Thread by @keikoinboston

1. Always amazing to watch the media run with misleading narratives about people shot by police.

Because everything has to be oversimplified, one person must be “good” and one must be “evil”.

2. The police are always “evil”, therefore the person killed in an officer-involved shooting is always “good”, even if they were violent, committing or accused of committing a crime, or resisting arrest.

3. This results in people overfocusing on the constructed narrative instead of the facts, leading to them making false judgements about people who better understand when, why, and how police are permitted to employ lethal force.

4. On the flip side you get other people overfocusing on the criminal aspect and dehumanizing the deceased.

It shouldn’t be mutually exclusive to understand that a person may have been doing something wrong but that it’s an utter tragedy that their life was ended.

5. People are complicated. They can be both good and bad. But having their life ended by law enforcement shouldn’t make them a saint if they weren’t one. In other circumstances we call this gaslighting.

6. Police in the US are empowered to make decisions about whose life matters more and the outcome is never good for everyone affected by someone's death.

7. US law enforcement uses lethal force against civilians at a significantly higher rate than law enforcement in other developed nations.

statista.com/statistics/112…

8. Some people say that this is because we have more guns per capita than any other developed nation, but law enforcement use of lethal force happens in cases where civilians don’t have firearms.

vox.com/2018/6/21/1748…

9. So how do law enforcement in other countries manage to kill so few of their citizens? There is no one answer, but training is a significant piece of it.

10.

“Basic U.S. training programs take twenty-one weeks on average, whereas similar European programs can last more than three years “

cfr.org/backgrounder/h…

11.

“The first year of police education in Norway is focused on the role of police in society and ethics. In the second year, students shadow training officers, before returning full time for a third year focused on investigations and completing a thesis paper.”

(source below)

12. Source for above quote.

cbsnews.com/news/police-tr…

13. To join the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, training time differs depending on level of education a recruit has completed.

University grads get 6 months of training and high school and junior college grads get 10 months of training.

web.archive.org/web/2016030500…

14. Martial arts training is standard for law enforcement in Japan. It is also ongoing.

Japanese law enforcement train in taiho-jutsu (逮捕術), literal translation — “arrest (逮捕) technique (術).”

tofugu.com/japan/martial-…

15.

“Not all police officers learn exactly the same thing; some parts of the country emphasize particular styles, whether it’s judo, kendo, or aikido.”

16.

“Of course, techniques are important, but to have the mind of kendo is more important. [Kendo] lessons taught in practice halls help build character and help [police officers] become more empathetic.”

17. Quote above from Mitsuru Hamasaki, 8th degree kendo master, former police officer & kendo trainer.

18.

"The first instinct is not to reach for a gun - what most Japanese police will do is to get huge futons [sic] and essentially roll up the person who is being violent or drunk into a little burrito and carry them back to the station and calm them down. …

19.

… The response to violence is never violence - it is to de-escalate," says journalist Anthony Berteaux.”

bbc.com/news/av/world-…

20. Berteaux has the basic concept right, but Japanese police don’t wrap violent civilians in futons. They use something called a hogo shīto (保護シート), literal translation — protection (保護) sheet (シート).

Jump to 1:32 for officer unfolding sheet.

21. There’s a device called The Wrap that’s been around for over two decades in the US that seems similar to a protection sheet but far more complicated.

saferestraints.com/?page_id=107&f…

22. I can’t find any info on how many police departments use The Wrap and what their policies are for when it’s used.

23. Here’s some body cam footage of it being used after a sexual assault suspect was detained and was kicking the door of the police vehicle. Note the differences between the video in Japan.

24. The Marietta Police Department in Georgia made Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (developed from Japanese martial arts training in Brazil) mandatory in 2019 after success with requiring new recruits to study BJJ.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian…

mariettaga.gov/CivicAlerts.as…

25. MPD officers must attend a minimum of 1 BJJ training session/week and can attend up to 3 paid for by MPD. Officers are paid for time spent at these trainings.

26. BJJ training has resulted in fewer injuries for both officers and civilians and reduced taser usage.

mariettaga.gov/CivicAlerts.as…

11alive.com/article/news/c…

27. All MPD officers also went through Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) to learn "verbal skills to deescalate the person in crisis, therefore minimizing the amount of force required”.

mariettaga.gov/CivicAlerts.as…

citinternational.org/Learn-About-CIT

28. CIT programs have made a big difference in helping law enforcement deal with civilians with mental illness.

nami.org/Advocacy/Crisi…

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

29. Source for MPD BJJ program from @SamHarrisOrg’s recent conversation with @RenerGracie, whose family developed Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rener_Gra…
samharris.org/podcasts/246-p…

30. Framing law enforcement lethal use of force as a racial problem has been a mistake from the beginning as more whites are killed by US police every year.

The racial framing also doesn’t account for POC officers who kill both POC and white civilians.

31. John McWhorter explores the disparities of media coverage and public reaction to officer-involved shootings depending on the race of the civilian who is shot in his most recent Substack post.

https://twitter.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/1383251590996381703

32. I really encourage people engaging in social media feuds to stop engaging with conflict entrepreneurs and learn more about the realities about police lethal use of force and what experts think it will take to reform policing and civilian violence in the US.

33. A good place to start is Peter Moskos’s Violence Reduction Project, “a collection of essays on how to reduce violence: solution, not rhetoric; policy, not theory”. These are short-term solutions.

https://twitter.com/PeterMoskos/status/1342878038229458952

34. The Solutions Journalism Network (@soljourno) doesn’t have a specific police reform tag but you can look through their “police agencies” tag for reporting on police reform solutions that US communities are trying.

solutionsjournalism.org/search?q%5Biss…

35. Many communities in the US are currently stuck in high conflict fueled by conflict entrepreneurs around issues of policing. Nothing will be resolved until these communities move out of high conflict into good conflict.

https://twitter.com/keikoinboston/status/1381417549133414401

36. Step 1 is to step away from the conflict entrepreneurs who are inflaming conflict and demonizing police, protesters, & the deceased.

Above quote tweet is from a thread on @amandaripley's book "High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out".

amazon.com/High-Conflict-…