Richard Whitehead (photo, left) trains police officers for a living. According to Reuters, he’s trained “at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 85 sessions in 12 states over the past four years” (read story here).
Washington was one of those states, but the Washington Criminal Justice Training Commission no longer uses Whitehead’s services.
That’s because he posted on social media that government officials disloyal to Trump should be executed, “urged law enforcement officers to disobey COVID-19 public-health orders,” and talked about “civil war.” He also uses racist, sexist, and homophobic instructional materials. And he’s apparently a member of Oath Keepers, a violent far-right militia group.
Whitehead isn’t a lone wolf. Reuters identified at least five civilian trainers working for police training firms “whose political commentary on social media has echoed extremist opinions or who have public ties to far-right figures.” All five have endorsed Trump’s election lies. They’ve called President Biden a pedophile, echoing QAnon conspiracy theories, and have ties to violent far-right groups like the Proud Boys. They’ve posted comments about overthrowing the government.
Several of those trainers, including Whitehead, endorse the “constitutional sheriff” movement, which believes county sheriffs can, and should, ignore any law they — not the courts — decide is unconstitutional.
Why are these people training police officers?
The answer, Reuters says, is because they “work in an unregulated industry,” and have been overlooked in the “heightened scrutiny of U.S. policing in recent years in the wake of high-profile police killings.” In other words, they’ve flown under the radar of police reformers. But the ultimate problem is that law enforcement agencies hire them.
How does their presence impact police training and behavior?
The instruction they provide, Reuters says, often exaggerates “the threats that officers face, making them more likely to respond with excessive force in stressful situations.” This rings true; of the many stores I’ve posted on this blog about police abuses, a common thread in many of them is itchy-fingered, trigger-happy cops. And for what it’s worth, police work has become less, not more, dangerous; FBI data show police deaths per 100,000 officers have fallen by 75% since 1970.
But there’s more. The trainer’s extreme political ideology can bleed into the thoughts and behavior of trainees, because instructors are seen as “having authority and credibility.” Ultimately, “Bad training instills bad behavior.”
America has a policing crisis. As I posted in August 2020 (here), the FBI has found that hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, other white supremacist groups, and far-right militias are encouraging their members to infiltrate law enforcement by becoming officers, and police agencies are doing little to identify them and weed them out. On a broader level there’s a crying need to improve the recruiting, training, and supervision of police officers, and to wrest control of police discipline away from police unions.
One place to start is by not giving work to politically radicalized contract trainers.