Alarms sound after 'horrifying' red-state police training exposed: 'More people will die'

Police Training That Teaches Denial, and Prosecutors Who Protect ItThe Real StoryThe reporting here is simple, and damning: Memphis Democratic District Attorney Steven Mulroy says a private company used by law enforcement agencies nationwide spent a week teaching officers a worldview that excuses lethal force, minimizes choke holds, and treats the prosecution of the officers who killed George Floyd and Eric Garner as a “witch hunt.” That is not a misunderstanding. It is an institutional message.Who Holds PowerThe power in this story does not sit with the activist sounding the alarm. It sits with the training apparatus, the law enforcement agencies that hire it, and the district attorneys who decide which police violence gets pursued and which gets laundered as professionalism. Force Science is not a quirky side actor. It is part of the machinery shaping how officers are taught to justify force before the encounter even happens.The Doctrine Is the ProblemMulroy’s account describes a training culture that turns obvious danger into semantic games. If a suspect says “I can’t breathe,” the instructors allegedly told officers that means the person can breathe. That is not rigorous analysis. It is prepackaged denial. It teaches officers to discard plain evidence, discount medical findings, and treat restraint-related death as a public-relations inconvenience.Prosecutors Rushing to Defend the SystemThe more revealing reaction was not horror from Mulroy’s fellow district attorneys, but outrage at Mulroy for saying the quiet part out loud. Six Republican district attorneys and two independents condemned him and accused him of reckless words. That response tells you what they are protecting: not public safety, not credibility, but the political and legal insulation of police power. They would rather police the language of a Democratic DA than confront a training regime that appears designed to normalize fatal force.Misdirection as PolicyThe source material shows a familiar maneuver: shift the debate from state violence to the person describing it. Mulroy’s op-ed becomes the scandal, while the training that allegedly minimizes the deaths of Floyd and Garner is treated as background noise. That is how institutions manage accountability. They recast exposure as impropriety and preserve the underlying arrangement untouched.The Larger PatternThis is what authoritarian drift looks like in local form: private vendors train officers to rationalize violence, prosecutors defend the culture, and dissent is treated as the problem. The issue is not a few bad actors. It is an enforcement ecosystem that rewards denial, punishes candor, and manufactures legitimacy for cruelty. Get full access to Systemic Error at paulstsmith.substack.com/subscribe