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New training sessions at LAPD

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Fervent public concern regarding the treatment of mentally ill persons by the LAPD has resulted in the department opting to retrain its 10,000 officers in the next few weeks on how to better de-escalate confrontations with suspects and how they approach them.

The mandatory five-hour training sessions will reportedly address four areas:

• Building trust by partnering with the community and recognizing your own implicit racial biases,

• Use of force and de-escalation techniques, including taking cover and creating distance from suspects to buy time to talk with them and call for back-up,

• How best to identify and approach mentally ill persons and

• Adhering to basic laws of arrest, including reasonable suspicion and probable cause.

“This is a pause that this department is going to take to recalibrate,” said Deputy Chief Bob Green, a 40-year veteran who helped design the training. “We want to make sure everybody knows how to constitutionally police,  and how to treat people with dignity.”

Green said the department began to look at new training techniques well before the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last summer. That incident, along with the shooting death of Ezell Ford in South Los Angeles, reportedly moved the training to the top of the department’s agenda.

The department wants to add three new permanent 80-hour sessions on the same topics early in an officer’s career, specifically after 10-months and then at three- and five-year intervals. Officials said they hope the new modules will reinforce good habits and stop bad ones for forming.

“We teach these already,” said Deputy Chief Bill Murphy, who in charge of the department’s Police Sciences and  Training Bureau. “But now we’re going to reinforce them to a far greater level. This may be the biggest we’ve ever done at the LAPD, as far as what will amount to hundreds of hours of new in-service training.”

The department will also address “consensual stops” of pedestrians on the street, said to be a common occurrence in high-crime minority neighborhoods. Green said that the training sessions may remind officers that sometimes they must be willing to accept “no” for an answer. “It’s about being able to walk away from an encounter when somebody doesn’t want to talk to you … checking your ego and moving on.”

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