Portrait of a Rotten Orchard: "Minneapolis Police Union President: “I’ve Been Involved in Three Shootings Myself, and Not a One of Them Has Bothered Me”

From The Intercept

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/02/minneapolis-police-union-bob-kroll-shootings/

Minneapolis Police Union President: “I’ve Been Involved in Three Shootings Myself, and Not a One of Them Has Bothered Me”

Excerpts; the entire article is well worth reading.

"In an interview in April, Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis’s police union, said that he and a majority of the Minneapolis Police Officers’ Federation’s board have been involved in police shootings. Kroll said that he and the officers on the union’s board were not bothered by the shootings, comparing themselves favorably to other officers.

“There’s been a big influx of PTSD,” Kroll said. “But I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different.”

His comments underscore the rampant nature of police violence in the United States. The number of times police officers fire their weapons swamps the level of violence in most other countries, where authorities rely on nonlethal methods of coercion, persuasion, or control. Many police officers live with post-traumatic stress disorder induced by the violence associated with policing.

But not Kroll’s crew, he said. “Out of the 10 board members, over half of them have been involved in armed encounters, and several of us multiple. We don’t seem to have problems,” he said. “Certainly getting shot at and shooting people takes a different toll, but if you’re in this job and you’ve seen too much blood and gore and dead people then you’ve signed up for the wrong job.” 

Later in the same article...

"According to a 2015 Star Tribune report, Kroll clocked at least 20 internal affairs complaints during his three decades in the Minneapolis Police Department, “all but three of which were closed without discipline.” There have also been several lawsuits against Kroll, detailing a long history of allegations of bigoted comments, including one that accused him of using excessive force against an elderly couple during a no-knock raid and another that accused him of “beating, choking, and kicking” a biracial 15-year-old boy while “spewing racial slurs.”

...

Kroll also mocked the concept of procedural justice, an institutional reform meant to reduce police use of force through diversity and anti-bias training, saying that it’s an opportunity for people of color to get back at white men. He said that in his early days of training, the rule was to “ask them nicely to do something the first time,” then give them a “direct, lawful order” to do so, and if they refuse — “you make them with force, that’s how you get compliance.”

“Those days are over,” he said. “Now, it is ask them, love them, call, you know, give them their space and give them their voice. And this is what they’re training new officers. … Our cops went through that and they’re going, ‘Oh my God.’ Yeah, procedural justice. And the theory behind it being that, you know, the white men have oppressed everyone else for 200 years. So it’s their opportunity to get back.”