04/21/2021
An open letter about police training from Prof. Elizabeth Wheeler:
As a University of Oregon English professor and director of the UO Disability Studies Minor, I have devoted my 25-year career to advancing diversity and to active, not passive, teaching. And I’ve seen how often diversity and equity are regarded as nice extras rather than integral to one’s professional knowledge.
As we work to reform the police, new trainings cannot be the boring, perfunctory “diversity trainings” familiar to so many of us at our workplaces: lectures we can tune out while drinking coffee. Police officers and academy students should learn how to react in the moment to vulnerable populations—Black and brown people, homeless people, mentally ill people, trans people—through unexpected, repeated, challenging roleplay scenarios.
Current and future officers should act in different scenarios until the right response comes the first time and every time: until the right response to crisis becomes second nature. Trainers must have the authority to hold trainees accountable for this branch of professional knowledge. And diversity must be woven into the whole curriculum, whatever the topic of training, because it is integral: not a nice extra.
The police killing of Stacy Kenny on March 31, 2019 in Springfield, Oregon illustrates the flawed, inadequate nature of current Crisis Intervention Training. Stacy Kenny was a white trans woman with schizophrenia stopped for behaving “weird” while driving. Of the four Springfield officers involved, none tried to talk to Kenny. They broke her car windows, Tasered her twice, punched her 7-13 times in the face, hit her with a knife handle, pulled her sweatshirt off her body, and tried to pull her out of the car by her hair. Finally, Sergeant R.A. Lewis shot Kenny several times in the torso, then twice in the head.
What does this story have to do with Crisis Intervention Training? Sergeant Lewis, the officer who shot and killed Stacy Kenny, was the Crisis Intervention Trainer for the Springfield Police Department. The other three officers had completed their 40 hours of CIT training. Clearly, de-escalation and awareness of implicit bias were not the first thoughts on the officers’ minds. Not second nature, not integral to their professional knowledge. Into that void stepped violence.
Writing on April 20, 2021, I greet with relief the conviction of former officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis for the killing of George Floyd. As we work together to consign these events to history, all police reform initiatives must build in active, sustained anti-bias and de-escalation education that holds police officers and academy students accountable for their learning: until it becomes second nature and integral to their professional sense of self.
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