Sgt. Joe Unser stood in front of 46 police recruits here recently to train them on what he said was one of the most difficult actions they might one day have to take: stopping fellow officers from doing something wrong.
“I’ll run toward gunfire any day,” he told them. Confronting colleagues and superior officers is much harder, the 26-year veteran said, in a culture where supporting fellow men and women in blue is a prized value.
Since former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd last May in front of three colleagues, more police departments have begun training police officers to intervene when their fellow officers use excessive force or engage in other misconduct.
Many are using a training called Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement, or ABLE, that was designed by policing researchers at Georgetown University Law School based on studies of group violence by Ervin Staub, a Holocaust survivor and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In the four years after the training was first tried in New Orleans in 2016, only a handful of departments signed up.
“Fewer than a dozen expressed interest and one or two took the curriculum,” said Lisa Kurtz, ABLE project director at Georgetown. “In June of last year, I personally received emails from more than 100 agencies across the country.”
The number of departments that have signed up since Mr. Floyd’s murder now totals 138, including in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston.
“This incident that occurred 1,000 miles away has dramatically impacted law enforcement across the country, and it has eroded trust,” said Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen. “The training and the cultural shift is part of the solution to help rebuild that trust.”
When Denver police Lt. Steve Addison was selected to evaluate whether the department should adopt ABLE’s training, he worried how police officers might interpret the fact that the training was informed by Dr. Staub’s research into the Nazis.
“I was really afraid that when officers found out that they would think that they’re being compared to Nazis,” he said.
But Lt. Addison said he liked how the training encourages officers to intervene well before a potential incident if a fellow officer is angry or depressed, all the way up to stopping someone from doing something that could cost them their job. He said hopes it will prevent another murder like that of Mr. Floyd.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/post-d...ness-misconduct-11624874400?mod=hp_lead_pos11
