The past several years have featured multiple tragic headlines about people killed in police custody, but if you’re Tomi Lahren, every single one of those cases was because people weren’t complying with police and were resisting arrest — and that’s sadly not even the worst message your taxpayer dollars are paying for police officers to hear.

In an eye-opening investigative report for the Washington Post, Robert Klemko covered the controversial content and rhetoric present at police training conferences across the country that stands in sharp contrast with the public’s support for reforms and training in de-escalation techniques and avoiding excessive force.

There is “little guidance or oversight for what officers should be taught,” wrote Klemko, who researched the article by interviewing conference speakers and police training experts and attending (either in person or online) various police training conferences around the country.

He found multiple speakers who “tell officers that pushback against conventional policing is a media invention,” who “demonize civilian protesters and reformers,” and who tell police officers they “should maintain a ‘warrior mentality’ to weather the rigors of what they describe as the most dangerous job outside of military service.”

The reality, as Klemko noted, is that law enforcement is the 22nd most dangerous occupation in the U.S., “safer than roofing and collecting garbage.”

Lahren fits right into this aggressive mindset. Klemko reported on her speech at the Street Cop Training Conference in Atlantic City last October, describing her as the “most anticipated presenter” there.

“If I’m wrong, please point it out,” Lahren declared. “But all these major headline incidents that we’ve had in this country involving law enforcement in the last at least five years could have all been prevented if people would just comply with police, would follow orders and not resist arrest.”

Bless your heart, Ms. Lahren. Since you asked, yes, I will be more than happy to point out how you are wrong. So very, very wrong. 

The murder — and it was legally a murder, a jury said so — of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is unquestionably the most prominent “major headline incident” from the past few years of a police officer killing a suspect in their custody, with the international protests and front page stories the case generated.

Lahren may try to point to Floyd’s initial resistance as justification, and in a factual sense, it is reasonable to argue that George Floyd’s name would not have become a hashtag had he immediately complied with the police when they arrested him that fateful day in Minneapolis.

But that’s not how we morally or legally judge these situations. As Minneapolis Chief of Police Medaria Arradondo testified in Chauvin’s trial, while there may have been “an initial reasonableness in trying to get [Floyd] under control in the first few seconds,” his actions restraining Floyd  “absolutely” violated department policy and “should have stopped…once there was no longer any resistance and clearly when Mr. Floyd was no longer responsive and even motionless.”

Whatever justification Chauvin might have had to use force at the beginning of the encounter was not a permanent blanket excuse for everything that followed. And again, Floyd did not die because he resisted. The testimony of pulmonary specialist Dr. Martin Tobin and other experts made it clear that Floyd died from a continued low level of oxygen to his brain and heart, occurring after he was no longer physically resisting or even able to do so.

Let’s remember the broader point: do we want our police officers trained by people who tell them that if someone resists arrest at all, then any and all abusive acts of force and violence inflicted by the police afterward are completely justified? Of course not.

How exactly Floyd was “resisting arrest” when he was unconscious, when his heartbeat was getting slower and weaker with each passing moment? What else could he have done to “just comply with police” when an officer knelt on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, continuing long after a detectable pulse could be found? Those questions are ridiculous to even ask, and illustrate how Lahren’s comments are an absolutely wrong lesson to be teaching police officers.

Mediaite spoke to Jason Pye, the Director of Rule of Law Initiatives at the Due Process Institute, about paying a commentator like Lahren for police “training.”

Pye, whose father was a police officer, was scathing in his reaction to Lahren’s presence at that conference, saying “it’s beyond me” why she would even be invited.

“It’s frustrating because Tomi Lahren has a platform and people listen to her,” he continued, “and this is the narrative I’m hearing more and more from conservative commentators.”

“Come on, this is not a substitute for reasoned political thought or even basic human decency,” Pye urged, noting how easy it was to find an overwhelming number of cases of someone who was innocent and killed by the police, or a situation where there was a clear case of abuse of power, like Chauvin’s conviction for killing Floyd.

“Breonna Taylor was asleep,” Pye pointed out, clearly exasperated with Lahren’s claim that “all these major headline incidents” were preventable by their victims. He pointed out other older cases, like Katherine Johnson and Cory Maye, both of whom were innocent targets of no-knock raids, or Philando Castile, who was shot during a traffic stop while reaching for his driver’s license.

There’s also the matter of Lahren’s total lack of expertise on the issues of criminal justice and policing.

The 29-year-old political commentator has constructed a lucrative brand for herself with her brash and rapid-fire opinions on conservative media outlets including One American News Network, The Blaze, and multiple Fox Nation and Fox News programs.

She majored in broadcast journalism and political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. All of her work experience is in politics or media. She is not, and never has been, an attorney. She is not, and never has been, a police officer.

Lahren may have a lot of loud opinions about all sorts of things, but there are several million loudmouths on Twitter right now arguing about Joe Rogan and M&M’s and proper representation in Disney movies and all those tweets don’t make them experts.

“She has no experience” on these topics, Pye emphasized, calling her “clearly a grifter who is wanting to continue the divisions in this country, particularly on this specific issue.”

She simply does not have the experience, knowledge, or research to be qualified to train police officers. But she obviously wasn’t there for training. She was there to rally the crowd and give her hot take that everything is fine, fellas, keep doing what you’re doing.

Except everything most certainly is not fine. The hashtagged names of dead Americans are not fine.

As repulsive as Lahren’s rhetoric may be, she is far from the worst person scooping up taxpayer dollars to cheer on abusive and violent cops. As criminal justice opinion columnist Radley Balko pointed out, these conferences have also featured speakers that include police officers who were fired for misconduct and “killology” police trainer Dave Grossman.

Police departments are spending public funds to send cops to a “training” conference featuring Tomi Lahren, Dave “Cops have the best sex of their lives after they kill people” Grossman, some UFC guy, and some other cops fired for misconduct. https://t.co/sUOJ9uMNzn

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) January 26, 2022

Reached for comment by Mediaite, Balko replied that it seemed like Lahren was just there for “a keynote pep talk,” and while she was “offensive,” he found Grossman’s involvement “far more disturbing.”

“Grossman gives more tactical training,” Balko added. “He literally tells cops they should be killing more people. My tweet about him wasn’t an exaggeration — he tells cops in his seminars that after you kill someone, you’ll have the best sex of your life.”

Yes, that is a real thing that Grossman says in his training sessions.

“This is the guy who has trained more U.S. police officers than anyone else,” wrote Balko in an article about Grossman’s seminars. “The guy who, more than anyone else, has instructed cops on what mind-set they should bring to their jobs.”

And this is the guy who is raking in piles of taxpayer dollars, so he and Lahren can cheer on cops who kill.

This isn’t a problem that is easily solved at the national level (even though a lot of the funding for police training comes from the federal government, and we should lobby Congress to refuse to fund programs that promote dangerous and excessive uses of force) because the local criminal justice issues in your community are mostly handled by your local city and county police agencies — including deciding what training programs their officers should attend.

You have the right to know how your taxpayer dollars are being spent, and to object to it being spent to pay people like Lahren and Grossman to encourage the worst, not the best, of police behavior.

Good cops exist; they’re protecting our communities in a million daily ways that never make the headlines. Proven de-escalation tactics exist. Training programs that emphasize the safety of both the officers and the suspects being arrested exist. But trainers who claim cops have done nothing wrong when people are killed or worse, cheer them on, are not an acceptable option.

Demand better from the people who are taking your money to protect your community, and maybe Lahren can concentrate on doing what she does best: yelling about politics. And maybe no more names will become memorialized in hashtags.

The post Taxpayer Dollars Are Being Used to Hire Tomi Lahren To Tell Cops They’re Doing Nothing Wrong When They Kill People first appeared on Mediaite.

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