Kentucky Police Training Quoted Hitler and Urged 'Ruthless' Violence

[SummerMadness]

Kentucky Police Training Quoted Hitler and Urged 'Ruthless' Violence

A slide show once shown to cadets training to join the Kentucky State Police includes quotations attributed to Adolf Hitler and Robert E. Lee, says troopers should be warriors who "always fight to the death" and encourages each trooper in training to be a "ruthless killer."

The slide show, which came to light on Friday in a report from a high school newspaper, brought harsh condemnation from politicians, Jewish groups and Kentucky residents, but not from the Kentucky State Police department itself, which said only that the training materials were old.

Morgan Hall, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, which oversees the State Police, said that the slide show was "removed" in 2013 and was no longer in use but declined to answer a list of questions, including queries about how long the material was used and how many cadets had seen the training.

 

[Paulos23]

I wish I could say I am surprised.

 

[Ophiolite]

Of course, using Hitler quotes to inspire your troops can backfire and before you know it, there you are, invading Russia in winter.

Note: please don't interpret the above as indifference. Rather, like @Paulos23 , almost nothing surprises me any more and the best response seems to be sardonic humour.

 

[dzheremi]

Good that they discontinued their use of those slides, but come on...it's not like 2013 was forever ago, so there are definitely still cops on the force who were taught from them, and hence have in their minds a very specific and terrible idea of what it means to be a police officer. I don't think "we don't use them anymore" is going to cut it.

 

[SummerMadness]

The fact that a quote even made it that far tells you something is wrong with the culture in that department that someone would be that comfortable to share such a view.

 

[Trogdor the Burninator]

Apparently Kentucky Police have some wicked new cop cars on order...

 

[Paulos23]

Beau of the Fifth Column breaks it down. This training is for soldiers, not police.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Apparently Kentucky Police have some wicked new cop cars on order...

Oh wow....do you do memes for a living? Cuz you nailed this one buddy....

I was all like, no way! They got tanks? Then I realized....that's a nazi! It suddenly clicked....cops are nazis, Hitler quote.

Well done sir....if I had a hat it would be off.

 

[Ana the Ist]

The whole thing reminds me of how about how Zach De La Rocha of RATM fame named his second band "One Day As A Lion".

He saw the whole "I'd rather live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb" quote....liked it, and used it as a band name. He found out later that it's a quote from Mussolini...and I guess that didn't work well for him since the main themes of his previous 4 records were about the evils of America and how it's an imperialistic fascist capitalist state.

There's a lesson here somewhere....

People make mistakes and maybe we shouldn't assume the worst? Nah...

Sometimes people with extreme views don't really know what they're talking about? That's not it...

Quotes are fun...?

 

[rambot]

The whole thing reminds me of how about how Zach De La Rocha of RATM fame named his second band "One Day As A Lion".

He saw the whole "I'd rather live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a lamb" quote....liked it, and used it as a band name. He found out later that it's a quote from Mussolini...and I guess that didn't work well for him since the main themes of his previous 4 records were about the evils of America and how it's an imperialistic fascist capitalist state.

There's a lesson here somewhere....

People make mistakes and maybe we shouldn't assume the worst? Nah...

Sometimes people with extreme views don't really know what they're talking about? That's not it...

Quotes are fun...?

Some other possible lessons:
cops are being trained and encouraged to use excessive force and that's a problem.

The PATRIOT Act show did an episode on police training a couple years ago. IT is, essentially, no better.

 

[rambot]

Oh wow....do you do memes for a living? Cuz you nailed this one buddy....

I was all like, no way! They got tanks? Then I realized....that's a nazi! It suddenly clicked....cops are nazis, Hitler quote.

Well done sir....if I had a hat it would be off.

Really? You got that?

 

[Ana the Ist]

Some other possible lessons:
cops are being trained and encouraged to use excessive force and that's a problem.

It's possible...haven't seen any evidence of it but it's possible.

We still like evidence, right?

The PATRIOT Act show did an episode on police training a couple years ago. IT is, essentially, no better.

If your goal is to ultimately get police to value their lives less....I think you'll always fail.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Really? You got that?

Yeah it was both timely and insightful.

Gotta hit these trends at their peak....everyone you hate is a nazi. It's super trendy.

 

[7thKeeper]

Some other possible lessons:
cops are being trained and encouraged to use excessive force and that's a problem.

The PATRIOT Act show did an episode on police training a couple years ago. IT is, essentially, no better.

Yeah, in this case, it doesn't even matter what the source of the quote is, the quote itself is a problem. There's a reason why the symbol of the police is a shield and not a sword.

 

[Ophiolite]

Gotta hit these trends at their peak....everyone you hate is a nazi. It's super trendy.

No. Some are just pretentious [alliterative follow on]. And it's not so much haste as amused distaste.

 

[rambot]

It's possible...haven't seen any evidence of it but it's possible.

We still like evidence, right?

Alrighty then. I can see discussing the topic with someone as on top of the issue as this will not be super fruitful.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Alrighty then. I can see discussing the topic with someone as on top of the issue as this will not be super fruitful.

Well it's getting harder and harder to have honest conversations with people rambot. I'm sorry to ask about evidence so soon but...the people who used to claim to believe in evidence really don't anymore.

They believe anecdotes. The science on anecdotes is pretty clear and has been for a long time....they're useless for describing groups of people. That's because of a mess of problems regarding the way humans are wired to think. One of those is our own tendency to overemphasize negative experiences....which has a wealth of research by actual scientists (not sociologists) and is proven true across cultures for basically all humanity.

Let's throw out another possibility....let's imagine that we currently have the best police in US history. They're the most diverse, careful, considerate, and least racist or sexist or homophobic police force ever. We have to compare them to another country with far fewer people and vastly less violent crime to make them look bad.

Both possibilities are possible....I suspect only one has any statistical backing...but I could be wrong. It's probably fair to ask why so many people are angry at cops then...and that's a much different question with quite possibly vastly different answers.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Alrighty then. I can see discussing the topic with someone as on top of the issue as this will not be super fruitful.

Here's another possibility....

In the 80s gang violence became a problem in black communities across America. Every night on the news people saw images of violent black men doing awful things. Over time, it began to affect people's perceptions of all black people....and while it would be easy to blame this on racism....in reality it was true in every community including black communities. People vastly imagined the problem was larger than it was. It was realized that the media and this nightly exposure was having a serious impact on unfair and untrue perceptions of an entire race. The media more or less already understood the part they played and more or less tried to temper the stories so that it appeared to be a few bad actors within a larger community of regular people.

That's the end of the story and the media acted responsibly from then on...

Just kidding. Right wing media and Fox News took advantage of the exact same technique and effect after 911 to rile up their base about the problem of Muslim terrorists and their danger. It's not that there wasn't a problem...there was...but it was having an outsized effect on the right and as a reaction, the rest of the media tried to temper the effect on the left by reminding everyone that it wasn't a huge unstoppable problem of all Islam, but just a few bad actors. In some ways, we might even say they undersold the exact same issue to try and counter the effects of right wing media. This began a serious problem of media polarization in the US....and we gave it only passing attention. Two very different stories began to emerge from very different sources.

By 2010 traditional news sources were struggling from competitors online so much...that they've more or less given up the idea of objective reporting or impartiality altogether. Now they do the exact same thing Fox News did...on a 24/7 cycle, and instead of seeing it for exactly what it is...the side that thought themselves so smart is buying into the exact same problem. It took them awhile to find a political enemy you would ignite around....incels aren't frequently violent enough and are kind of pathetic. They really want to make it white supremacists.....so much so that they've broadened the term to something unrecognizable and applied it incorrectly more often than not.

But bad cops or just ones dumb enough to make a bad mistake caught on video? That's gonna get the left marching in the streets.

Is it a problem? Sure. Is it a big problem? Doesn't appear so. Is the reaction from the left appropriate? Absolutely not....it appears completely unreasonable. It appears that they ignore big problems and give a vast amount of attention to small ones....to the point where now, they may very well make the problem far worse in their desperate attempt to solve it.

Are you being cynically manipulated by a polarized and political media? It definitely looks that way.

 

[rambot]

Are you being cynically manipulated by a polarized and political media? It definitely looks that way.

No. I'm listening to the people who've had the bad/unjustifiable interactions with cops. There are many of them.
That is happenning to all races. Policing in America is not great. You can argue that blacks see MORE of that, but to suggest that policing in America is healthy and in a good balance with the restoration of their communities, well, I don't necessarily hear that refrain often.

Also, people get up in arms when teacher's unions protect crappy teachers; I get that. I don't like it either. I'd like to see more done to police officers who are crooked or terrible OR woh protect the crooked and terrible.

Sidebar: The idea that, as part of a training, that cops are encouraged to be "Ruthless" is indefensible.

If the police continue to use violence, even and especially when it is unwarranted or uneeded would you EXPECT a countries citizen's to sit back and take it or fight back?

 

[Ana the Ist]

No. I'm listening to the people who've had the bad/unjustifiable interactions with cops. There are many of them.
That is happenning to all races. Policing in America is not great. You can argue that blacks see MORE of that, but to suggest that policing in America is healthy and in a good balance with the restoration of their communities, well, I don't necessarily hear that refrain often.

Also, people get up in arms when teacher's unions protect crappy teachers; I get that. I don't like it either. I'd like to see more done to police officers who are crooked or terrible OR woh protect the crooked and terrible.

Sidebar: The idea that, as part of a training, that cops are encouraged to be "Ruthless" is indefensible.

If the police continue to use violence, even and especially when it is unwarranted or uneeded would you EXPECT a countries citizen's to sit back and take it or fight back?

I don't want you to think I haven't listened or considered the perspectives of individuals and their experiences. Those are very useful if I want to understand a person and the way they see things. At the same time, it would be completely wrong to generalize about an entire race of people based on those few experiences I have been exposed to. It could be 100 or a million stories....they are useless as evidence.

I've considered the commonly accepted explanation of these problems the left had come up with. I've looked at more factors than I can remember. Is it training? Police are definitely taught to respond to lethal force with lethal force. I don't see how to change that...I can't reasonably expect the police to just not fight back when someone is trying to kill them.

Are they racist? Are all police racist? I don't see any reason to believe that either...the left has dragged a few racists out of the police and that's good. I want them gone. That has changed anything though. I also think it's good that we appear to be seriously prosecuting cops who commit crimes. Those are the good results of what the left has done with police.

The problem is those aren't the only results. I've seen the left distort the meaning of words so they can be broadly applied in ways that don't really work. I get that the left thinks the police are systemically racist...but they can't tell me what that means. They definitely believe it...but is it policies? Laws? Individual cops? No one can really say....

So how do they know it's happening? Because they're told so. I get why people looked at Michael Brown and considered that it was racial. It's a white cop....unarmed black teen...it's definitely a reasonable question. Let's be honest though, it doesn't matter what race the cop is and at this point and now, it doesn't even matter if he did anything wrong. The most recent example I saw involved a black man with a knife he was swinging at a cop getting shot and killed. It had the exact same reaction as all the others.

So what's going on here? I don't really believe that even most black people expect a cop to just allow himself to be stabbed by an attacker. Why would that ever justify the rioting and looting that followed?

Are we still trying to confront a serious problem? Because no matter how many police you train, or how many times you tell them they might be unconsciously biased (which is a fun explanation) it doesn't seem to affect what the problem is.

Are we trying to stop cops from shooting unarmed black people? Or is it armed black people? Police brutality in general? If so...what is the expectation for a police force that routinely confronts violent crimes? Are we trying to confront racism and remove racist cops....or racist laws....or?

If you want me to think there's a problem with racism in police....you're going to have to explain how you identify the problem. I don't see any method at all....you just seem to blindly accept it.

That explanation actually makes the most sense because I can give you almost an endless number of examples of people on the left who claim that we should just believe people who say this problem is both real and very large. The reason given they say we should believe them....is because they're black.

That's not a reasonable proposition. It's completely ridiculous. Being a person of a particular race doesn't make you factually correct. It's never going to be a reason to believe anyone on anything. Everyone is wrong sometimes....everyone has their own perspective.

That's created it's own problem...because if a large enough group of people on the left accept that a group of people are an authority on a subject because they declared them an authority....that's dogmatic thinking. The left has abandoned facts and evidence and accepted dogmatic thinking.

In 8 years...the left only ever engaged with one side of this problem....the black community. They never engaged with the police. It's fair at this point to ask why? Do they really want to solve a problem or do they just want to indulge the beliefs of some black people for political support?

If the left really wants to confront the problem they'll have to return to facts and evidence and reconsider their own explanations. I don't know they can do that....I think that at least politically, they're too scared of losing support by merely suggesting to a group of people that they might be wrong and the problem is simply far more complicated than the simplistic racial explanations that they never deviate from.

If the downside to this strategy was simply that you never solved the problem...I wouldn't be that worried. I'm not sure you can actually prove the problem is that large. The downside now appears much larger though. We're seeing widespread damage and destruction, rioting and death. We're seeing the public's confidence in police severely undermined and the police's confidence that they can do their jobs, even correctly, severely diminished. We're already seeing the results...all kinds of crime and violence are rising in the very communities the left is claiming it wants to help.

I wouldn't know what else to say. The left should drop the racial politics it's latched onto and return to facts and evidence. Stop trying to redefine words. Stop indulging people based on race and gender and everything else....these things don't matter when it comes to facts. Facts remain the same whatever your identity is.

That's a difficult road to take...but I don't see any other options if they're serious about solving problems. Until they either realize this....or are forced to acknowledge it....they'll probably continue to do damage.

Dogmatic thinking isn't new, racial politics is ugly and when it leaks into policy....it's damaging. Anyone can be wrong....about anything. I don't see the left abandoning it's dogma though....and why would they? They just found an enemy you'll unite against. They know they can reliably find 6-12 incidents of bad cops a year you'll get riled up about....why would they let go of that?

I suspect the solution to this problem will always appear just out of reach for the left.