Police Cadets Quit, Expose Dept. for Training Cops to View Public as “Cockroaches” They’re at War With

By Jack Burns

It takes at least four years of college for an enlisted person in the military to become a military “officer,” which is quite a contrast from the mere nine months it takes for a police officer to earn the title. But according to a group of 10 former Austin Police Department recruits who wanted to become peace officers, just like the military, the Austin PD is training  “warriors” instead of “guardians.”

The former recruits are now blowing the whistle and claiming that the type of mentality they encountered is not what they signed up for and is not representative of the greater Austin community. KVUE writes:

Summer Spisak, a 38-year-old former tech employee who participated in nine weeks of the eight-month academy last year, said instructors told her and other cadets they would “punch them in the face” if they said they wanted to be police officers to help people.

Spisak and others are now sounding the alarm for the public, saying police are being trained to view community members as the enemy and not as their fellow citizens. “It’s so different from what is portrayed…It’s so different from my expectation of the Austin Police Department,” Spisak concluded.

KVUE continued by describing another former recruit’s observations of the police training currently being implemented at the Austin PD:

Jonathan Murray, who now works in sales for Dell, said instructors repeatedly degraded the homeless and prostitutes, referring to them as “cockroaches” and suggesting they “find a transient” if they were bored and wanted a felony arrest.

Viewing sex workers as insects and the homeless as potential targets for prosecution differs vastly from the generalized public perception of officers as those who are sworn to “protect and serve” members of the community. According to the former recruits, officers of the peace should have a “guardian” mentality as opposed to the “warrior” mindset the recruits and graduates are being taught to possess.

Both Spisak and Murray joined eight others who voiced their concerns in a letter to two different news agencies. Their objections were met, predictably, with denial by Austin’s Chief of Police, Brian Manley, who claims his cadets are trained to be both guardians and warriors.

We train our officers at the Austin Police Department to be guardians, but to have the ability in the moment to become a warrior when it is necessary…Law enforcement is a profession where you have situations where you have to go in and use force to protect yourself or the community, but the vast majority of the work we do requires that guardian mindset—that guardian training.

Part of the motivation, it seems, to train police to be warriors comes from the false perception that there is a war raging against law enforcement. There are absolutely zero statistics to support the claim that there is a “War on Cops” at work on the streets of America.While there are less than 75 officers who are killed by bad guys with guns each year, more officer deaths are attributed to suicides than homicide and vehicle accidents—combined. Therefore, there is hardly any justification to train police to become warriors, critics would likely contend. Instead, responsible academy training should understandably focus more on preventing suicides and depression than learning the public is the enemy to be referred to as cockroaches.

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