Warning Signs

This is following up on a previous Cheat Sheet post on the Citizens' Police Academy program here. I wanted to do a separate post on the class that dealt with active shooters and how to respond to them. It's a scenario that many local schools and emergency services have been preparing for with passionate disagreements on how we keep our children safe. It's an issue that often revolves around extremists and their violent actions. The human response to extremism varies from what some would consider naive to what others would consider extremism also. This 10 week program dealt with controversial subjects and differences of opinion on a whole array of issues. This particular class stood out to me as unique due to the extreme nature of the topic.

The instructor was Sgt. Jeff Vercler of the Champaign County Sheriff's Office for over two decades and 21 of those years spent on the METRO SWAT team. He's a tactics expert and has had various training roles with local law enforcement and the Police Training Institute. I think it's fair to sum up his main advice on active shooters as a more aggressive interpretation of ALICE training, which he has described to the News-Gazette in the Legally Speaking podcast (excerpt and links to the podcast here). The classroom advice mirrored the excerpts here:

"Counter. If given no choice, if someone breaches your door and is armed, attack the shooter with whatever and however you can. Just because he has a gun doesn't make him all powerful in a room full of people. Can you grab a weapon? Can you grab anything? I'm talking anything you can throw, project, a fire extinguisher, bug spray, a chair across the face.

"When you get swarmed by a bunch of people, there is little you can do. I can walk in a room and have a gun, I know it sounds strange, but I'm at a disadvantage. You cannot shoot people fast enough if they attack you.

"If you're going to go down, how do you want to go down? Go down fighting. If you just sit there in a fetal position and do nothing, you will become a victim unless the shooter chooses not to make you a victim that day.

"Don't be scared. Gather others."

Interview link here. People will surely debate the political issues leading to such a desperate situation. They would certainly debate the feasibility of having to rely on civilians and possibly children swarming a gunman in a combat situation. Survival can demand desperate measures in desperate situations. I found a lot of the ideas tossed around in the class from arming teachers to the potential complications varied along Thanksgiving Dinner disagreements: varying from solutions with gun control, more guns, mental health, resolving social and/or cultural dimensions. Given the subject, some folks may have been bothered by what the instructor and other classmates had to say. That's probably unavoidable.

What raised red flags for me weren't the political differences, but the "othering." It started off subtle, but early and oddly enough that it was my first note after the introduction referring to the students as "normal people." This was quickly reinforced with imagery and descriptions contrasting those risking life and limb with those walking away. Civilians who took action, even if they died, contrasted with the people described as sitting ducks at the mercy of the killers. Given the subject matter and frustrations within the law enforcement community, this could easily be viewed as highlighting heroes and their sacrifice. Any perceived resentment could have been unintentional.

After detailing various active shooter incidents, explanations of the huge capacity of people to do harm, and when we were told we need to embrace the reality and react with force, he promoted the warrior training that had recently been banned by a mayor in Minnesota. The rest of Sgt. Vercler's presentation drew heavily from this "Bulletproof Mind" warrior training. The training seminars are popular with law enforcement and taught by a military expert, Dave Grossman, in training military members to use lethal force, or "Killology," as he calls it. You can watch a full presentation of the seminar on YouTube here. Some previous media reporting, overview, and links to further coverage are available here at the Washington Post.

It divides people into a vast majority of "sheep" protected by a slim percentage of "sheepdogs" from another slim percentage of "wolves." The "sheep" are described as unarmed civilians unwilling to embrace reality and resigned to do nothing while the "wolves" murder them. They've forgotten about 9/11 and believe the media who endlessly denigrate the efforts of our military and law enforcement (the "sheepdogs"). As Grossman explains, law enforcement are the front line soldiers in the war. In the seminars he points to Islamic extremists and Mexican cartels as "wolves," but in the reading material he encourages people to read and which he helped author, he targets Islam specifically. 

In "Terror at Beslan" (detailed book review and link to the eBook here) the primary author and Grossman first start off warning against overreacting to the threat and not blaming all Muslims. Quickly the book goes to advocating everything from arming all civilians to having special forces troops guarding schools, whole chapters explaining the uniqueness of Islam to produce hatred and evil, and suggestions that genocide may be the only solution to the Muslim threat against the United States and Russia. 

To say that the literature that goes with this seminar is horrifying, brutal, and extremist is an understatement. It goes further in castigating civilians enjoying the decadence of American life fought for by armed heroes. The calls to violent action are overt and numerous, as are the definition of in-groups and out-groups. When I say that it is textbook extremism, I'm going to refer to excerpts from J.M. Berger's "Extremism."

Few movements are born extreme. Most emerge from mainstream identities that affirm the merits of an in-group — pride in a heritage or the values of a religion — without stipulating that the in-group must take hostile action against an out-group. Out-group definitions evolve over time, starting with categorization (exclusion from the in-group) and escalating as the in-group develops a more and more negative view of the out-group.

That negative view leads to Grossman promoting the idea that the in-group's survival depends on eliminating the out-group and recruiting the eligible in-group (the "sheep" as he calls them) to join the fight:

The preparation of our country is not merely the preparation of our law enforcement and military. It is the preparation of our nation; of every man, woman and child who claims the title of "American." It is the preparation of every citizen and school employee, but most importantly, of every parent across our great nation...

This is not the kind of war fought only by those valiant souls who everyday don a blue uniform bearing the Stars and Stripes on the shoulder, or who pick up an automatic rifle and shrug weary shoulders into an overloaded rucksack. It is a war that either will be fought by all Americans, or one that will consume our nation.

The crisis and solutions matched with "eligible in-group" recruitment into "extremist in-groups" against a dehumanized "out-group" that must be destroyed is the radicalization process in a nut shell. This is regardless of ideology or extremist group. It can be more complicated and involve less direct jumps from legitimate in-groups being targeted for radicalization with extremist literature and seminars... and sometimes it's textbook:

When extremist rhetoric seeps from the extremist material and into a classroom full of civic minded civilians taking a Citizens' Police Academy course, ending up sometimes verbatim on the slides and repeated statements, it can hit the ear oddly. The animated and repeated demands that "this should piss you off." The "adrenaline junky" explanation for wanting to be in the fight, wanting to be the guy who takes the kill shot, wanting the violence and the danger to come your way, etc. The Grossman seminars ask the "sheepdogs" to embrace the idea of being a killer. To stop the violent "wolves" with superior violence. 

In strictly military training, this may be disturbing to civilians, but more understandable. When the "Killology" guy running the seminar talks about about crisscrossing the nation for 14 years teaching local police officers to be the front line warriors in this war, it gets very odd. You end up with local law enforcement bragging about being an "evil fuckin' warrior," fantasizing about head shots and getting the "shots fired" calls. You end up hearing the absolute disgust and anger at officers who aren't prepared for a combat role in that war. You hear us versus them rhetoric dripping with resentment. You hear repeated calls to train, arm, and be dedicated warriors ready to hunt the enemy down by being "aggressive, decisive, and ruthless."

I don't know how much Sgt. Vercler has been radicalized by his exposure to this extremist material. His repeated references, often verbatim, from that material is concerning. His promotion of extremist seminars, even if widely popular among law enforcement, is doubly concerning. The fact that the material he was regurgitating appears to come from a seminar that offers the next step of radicalization literature and includes advocacy for exterminating Muslims is deeply disturbing. Being part of an eligible in-group targeted by extremists doesn't make one an extremist in and of itself, but there is clear evidence of further radicalization here.

Unfortunately police and military have been heavily targeted for recruitment by extremist groups and movements after periods of military conflict, and America has not been an exception after Vietnam and again with our long Global War on Terror. For further reading on the history of paramilitary movements in the United States after Vietnam, I'd recommend starting with "Bring the War Home." For a basic primer on extremism: "Extremism." 

Nobody likes to think that the people who are supposed to be protecting us could be persuaded by hateful extremists, but that's not how extremism works. It's people who believe they're doing the right thing to protect the people and nation they love. It's regular people, good and bad. None of us are perfect. One of the repeated lessons throughout the Citizens' Police Academy classes, including from Sgt. Vercler, was that police are people too. They aren't perfect either and sometimes they make mistakes.

I imagine some will dismiss all of this as anti-police nonsense in spite of the history and concerns of our own government on modern extremist recruitment in the ranks. Others will use it as an opportunity to paint police generally as racist or hateful. The extremist material referenced is readily available, so I hope that some people will take the opportunity to get more informed and act accordingly whether they agree with my impressions or think I've read too many books on modern extremist movements and am starting to see it everywhere. I'd like to think that our local law enforcement will actively screen for ties to extremist groups that advocate violence against the people they're charged with protecting. Building trust is fundamental to community policing. It's my sincere hope that these concerns can be dealt with in a way that builds trusts rather than adding to suspicions.