No Amount of Training Can Prevent Police Brutality

Marvin Slaughter contributed to this piece.

The killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo by officers of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has led to renewed calls for improved police training. But no amount of training can fix the institution of policing; we need an entirely new system and organization to build on.

The CPD Education and Training Division already provides over 900 hours of basic training to all recruits. They claim to provide “progressive and comprehensive training to develop policing skills, enhance leadership abilities, and promote a solid ethical foundation to all CPD recruits” so they can maintain their stature among “the nation’s premier law enforcement organizations.”

What entitles the Chicago Police Department to this “premier” status? Is it killing Black people at a rate 22 times higher than white people? Killing Latinx people at a rate six times higher? Or maybe it’s CPD’s record for having the most extreme racial disparity in fatal police violence of any major city.

A close second place is the Minneapolis police department, which killed a compliant 20-year-old Daunte Wright earlier this month and George Floyd last summer.

CPD followed suit last month with the killing of Adam Toledo. The entire tragedy is captured in bodycam footage: the officer leaves his car to pursue Toledo at one minute and 45 seconds into the video. At 2:04, he tells Toledo to stop and put his hands up. And although Toledo immediately complies and drops his weapon, he is still shot.

While the tactical report states he was non-compliant, the video tells a different story. Toledo followed the officer’s directions but was given less than two seconds to comply before being shot and killed at the 2:05 mark.

The interaction lasts no more than 20 seconds before turning deadly.

Officers in Chicago currently receive more training than mandated by the state. The training provided for CPD recruits includes firearm training, control tactics, physical training, classroom training, and scenario-based training, all in an effort to help officers be “… part of, and empowered by, the community,” as sworn officers of the law.

But even after 900 hours of mandatory training, this officer still failed to responsibly apprehend a child. Police officers have received ever larger amounts of training for years, and the more hours they receive, the more “comfort” predominately white people have in trusting them with their safety and well-being.

How do we know the training actually makes us safer? Sadly, many departments that increase their mandated hours of training don’t produce data to back up the claims. They just appeal to a concept known as numerosity: the tendency to infer that more of something will result in better outcomes.

Maybe the problem is that these additional trainings do work, but only for certain suspects. Refer to the safe apprehension of Dylan Roof, Kyle Rittenhouse, or Robert Aaron Long. Each a mass shooter, each white, each put into handcuffs without incident.

Where was that training when police fired on Adam Toledo?

Any system built within the confines of racism is a product of that environment. If a racist system produces an organization, that organization will have racism bred into its roots. This is what the term “systemic racism” refers to: the way the system itself perpetuates racism. Meanwhile, “institutional racism” refers to the laws that embed racism into organizations, thereby building the structure of racism. If systemic racism is the house, institutional racism is the brick that it’s built from. And police enforcement is just one brick.

Policing is a part of systemic racism due to its historical roots in enforcing racist policies such as slave catching, redlining, repression of immigrants, and so many others. The history of policing is rooted in upholding laws that protect whiteness. The training officers receive to be part of this system transfers that institutional legacy; its purpose is to uphold the system and its original design. When policymakers design systems to correct this pervasive history by deploying police training, they are working to change the institution, not the system itself. No amount of training can fix the biases that are built into policing as an institution; the only solution is to completely rebuild it.

The men and women that make up our police force do not exist in non-racialized spaces; they inherit and internalize the racism bred into this nation like every other American. Training cannot cause them to completely unlearn that racism or teach them to serve without making race-based decisions. If that were possible, police training would be invaluable.

Unfortunately, it does not work this way. If it did, Adam Toledo would not be dead, and Derek Chauvin would not be on trial for the murder of George Floyd. But this problem is buried in the soul of our nation and continues to bear “strange fruit.”

This “strange fruit” is actualized in examples like Dylan Roof, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Brock Turner. Roof, who killed nine church parishioners and injured another, was later entitled to the “humane treatment” of receiving food from Burger King despite being armed and dangerous.

Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people and wounded another, was armed with an AR-style semi-automatic rifle and held both hands in the air, in a similar manner as Toledo, but was allowed to leave with his life.

These examples illustrate the stark difference in the application of being “armed and dangerous” for white suspects versus Black or Hispanic suspects.

Brock Turner, who raped and assaulted an unconscious female student, was given six months in county jail and three years of probation for “20 minutes of action.” During the sentencing of this convicted rapist, Judge Aaron Persky consciously thought about the ramifications of the sentence on Brock Turner’s future: “I think you have to take the whole picture in terms of what impact imprisonment has on a specific individual’s life… [The] character letters that have been submitted, do show a huge collateral consequence for Mr. Turner based on the conviction.”

This illustrates the difference in how society views and treats instances of white crime versus Black or Hispanic crime. White crime is treated as a “bad instance” or a “learning experience,” while BIPOC crime is a “death sentence” or an opportunity to “make an example” out of the wrongdoer. Recognizing this societal bias and actively changing the preconceived notions of “white” as synonymous with “good” or “redeemable” and “BIPOC” as synonymous with “bad” or “irredeemable” will go a long way to addressing unjust police interactions.

Still, these societal changes are not possible through police training. No amount of training can prevent a system built to enforce racism from conducting its original mission. It is time we consider our other options, so no child ever goes through the pain and fear that Adam Toledo faced.