CCHR & Racism Task Force Support Moves to Ban Restraints & “Warrior Training”
As Congress considers prohibiting the use of chokeholds and psychological “killology”-style training of police and Minnesota banning it, calls are made to bring about community safety by eliminating these practices nationwide.
As Congress considers prohibiting chokeholds and psychological “killology”-style training of police, calls are made to eliminate these practices nationwide
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, April 27, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A U.S. Task Force Against Racism and Modern-Day Eugenics announced its support for current federal consideration of legislation to ban police use of chokehold restraints but also wants prohibition of such restraint use extended to behavioral institutions, where teens have died. It also seeks federal and state bans on “warrior-style” or “fear-based” law enforcement training, also known as “killology,” started by a professor of psychology over 20 years ago.[1] The mental health watchdog, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International launched the Task Force last year to raise awareness of these issues. It was founded by Rev. Fred Shaw, a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff and current president of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay, California chapter.
Rev. Shaw says: “As a Black man, I’ve experienced years of racism, but as in any fight, it is the punch you don’t see that knocks you out. There is a source of knock-out, but hidden, oppression that has plagued our community and impacted our law enforcement, that manifests as a callous disregard for life. ‘Warrior-based’ training could be one of the key sources of injustice and violent treatment perpetrated on minorities.”
In July 2020, the Minnesota legislature banned the use of chokeholds and “warrior-style” training, a move Rev. Shaw commends.[2]
Craig Atkinson, filmmaker and director of the Tribeca Film Festival Award-winning documentary, Do Not Resist, addressing warrior training, said it “100% has to be put under a microscope and analyzed” and “less people would die.”[3]
The U.S. Justice Department just announced a probe into a “pattern or practice” of unlawful or discriminatory behavior, including training, within the Minneapolis police department.[4] Shaw said that despite the ban on “warrior training” in the state, it takes time to undo the influence of violent and potentially racist training on the thinking of those indoctrinated with it. He hopes the DOJ investigates this and the developers’ accountability for its potential impact.
Shaw says a nationwide ban on “killology” is needed as well as prohibiting violent restraint use in law and mental health practice. He sees the mindset behind this type of training being steeped in eugenics, the psychological theory developed by British psychologist Francis Galton in 1883, that certain races and the poor were less human than others and should be denied equal rights.
“Based on eugenics, a mindset was indoctrinated into the community that minorities were ‘inferior’ and prone to violence,” Shaw points out. “Eugenics, when practiced in law, education and health care taught that Africans, for example, could hardly rise above barbarism and should be met with the same response.” The Minnesota law outlawing warrior-based training recognized that it encourages officers to act aggressively in a way that “deemphasizes the value of human life or constitutional rights.”[5]
As a former deputy Sherriff, Shaw says it’s a disservice to train police in this method: “Most of the cops I’ve met are good, decent people. They would run into a burning building or risk their lives to save a person of any color or race. I’ve worked alongside the good and the bad. But this training has the potential to reinforce racial profiling that has been occurring since slavery and we don’t need anything that insidiously reinforces this on our streets today.”
Shaw said the Task Force will direct Members of Congress and the Justice Department to Atkinson’s documentary, the Minnesota law and other research on “killology.”
He warned against a 2018 American Psychiatric Association (APA) Position Statement on Police Brutality and Black Males encouraging “collaboration between law enforcement and mental health professionals to develop programs that train law enforcement administrators and officers on racial bias and racial trauma and their impact on the mental health of the communities they serve.”[6] “It sounds benevolent,” Shaw says, “but the full extent of the role of psychological-psychiatric racial profiling since the sixties should first be isolated so that none of these transition into the current agenda to move more mental health into law enforcement training.”
In January, the APA publicly apologized for psychiatry’s “role in perpetrating structural racism” that “hurt Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” APA said it did not support major civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
But it went a great deal further, Shaw said. Psychiatrists used the movement to stereotype Blacks as aggressive, with claims that Blacks, when protesting, developed “dangerous aggressive feelings.”[7] Consequently, more African Americans than Whites were diagnosed with schizophrenia, fast tracking them onto antipsychotics, or profiled as criminal to be jailed.
Since 1969, CCHR has been responsible for more than 190 laws that protect against psychiatric abuse. It was responsible for a World Health Organization investigation of South African psychiatric slave labor camps in 1977, helped in the dismantlement of a racist government “violence initiative” targeting minorities in the 1990s and produced the Task Force on racism as a resource for the community.
[1] Jason Breslow, “Where Efforts to Overhaul Policing Stand in Congress After Chauvin Verdict,” NPR, 21 Apr. 2021, https://www.npr.org/sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/04/21/989500468/where-efforts-to-overhaul-policing-stand-in-congress-after-chauvin-verdict
[2] Stephen Montemayor, “Pressure mounts at Legislature to pass new police bills after Daunte Wright's death: Governor, legislative leaders face calls to act on additional law enforcement reforms,” The Star Tribune, 17 Apr. 2021, https://www.startribune.com/pressure-mounts-on-minnesota-lawmakers-to-pass-new-policing-bills-after-daunte-wright-s-death/600047268/; Briana Bierschbach, “Minnesota lawmakers pass sweeping package of police accountability measures,” The Star Tribune, 21 Jul. 2020, https://www.startribune.com/state-lawmakers-strike-deal-on-police-reform-proposals/571833891/
[3] “One of America's most popular police trainers is teaching officers how to kill,” Insider, 2 June 2020, https://www.insider.com/bulletproof-dave-grossman-police-trainer-teaching-officers-how-to-kill-2020-6; https://www.tribecafilm.com/festival/archive/award-screening-best-documentary-2016
[4] “U.S. Dept. of Justice to investigate Minneapolis police,” MSN, Reuters, 22 Apr. 2021, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/soccer/us-dept-of-justice-to-investigate-minneapolis-police/vi-BB1fTyg7
[5] Bill Chappell, “Minnesota Lawmakers Ban Police Chokeholds, 'Warrior-Style Training,'” PBS,NPR, GPB, 21 July 2020, https://www.gpb.org/news/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/21/minnesota-lawmakers-ban-police-chokeholds; Justine Coleman, “Minnesota legislature passes ban on chokeholds in wake of George Floyd death,” The Hill, 21 July 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/508269-minnesota-legislature-passes-ban-on-chokeholds-in-wake-of-george-floyd; “Governor Walz Signs Minnesota Police Accountability Act,” Office of Governor Tim Waltz & Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, 23 July 2020, https://mn.gov/governor/news/?id=1055-441356
[7] https://www.cchrint.org/2021/01/26/american-psychiatric-associations-apology-for-harming-african-americans-rejected/ citing: Megan Brooks, “APA Apologizes for Past Support of Racism in Psychiatry,” Medscape, 19 Jan 2019, https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/944352?src=wnl_edit_tpal&uac=345404PY&impID=3143084&faf=1; Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, How Schizophrenia became a Black Disease, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2009), p. xiv
Amber Rauscher
Citizens Commission on Human Rights
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