we're going to play aspects of this in a bit.
The video shows a traffic stop.
The deputy pulls over an older man driving erratically.
Said man is belligerent.
He jumps and he refuses commands.
At one point, he jumps up and down, yelling for the officer to shoot him.
He yells that he is a Vietnam veteran.
He gets in Dinkheller's face and he gets aggressive.
The deputy eventually hits him with a nightstick.
The man is knocked down, but he gets back up and runs to his car.
There he grabs a rifle, which he uses to shoot Deputy Dink Heller to death.
And kind of critically, he fires several warning shots first.
Dinkheller fires back and hits him, and then he shoots Dinkheller to death.
And the video is horrific.
Whatever else you think about cops, Dinkheller does seem to have honestly tried to do everything in his power to avoid shooting this guy, even after the guy pulled out a rifle.
It is a terrible video.
And I guess if we're going to do a content warning, you're going to hear a man's death screams a little bit later.
It's bad.
But it's important because this is what is, this is like one of the most important videos in police training in the United States, even outside of Grossman's courses.
And the CNN video of this includes interviews with Kyle Dinkeller's dad, who trains cops now.
And what Dinkeller's dad takes out of this video is just as horrific as the video itself.
And I'm going to ask you to play that clip now.
Kyle, he was a deputy sheriff with Lawrence County Sheriff's Department in Dublin, Georgia.
He was a good officer.
Being his dad, I'm the first one to say, yeah, he made some mistakes.
He was too fair.
He was too nice.
That was just him.
My son pulled out his ass baton, hit him a few times, but then the first mistake he made was letting a man get him on the ground and covered him.
Yeah, this is his dad.
Can I say, shut back now?
Put the gun down.
Put it down now.
He was giving the guy to the last ditch effort to put the gun down.
He didn't want to hurt him.
It didn't work.
Okay.
Yeah, that's probably enough.
So that's pretty horrific, right?
Those screams are, that's bad.
It's a hard video to watch.
It's brutal.
And it has, you can tell the impact that it's had on his dad because he's taken out of this the fact that his son was too kind and gave this guy too many chances, was not violent enough.
And that is what watching the video, that's how it's trained to police, that like you need to be shooting faster to save your own life.
And that video, you can like imagine a whole classroom full of young cops, which is like who this video was played to almost every day in this video.
I just want to show that, actually, is like a bunch of cops just putting their head down.
I mean, it's really like one of the, I can't, like, that's, it's like trying to amp them up to just be as trigger happy as possible.
It's like the bad, bad police porn.
Like how, yeah.
Not the person who's being killed in the video, but like it's, it's just such a specific example and like just piece of propaganda.
Yeah.
And it's, yeah, we're going to be talking about this video quite a bit.
So as you might imagine, the Dinkheller video has a powerful impact on the police and Grossman's classes.
And he ties this video and the fact that Dinkeller didn't shoot earlier to some facts from the Civil War.
On battlefields in the Civil War, dropped muskets were often found loaded with multiple balls.
And kind of the conclusion that Grossman and a number of people take from this is that most soldiers weren't trying to kill the enemy, that they were basically like pretending to fire and then fake loading their guns, which is why there were so many bullets in them because they weren't willing to shoot people.
That is one interpretation of that.
Other people say that like people panic in gunfights because it's terrifying and they were like fucking up not realizing their gun wasn't actually firing because they were in a panicked situation or they were like fucking up while loading and accidentally sticking too many balls in.
There's no way to know what the actual truth is, but Grossman ties this to the fact that people are so naturally unwilling to kill people that you have to really aggressively train people like police to kill very easily.
Otherwise, they won't kill when they need to.
Like that's that's the lesson he learns from this.
So that there, his argument is that the Civil War wasn't deadly enough.
Kind of, yeah, that is part of it.
Yeah, we'll talk more about this in a little bit.
In these classes, the sheriff who trained Dinkheller gets a lot of guff for the way that he trained his deputies, which gives you an idea of kind of like some of the pre-Grossman attitudes towards at least shootings of white people.
And the sheriff who trained this cop that died was famous for telling his officers, make sure that if you shoot, it's a good shoot.
And if not, you're probably going to lose everything you've got.
Plus, you're probably going to go to prison.
So he was being like, don't shoot unless you're absolutely certain it's the right thing to do.
Otherwise, you will go to prison, which I would say is how everyone with a gun should feel.
Right.
Right?
You would think so, yeah.
Like at all times, no matter who you are.
At all times.
Yeah.
Now, the way the story goes, Webb had a minor dust up with Dinkheller a few minors, a few months prior to his death.
The deputy wound up yelling at a driver on the road while responding to an incident.
That driver was a friend of Sheriff Webb's.
He told the sheriff and the sheriff yelled at Dinkheller and made him write a letter of apology.
This humiliated Dink Heller and caused him to get shit from his colleagues.
So as the story goes, he was also super self-conscious about fucking up on the job and getting in trouble, and that's why he didn't shoot first.
This whole story and the video of this man's death has become a seminal moment in the history of law enforcement education.
Not only did Kyle Dinkheller's father start touring with the video of his son's death and teaching classes on it, but other trainers have adopted the video, including Grossman.
It is used in police training courses in at least 27 states.
The lesson plan that accompanies this one course or one course notes that the video is meant to help police, quote, determine when lethal force is justified and to always remember your life is worth more than a lawsuit.
And the thing that's not stated there, but is true, is that they're also saying, remember, your life is worth more than other people's as a cop.
Right.
Yeah.
Which is not the, I mean, I, you would think that becoming a cop is like the ideal version or the best case scenario would be that it's a calling and you're there to serve and protect the people who are.
Yeah, for some, I don't know, yeah.
Yeah.
You would think serve and protect would be a part of the job, like, and ideally.
And I do want to state here that, like, I'm not saying Grossman's training had a particular impact on the son of a bitch who killed George Floyd because that, whatever, whatever that was, that was even out of the pale for police murders of black men.
But obviously, I think it had a huge impact on all of the other police murders in Minneapolis and a bunch of other parts of the United States that contributed to George Floyd's murder kind of setting all this off, you know?
Like, it's a factor behind those.
Like, I don't know what the fuck was going on with the guy.
Like, that's even beyond the pale for police murders of people, which is part of why it had the impact it did.
So it's just so slow and deliberate.
And yeah, it just seems like there are so many moments where they can stop what they're doing and they just keep doing it for no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The kind of killing that Grossman's stuff, I think, really mainly has had a major impact on is like the killings of people like Philando Castile, where the cop clearly, without any sort of good reason, makes a split-second decision to gun somebody down based off of like a moment of anxiety.
Like that's what Grossman's impact is on.
So, and again, like, he's not the only one who uses this video in trainings.
Another training company, Milo Range, even turned the Dink Heller video into an interactive video game played with a fake gun that gives trainee cops a chance to kill the man who killed Kyle Dinkheller, which is lunacy.
According to CNN, quote, at the Bartow County Sheriff's Office in Cartersville, Georgia, Captain Richie Harrell used this training machine to test more than 100 officers' willingness to use deadly force.
If an officer waited too long to fire, Harrell asked, what are you doing?
What the heck are you doing?
That's good.
Yeah.
Perfect.
So obviously, the problem of absurdly aggressive police training is wider than Grossman.
But journalists have noted that as far as anyone can tell, he's probably trained more cops than any other man in the country, which is why we're focusing on him.
He is the most influential figure involved in crafting this narrative, which the Dinkheller video brutally narrates that police are in more danger now than they've ever been.
And this is horseshit.
Yeah.
Fatal shootings of officers by civilians have declined for 40 years.
Jesus.
Yeah.
Like, that's got to be the opposite, right?
Like, aren't we at the safest point we've been at?
Pretty much.
There was a slight surge in like 2015 or 2016 as a result of like those shootings of cops and stuff during the election that were kind of that were in response to the shootings by cops of black men.
But yeah, it is safer than it's been for 99% of the history of this nation for cops right now.
In 2014, 129 officers were murdered on the job.
That's not a tiny number, but for some context, about 118 retail workers were murdered on the job.
Overall, police officers are number 14 in the nationwide list of jobs most likely to get you killed.
Fishermen, loggers, garbagemen, and taxi drivers are all more likely to die working than police.
Now, that's what the actual facts say.
Yeah, fishermen, I mean, it's fucking dangerous to be a fisherman.
Like, that makes total sense.
That's a hard gig.
Yeah.
Fish have triggered caps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They will.
But like, fucking garbagemen and taxi drivers are at more risk of dying on the job than cops.
I don't know why, but the fisherman thing did bother me.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not, I wish less fishermen died.
I don't have a problem with fishermen.
So yeah, those are the facts, but those are not the facts as Grossman relates them.
I'm going to report or quote from Mother Jones reporting on this bit of the seminar.
Quote, the number of dead cops has exploded like nothing we have ever seen, he tells the armed citizens in Lakeport, which is where he was doing a class.
That is not true.
The average annual number of police officers intentionally killed while on duty in the past decade is 40% lower than it was in the 1980s.
If emergency medicine and body armor hadn't improved since the 1970s, Grossman claims the number of dead cops would be eight times what it is today.
It is not clear how he arrived at these figures.
And it's also worth noting that that was from another version of the seminar that he does for civilians with guns, which he's also started doing now because after the Philando Castile killing, less police started using his services.
So that's good.
So he should now be in jail, it seems like.
Right, yeah, he should be in jail for a lot of reasons.
I would say there's an amount of irresponsibility that's tantamount to a crime.
I don't know.
There's probably not a crime on the books that he's technically committed, but let's change the books, maybe.
I don't know.
One thing I find really...
Yeah.
Yeah.
One thing I find really interesting is that Grossman and all these other police trainers tend to completely ignore the person who killed Kyle Dinkeller, Andrew Brannon.
And I'm going to quote from CNN talking about who Brannon was.
Brannon spent three years as an army officer in Vietnam, where his company commander was blown apart by a landmine, and Brannon never really came home from the war.
The sound of a bottle rocket sent him diving under the couch.
He left college after a nervous breakdown.
He couldn't hold a job.
He got married and divorced.
He tried walking alone in the woods from Mexico to the Canadian border or from Tennessee to New York.
On the trail in 1986, he wrote a postcard to his father.
I wish to thank you for being the being that means the most to me.
You have set a good example, which I am only now getting better at following, but I will keep on going.
Better to keep going than to stop.
Then his father died of cancer, and he withdrew to a hideout in the woods of Lawrence County.
And in early 1998, he ran out of the medicine that treated his depression and stabilized his moods.
By January 12th, when he met Kyle Dinkeller, he had been unmedicated for five days.
There are a lot of lessons to take out of the shooting of Kyle Dinkeller.
I don't think they are cops should be shooting people faster.
Yes.
That's the it's you really have to work hard to get that decision that wrong.
Yeah.
Among the lessons I would take out of this is we shouldn't be fighting wars that don't concern us in any our security in any meaningful way and send back thousands of young men who have been traumatized.
We shouldn't have a system whereby someone's harder for people to have stabilizing medication.
Yeah, we should have more therapy.
We should have a culture in which it is considered less shameful for men to take therapy.
There's a lot of lessons to take out of this shooting.
Lessons from a Cop Shooting00:02:51
Grossman takes one.
Yeah.
So yeah, and the good analyses I've read on Brennan suggest very credibly that he was trying to commit suicide by cop, firing a number of shots that didn't hit Dinkeller before he actually shot the officer.
And when he fired back, it was after he had been wounded.
And kind of the theory goes that he flipped out and went to NOM mode once he got hit and killed the deputy.
Yeah, the officer who was taking the bulletproof mindset course that I'm reading from took this note during this section of the lecture.
We know what they are trying to do, kill a cop.
So why do they expect us to act differently?
They start this, but then they ask us to play by the rules.
So from this point in the lecture, Grossman goes on to lecture his now terrified and angry students about what his research has told him about their adversaries, which are, again, American citizens, mostly of a specific color.
Grossman warns that they are younger and in better shape than police, that they have been in more gunfights and violent encounters, which in Grossman's case is not a high bar, at least.
He states that they practice more, which is true, and states that they don't hesitate when it comes to violence.
So he's...
Who is he talking about?
I mean, some of this is based on the fact that an FBI study revealed that cop killers tend to have more armed training and practice than cops.
But that's a low bar because most cops practice very little with their sidearms.
Like it's actually an extremely low bar to practice more.
I practice more with my gun than the average U.S. police officer.
But he's also noting that like, like, he's not just saying that like this about cop killers.
He's saying this about your adversaries, which he kind of intimates are almost anyone you run into as a cop.
Right.
It seems like he could just be saying that everybody who you pull over is like a trained assassin.
I mean, he called Generation Assassin.
Assassination Generation.
Yeah, that's what he's saying.
We're just going to roll some ads now.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver.40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Chaos in the Chamber00:03:40
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
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You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Oh my God, what a day.
So this is fun stuff.
Killing Without Thought00:15:09
From there, Grossman plays a video that involves police shooting at a suspect in a car who was driving away.
Grossman makes sure his students know that these were good shoots, that these cops shooting at a car driving away were good shoots.
And that if anyone says shooting at a fleeing car is bad, it's because of media poisoning.
Like the media has poisoned their minds.
Maybe shoot at a fleeing car.
Maybe don't shoot at a fleeing car in the middle of a city.
Yeah, it's media mind poisoning that makes people think.
I don't know why you're trying to put that from propaganda.
Copaganda.
Yeah.
I mean, let's all take a moment back to when those cops, a guy with a gun, like entered a Trader Joe's fleeing from the police and they just fired Wiley into the Trader Joe's killing a woman.
Maybe relevant to this.
So the next page of this booklet focuses on nonverbal communication, which Grossman's writes is much more important than verbal communication.
He goes on to lecture cops about different nonverbal cues that can help them determine who secretly means them harm.
Some examples include, I am not lying.
So the words, I am not lying, Grossman says, are a hint to cops that you are lying and an untrustworthy person.
And also a thing, just a perfect description of how people talk.
Hey, officer, I am not lying.
I'm not lying.
I'm not lying.
It's one of those things.
I had a very tense police interaction where they attempted to search my car and had like, it was a very stressful, long night.
We spent like a couple of hours with them.
And they kept telling me that they were trained to tell when I was lying and they knew I was lying about having pot in the car.
And I didn't have pot in the car this time.
And ironically enough, another time when I did, I was pulled over and had my car searched by dogs and had weed in the car.
I locked eyes with the officer and repeatedly told him I didn't have pot and he let me go because they're trained to believe by grossman.
Lock eyes with him and say, I am not lying.
I am not lying.
I just said, I don't have pot.
Yeah, part of the problem with this is that Grossman again says that like nonverbal cues are the most important thing to recognize as a cop and people are famously bad at recognizing nonverbal cues.
UC San Francisco psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman conducted a study in 1994 on people's ability to recognize a liar from nonverbal cues.
And he found that most people were remarkably certain across the board that they were good at telling when someone was lying.
He also found that most people across the board were very bad at telling when other people were lying.
Quote, the great majority of us are easily misled.
It's very difficult and most people just don't know what cues to rely on.
Grossman teaches his officers that people who make eye contact are more likely to be honest and thus safe.
And again, this is another misnomer.
People are less likely to make eye contact when they are frightened and people are frightened about police officers.
Counter to this, people who are either hardened criminals or just folks like me who wind up talking to police officers a lot, whether or not we're doing the thing they're concerned about, learn that you make eye contact with cops at all points.
You don't break eye contact when you're telling, and you tell them what they need to hear.
That's how you deal with cops.
You make eye contact, you keep your hands open, you tell them what they need to hear for you to go home.
Like, that's what you do.
It sounds like you're talking about dealing with an angry dog.
Yeah, that is, that is.
I deal with police and angry dogs.
Having been at hands where you can see them, slow moves.
Well, you don't want to make eye contact with an angry dog because that scene is confrontational a little bit.
But you do want to very, yeah.
But you do, yeah, it's, it's, the best teacher I ever had was my speech and debate coach for one semester until he got fired for his past history of selling pot.
But the thing he told us was that as adults, what we needed to know is that anytime you're dealing with an authority figure who has the ability to punish you, the only thing, whether he said, whether it's a judge or a police officer, you make eye contact with them and you tell them slowly and calmly whatever they need to hear for you to go home.
Jesus.
And that advice has never led me astray.
I mean, and again, I'm a tall white guy, which helps a lot.
But that's the best advice I ever got as a kid from a teacher.
Really, the only advice I ever got as a kid from a teacher that I remember.
Shout out to Coach Gonzalez of fucking Clark High School.
Yeah.
So, yeah, again, he's telling people that, like, yeah, so he's telling people that all these nonverbal cues mean folks are lying and this stuff is like just straight up not true.
And part of what he is doing is he's getting officers to expect that people who express fear of police officers, often by fidgeting or not making eye contact, and these people could be afraid for completely legitimate reasons, like the fact that they're black residents of Minneapolis, that people who do this are a threat for doing the things that science tells us are normal behaviors for scared people.
That's what he's training cops to believe.
Now, this is probably the least salacious part.
This next part is probably the least, yeah, or this part is probably the least salacious part of his training, but it might be the most dangerous one.
Grossman doesn't come across directly and say, if someone fails to meet your eye or acts nervous, shoot them.
But he does tell officers that they are under risk of deadly assault at all waking moments, that people are lurking in the shadows, constantly ready to kill them, that they should err on the side of violence, and that, oh, yeah, you can tell who's dangerous by the fact that they won't meet your eyes.
And then he says shit like this: We fight violence.
What do we fight it with?
Superior violence, righteous violence.
Jesus.
It's not great, Jack.
Robert, I don't like this.
I don't like this either.
Not a fan for the record.
They're allowed to carry guns.
Like, yep, they can legally murder you.
And if you act nervous when they walk up to you with their hand on the gun that they can legally murder you with, they will legally murder you.
Yep.
Yeah.
That doesn't seem like a healthy system for divining the truth and innocence of any given situation.
Yeah.
Like Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, I'm not a cop, Jack, but I would agree with you.
That seems unreasonable to me as well.
So, much of Grossman's analysis is based on a series of studies conducted after World War II and through the Vietnam era.
And the short summary of these studies is that researchers after World War II found that U.S. soldiers in combat only shot at the enemy like 15 or 20% of the time.
Most troops would fire above the enemy's heads or pretend to fire anything they could do to avoid actually killing somebody.
And so the military had to create a rigorous new training method to teach soldiers to aim and shoot at human bodies automatically without thinking.
And by Vietnam, you know, soldiers who were trained properly no longer hesitated before shooting at human beings.
And this research is very famous.
It is cited by a lot of folks outside of Grossman.
I'm not going to get into this in detail because the veracity of it is heavily debated.
And there are a lot of reasons to question those old World War II studies.
A lot of people who will say they're bogus.
It's too much of a topic for us to get into now.
What's important is that Grossman believes it.
I found in a 2004 PBS interview with him in which he really lays out his mindset on this.
And I want to remind you all, he's talking about this because he views what he's saying as a good thing that he does, as a positive service that he provides to cops.
Quote, prior preparation is that one variable in the equation that we can control ahead of time.
And one of the key things is embracing the responsibility to kill.
Modern training makes you kill without conscious thought.
We are making it possible for people to kill without conscious thought.
And thankfully, and frankly, at the moment of truth, they need to be able to do that.
Those who are not properly trained are going to be killed.
And so we're teaching them to kill without conscious thought.
And they, at an unconscious level, at the muscle memory level, reflex level, have grasped killing.
Gun, shoot.
He's dead.
I can trick your body into killing.
But if your mind is not ready to come along on this ride, who's the next victim?
You are.
I have tricked your body into doing something that your mind is not ready to do.
So when I teach, one of the things I believe we need to do is embrace this word kill.
You will read a hundred military manuals and you'll never see the word kill.
It's a dirty four-letter word.
It's an obscene word.
And yet it's what we do.
Assuming there's no stress inoculation in a normal human being, at the moment when you want to fire, the forebrain shuts down, the midbrain takes over, and you slam head-on into a resistance to killing your own kind.
The only way to overcome that resistance is through operant conditioning to make killing a condition reflex.
And we've done that.
That's the worst.
That's real bad.
It's horrible.
It's human engineering, like behavioral engineering to murder on behalf of the people who are designed, whose function in this, like according to the social contract, is to protect.
Yes.
That is exactly what he says.
No contradiction.
He sees no contradiction.
He also is like, you know, yeah.
He's like, you know, the war that we should try and imitate is the one that America, like that completely psychologically damaged Americans, as America as a nation.
Let's go after that one because World War II was not deadly enough.
Yeah, we didn't.
Clearly, our soldiers didn't do a good enough job of defeating fascism on a global scale.
And the way we fought in Vietnam was much more effective.
Like the war that we famously lost.
It's almost like that built-in, you know, physical and psychological stop that you hit when you're trying to kill someone is there for a reason.
Yeah.
It's almost like maybe, maybe the fact that U.S. soldiers in World War II were less aggressive played into the fact that we were so clearly the good guys in that war.
I mean, the genocides committed by the Nazis probably were more of a factor, but it is weird to take out of that.
Oh, we got to get people to kill more better.
We got to get people to kill more.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Obviously, Jack, I'm not an expert killologist.
You know, I haven't studied killology as much as Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman.
But that seems terrifying.
You're horrible to me.
Everything I've just read.
You have your master's in killology, but you don't have your PhD.
No, you know, Jack, I never finished my master's thesis on killology.
I've got everything but the thesis.
Yeah, I, you know, I dropped out.
I just didn't have, I couldn't afford it.
You know, after a certain while, those killology loan grants just weren't enough.
So maybe if I had reminds me of the Da Vinci code when they're when they make up the thing that the star is good at, it's like a puzzleologist or something.
Yeah.
Cryptologist, which I think is a real thing, but it's like cryptology is, I don't think he's basically a word jumble expert.
Yeah.
It's pretty cool.
That's all horrible to me.
And I might say that anyone bragging about doing that to people's heads, especially the heads of people whose job is to protect and interface with members of the community, that seems incredibly irresponsible.
And Grossman himself in this interview with PBS even acknowledges that his trainings can fuck up the heads of the police who take his advice.
Quote, if we haven't prepared ourselves emotionally for the act ahead of time and we just tricked you into killing, the magnitude of the trauma can be significant because we're having to live with something your body says is not right and you don't want to do and you were simply tricked into killing David.
Jesus.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The thing you don't want to do.
We tricked you into it and that fucks your head up.
I'm going to make this my entire life.
I'm going to make doing this my whole...
Like, it's one of those things.
Again, this is not the time to show it.
This is clearly not the time to express sympathy with cops.
But he is talking about gaslighting and emotionally abusing police officers.
Like, that is what he's doing.
He's talking very directly about that.
He's bragging.
It's not good.
Like, it's not good.
I'm taking a firm anti-colology stance here, Jack.
It seems like that.
I'm going to...
Yeah, I'm going to stand next to you on that.
I'm going to stand with you on that stance.
I am someone who, whenever I walk out the door, I have a gun on me, a loaded and chambered firearm with a bullet ready to fire when I pull the trigger.
That is an everyday thing for me because death threats are pretty much an every week thing for me at this point.
I think a lot about what would happen if I had to draw a gun and shoot a human being.
And I can tell you, like, I lose sleep over it.
There is nothing that scares me more.
And the people I'm specifically thinking about shooting potentially are fucking Nazis.
Like, that's realistically who I'm worried about because of the threat.
And it's not, I'm not particularly, like, I'm not horribly traumatized at the fact that I might have to kill someone who is attempting to kill me.
I am terrified about the fact that people miss regularly in stressful situations like gunfights and bullets don't stop because you miss.
And the idea of firing, anyone who carries a gun should be scared every time that they go into public with that gun.
It should be something that worries them.
It should be a, it should be uncomfortable.
It is a necessity for some people.
And I'm not saying it's bad to carry a concealed handgun or something.
I do it.
But you should, it should be a weight on your shoulders.
It should not be something you train to not think about.
You should never stop thinking about it.
That's my attitude as a guy who has thankfully never had to shoot anybody and hopes like hell he never has to.
But who does go into the world armed regularly?
You know.
So, this is all great.
So I think we need to work on your reflexes so that you have a little bit more killology expertise before the next time you walk out that door, bro.
So the murder of Mr. Castile did not spell the end of Grossman's business, but it did impact it.
The sheriff of Santa Clara County, California, canceled an upcoming training session after Mr. Castile's murder.
And she said that her officers were peacemakers first and warriors second.
Bias or Just Tired Cops00:06:30
There was an avalanche of criticism against Grossman.
He lost a decent amount of business.
And this is what kind of inspired Mother Jones to take that class and to write that article about him.
And they interviewed a number of other experts on law enforcement and even law enforcement trainers who are critical of Grossman.
I'm going to read that paragraph now.
Grossman's trainings are fear porn, says Craig Atkinson, a filmmaker who attended one for his documentary on police militarization, Do Not Resist.
He wonders how the Castile incident may have played out if Officer Yannis hadn't heard Dave Grossman tell him that every single traffic stop could might be the last stop you ever make in your life.
Grossman is more of a motivational speaker than a trainer, says Seth Stouton, a former cop and law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies the regulation of police.
And Grossman's worldview, Stoughton says, the officer is the hero, the warrior, the noble figure who steps into dark situations where others fear to tread and brings order to a chaotic world, and who does so by imposing their will on the civilians they deal with.
This approach to policing is outdated and ineffective, says Stoughton, and some of it is dangerously wrong.
Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor and expert on police accountability, says the bulletproof warrior approach is okay for green berets, but unacceptable for domestic policing.
The best police chiefs in the country don't want anything to do with this.
Grossman and his business partner deny that what they provide is anything like military training or that it treats cops as warriors, even though it repeatedly refers to them as frontline troops and shows them training materials that are also used by military trainers to prep soldiers for combat.
Yeah.
It is really impossible to overemphasize how much bulletproof mindset training focuses on building an image of the world as irredeemably aggressive towards random cops.
This Bloomberg write-up describes how the class is open.
Quote, 40 cops are in a classroom watching recent footage of protesters in San Francisco denouncing the police.
Your children are ashamed of you, a black woman in the video tells a black officer who looks away.
Coward, others shout.
A young demonstrator walks up to a cop and sticks out his middle finger.
A female officer trips and the demonstrators laugh.
The volume is way up and the cops in the room are leaning back in their chairs, crossing their arms and getting tense.
David Grossman's partner in this steps into the front of the room and stops the video.
Glennon, 59, spent 29 years as an officer in Lombard, a suburbs of Chicago, where they tortured people, and at one point running a county homicide investigations.
He's 6'1 ⁇ , 210 pounds, and has the gravelly voice and bearing of the desk sergeant on the 1980s TV show Hill Street Blues who told cops to be careful out there before the squad cars rolled.
Welcome to our world, Glennon says.
It's as bad as it's been since the 60s and 70s.
And again, obviously, that's not fucking true.
That's objectively not true.
I mean, you could argue that within the last three or four days, it might be starting to be true, but it's because the cops treated people like enemy insurgents and murdered a bunch of them.
Yeah, and even then, no cops have been killed yet in this, at least as of the recording of this fucking episode.
Who knows where we'll be, you know, in another couple of days.
But yeah, this is what cops believe.
And if it's not what the man who murdered George Floyd believed, it's probably what the other three cops he was with who stood by and who helped him murder George Floyd believed.
Minnesotan police love Grossman's courses, and he has taught a lot of Minnesota cops, a lot of Minneapolis cops.
And as you might expect, he does not teach officers positive things about groups like Black Lives Matter.
He calls BLM protests treason, and he says that BLM has blood on its hands for encouraging people to kill police.
The media, he teaches his cops, are bastards for their unfair coverage of police violence.
When homicide cropped up ever so slightly in 2015, he blamed it on what he called the Ferguson effect.
And his hypothesis is that after those police protests, protests, or after those protests, cops were scared to do their jobs, and so they let more crimes happen, I guess.
It is not a very coherent belief system.
But in Grossman's head, it all makes sense, just like his sheepdog metaphor makes sense.
Quote, the sheepdog, he says, looks a lot like a wolf.
He has fangs and the capacity for violence.
The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot, and will not ever harm the sheep.
Any sheepdog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed.
The author of that men's journal article I've quoted from got a chance to interview him, and he brought that up.
And here's his quote about this.
Of all the recent high-profile police killings, Grossman sees almost none that he believes were unjustified.
Take Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who died after an illegal chokehold from the NYPD and whose last words were, I can't breathe.
If you can talk, you can breathe, Grossman said.
That guy had a heart condition.
The lesson is, don't fight cops when you have a heart condition.
Jesus Christ, Mary.
By the way, one of the things that was said to George Floyd by the police when he said that he couldn't breathe is that if he could talk, he could breathe.
Yep.
This guy's like...
Or take Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old Cleveland boy who was fatally shot at a park while playing with a toy airsoft gun.
If you had a gun pointed at you, Grossman says, sympathizing with the cop who, for the record, did not have a gun pointed at him, that one's borderline.
I'm not going to give you that one.
Yes, the instant shooting of a 12-year-old with a toy is borderline.
Yes.
Yes.
Clearly.
Grossman does not believe that police have any kind of bias against black men that makes them more likely to shoot black men.
Instead, he says, the far greater bias in our society today is a bias against cops.
In 10,000 TV shows and 500 movies, black people are almost never the bad guys.
Name me one cop movie in the last 30 years that didn't have a bad cop.
Now, in total fairness, Jack, to David Grossman, he does think there's one way in which policing could be reformed.
And he even agrees that policing is broke.
Do you want to know?
Do you want to know what he thinks is broken about policing, Jack?
They're too hemmed in by restrictions and they need to be able to more freely use violence.
He does think that clearly, but what he says is actually even dumber.
When people tell you law enforcement is broken, they're right.
And what's broken is sleep.
He believes that when cops shoot wrongly, it's not because they're biased or scared or in need of better training or have been trained to shoot people much more regularly.
It's because they're tired, because they've been working too many long shifts and taking too much overtime.
Sleep deprivation, he says, is the number one predictor of judgment errors, ethical problems, and use of force problems.
If I could change one thing in the world right now to make law enforcement better, it would be mandating sleep.
Brutality in Iraq00:02:50
Holy fuck.
I mean, the bulletproof mindset does sound like a douchey diet among Silicon Valley people, like where it's like bulletproof caveman where you like only eat meat and sleep for 20 minutes, five times an hour.
That would be too many.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's I can see it.
I figured I was waiting for there to be some sort of biohacking element to it, and we snuck it in right at the end.
Yeah, I want to close this, Jack, with an anecdote from my own experiences, because it's one of the things that was most striking to me when I was in Iraq and Mosul during the fighting against ISIS.
Now, the Iraqi army has a long history of doing fucked up shit, both before and after the invasion, right?
Like there's a lot of brutality from a number of different Iraqi military units.
But something I saw when I was up at the very front, one of my last days in Mosul, I was at the very edge of the advance.
So I was standing at the end of a block of bombed out buildings, and the next block, 10 feet away, was technically ISIS territory.
Like they were fighting over that next block, and there were just waves of refugees whose houses had been blown up, in some cases, seconds earlier by bombs, fleeing towards us.
And these huge lines of people with everything they owned on their backs who had been in ISIS territory minutes earlier.
And I was with this line of Iraqi police who were meeting these fleeing people and were searching them for bombs.
And they had explosives detectors.
All of these guys had friends who had been killed within days by ISIS suicide bombers.
And this was just a crowd of undifferentiated people walking out of ISIS territory with huge bags on their backs and in their hands.
It was a fucking tense situation.
And there were numerous times where I saw young Iraqi soldiers walk up with metal detectors and guns to take someone's bags to search them.
And the person would grab their bag and pull away, which is a...
I was terrified because that looks like a guy about to fucking detonate a bomb that's in his bag or something.
At no point did I see any of those Iraqi soldiers point their guns at a civilian, so much as point their guns at one.
And these are 18, 19-year-old boys with virtually no training who are scared as hell and who have had friends killed in similar circumstances.
And I would have expected U.S. cops in the same situation to have reacted much more violently and much more poorly.
And that's something that stayed with me ever since.
It's almost like we're the worst.
Almost like that.
Yeah, it's almost like we're doing a real bad job.
Nasty Pants and Tear Gas00:02:48
Yeah.
Well, way to go.
David Gross, man.
David Grossman.
Gross, man.
That's it, Jack.
I think this is the end of Grossman.
You got it.
In your face.
David Nasty Pants.
Yeah.
Nasty Pants is good.
David Nasty Pants.
Suck on that, Davey.
Fucking shit.
Play plug at this point.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm Jack O'Brien.
I host a daily, twice daily podcast with Miles Gray.
It's called The Daily Zeitgeist.
And yeah, in the morning, we go through and try and tell you what's happening in the Zeitgeist that day.
And in the afternoon, we're going to be talking about the...
Oh, what's happening in the Zeitgeist, Jack?
Yeah.
I'll tell you anything.
It's pretty bad.
I haven't tell you what it is.
It's the news today, but check out the days.
Anyways, that's a lot of fun.
It won't totally destroy your soul, although we're having more and more trouble sticking to that this week.
But yeah, come.
We watch the whatever's in the Netflix top 10.
We tell you about that so you don't have to watch the bad stuff.
It ends up being a lot of fun.
So check it out.
You can follow me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien.
Check out Jack underscore O'Brien at the Twitter and check out the daily zeitgeist.
And, you know, obviously there will be more protests all around the United States by the time this finally drops.
My advice to everyone who's asking it, because I've gotten so many emails from people asking, is to go out and express your legal right to protest and to be furious about the situation we find ourselves in, the many situations we find ourselves in.
Utilize your legal rights, protect yourself, and remember, most importantly, if you get tear gassed, just use water to wash your eyes out.
People have a lot of fancy fucking tear gas recipes.
Just use water.
It is idiot-proof and it's fine.
Bring water, pour it in your eyes outwards from the eye, from like the inside of the eye out.
Don't fucking don't make it complicated.
Don't go buy in gallons of milk.
Just use water if you get tear gassed.
That's or put a traffic cone on top of the tear gas canister.
Yeah.
Pour some water in.
That was clever.
Yeah.
That's some good Hong Kong tactics right there.
So good luck, everybody.
Stay powerful.
Good luck to you, Robert.
Don't get killed.
Yeah.
Stay Powerful, Don't Get Killed00:02:10
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten and a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.