Training our police need

I have listened to concerns about “Killology” training that the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office had now postponed. I finally googled this training and found the website. The website says in part, “killology focuses on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police…) and the factors that enable and RESTRAIN killing in these situations.”

As I read further, the concept is to allow police officers to face the possibility of being killed and to process those physical and emotional reactions in order to be able to act apart from those natural reactions — to act rationally though in mortal danger. And then to consider the physical and emotional reactions when confronted with a situation in which one might take another person’s life, and to process those physical and emotional reactions to act rationally and not out of fear for one’s life.

This seems to me the kind of training needed, not to make taking a life more acceptable, but less likely and only when necessary. And this training aims to provide a culture in which officers can process with fellow officers the physical and emotional reactions after a life is taken.

I am a civilian, I’ve never served in the police, and so I don’t understand the needs of the officers It’s foreign to me, even thinking of killing another person. But we need to provide our fellow citizens serving us every tool necessary to make a peaceful outcome more likely when faced with a volatile situation.

Ginny Powers

Spokane