Local police discuss diversity, tactics
Conversations coming amid national outcry for widespread reform
As the deaths of Black people while in police custody has sparked national outrage, local police department officials say officer training has been revamped in recent years.
In May, George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis when an officer held his knee in Floyd’s neck while Floyd lay on the ground. In June, Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by Atlanta police during a DUI call in which Brooks obtained and discharged the officer’s taser while running away.
Local police officials in Hammond and East Chicago said training at their departments have been upgraded in recent years and their officers have received hands-on diversity and defensive tactic training. But, given the recent police shooting of Black people across the country, those police officials said they are reckoning with how to further improve their departments.
On June 11, the Gary Mayor Jerome Prince signed an executive order establishing a commission on the review of police use-of-force “to develop recommended strategies” to the mayor within 60 days.
In 2019, police-involved shootings and excessive force have resulted in 1,003 deaths nationwide and 17 deaths in Indiana, according to the order. Nationwide, Black people are shot “at a disproportionate rate … at more than twice the rate of white Americans,” according to the order.
“In light of these systemic problems most recently highlighted by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, there remains an urgent need to address issues of police violence and systemic racism in order to transform our justice system in our country,” according to the order.
In East Chicago, the police department “completely restructured” training within the last year
because the entire administration, from the chief to the two commanders, have been promoted to their new positions from within the department, said East Chicago Deputy Chief Jose Rivera.
Previously, officers picked which training they wanted to take to reach the state mandated 24 hours of annual training — which focuses on areas from firearms training to blood-born pathogens — and reported it to the department, Rivera said.
“(The police officer) could pick what he wanted, so he could skip ethics. He could skip diversity training. He could just take what he wanted. We saw a problem with that,” Rivera said. “We want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
Now, all East Chicago police officers work on Wednesdays and a portion of their day is spent in training, either an in-person training session or an online training course, Rivera said. The department’s goal is to have officers receive more than the state mandated annual 24 hours of training, and for officers to be trained in the same topics, Rivera said.
The subject of the training session is largely decided by what is happening “around the country” to offer training that is relevant to the conversation around policing, Rivera said.
With the current discussion around use of force and diversity training, the department has started offering training in those areas, Rivera said. In May, the department held two defensive tactics and use of force training sessions, and in February diversity and ethics training and taser training, Rivera said.
During the recent defensive tactics training sessions, new officers were pepper sprayed, Rivera said. Officers are also encouraged to be struck by a stun gun so they see the effects, he said.
“We want you to have confidence in your non-lethal weapons, that you don’t have to go straight to a gun. Your non-lethal weapons that we supply you with are effective,” Rivera said.
Another element of defensive tactics training is protecting the officer’s duty belt — which holds pepper spray, a taser, a baton, a gun and, for some officers, a second gun — if someone who is being arrested resists arrest or begins fighting the officer, Rivera said.
“When we’re involved in a fight … it’s more than just fighting, you’re actually more protecting yourself from having the weapons taken away from you and then used against you,” Rivera said.
What the community may not know, Rivera said, is that police officers are trained to go “one step above” the force being used against the officer. So, if someone “comes at us with their fists,” officers are trained to use a taser or baton, because if the officer used fists to fight back the arrestee could win the fight and then take the officer’s weapons, he said.
“We can go one force above. So, even with the incident right now with the uproar in Atlanta where the gentlemen had the taser, the officer going to his weapon is actually common practice because he’s going one step above the force that’s being used against him,” Rivera said.
Police officers are also trained that their use of force stops when the arrestee stops fighting back or resisting, Rivera said.
Rivera said the policy of “one step above” is under scrutiny right now, but that the policy is not likely going to change given the weapons the officers carry. But, Rivera said police departments will start focusing on deescalation tactics, like talking to a suspect, before guns are used.
There are calls, like mental health, that police officers shouldn’t be responding to because it goes beyond their training, Rivera said. With the discussion around police reform sweeping the nation, Rivera said he’d support resources for counselors or other professionals to respond to those calls.
“There should be mental illness hotlines, there should be hotlines for people dealing with troubled kids, because we go to these calls everyday and nobody leaves happy,” Rivera said. “No matter how many classes I give these officers in my department on how to deal with the mentally ill … we’re never going to be the expert because that’s not our full-time job.”
Hammond Police Department Lieutenant Steve Kellogg said the department has done a “layered approach” to diversity training. About 5 years ago, the department started a procedural justice training program, which focuses on “understanding different points of view and where different cultural groups are coming from” so that officers can approach citizens with “empathy and understanding,” Kellogg said.
“The core of that is fair and equal treatment for everyone, regardless of position, of race, of sex, of sexual orientation,” Kellogg said. “We’ve covered some basis of that every year.”
Within this scope, Hammond police officers are trained in verbal deescalation without “going hands on with use of force,” Kellogg said. But, that training comes with a caveat, he said.
“If possible, and of course (verbal deescalation) is not always possible. But, we do work on tactics and techniques to deescalate situations to try to avoid force whenever it is practical and possible,” Kellogg said.
Hammond police officers are in the midst of a “cultural integration role play” training, which also includes residents and crisis counselors, Kellogg said. In the four-hour training, Kellogg said officers are split into two groups into “made up cultures” with rules and ideals they follow.
“The program is designed to specifically make them act outside their comfort zone and feel seclusion and, not as much racism, but to feel left out and excluded from a group and what that feels like,” Kellogg said.
The majority of officers understand the importance of diversity training, with just a handful of officers stating that they already follow the training while in the community, Kellogg said.
“It’s almost like ‘You’re preaching to the choir here,’ but that doesn’t matter in the training program because we do see what’s going on, and police departments who have problems probably have had officers say a similar thing … and yet they still have officers that act inappropriately and against policy,” Kellogg said.