A new perspective on police

Thank you for your refreshing article highlighting our new police academy graduates (“Three newly graduated police officers enter new world,” Aug. 2). Their stories lend a new and needed perspective to a controversial subject. These folks obviously are compassionate and feel a need to serve and protect.

Hopefully they will not be subjected to David Grossman’s “Killology” training, previously suggested by Ozzie but now perhaps not happening due to the outraged citizenry of Spokane. Just Google “Dave Grossman killing is not that big of a deal” and you will see that he says those exact words in his training. He focuses on violence rather than de-escalation, increasing the military mindset of city police officers.

Grossman trains police across the country, but PLEASE not in Spokane. We must stop the militarization of the police, who are the community peacekeepers. We don’t want to fear our police, but rather welcome them, because they are there to help us when we need them.

To that end, I support the Spokane Platform for Change. Although their first demand is “defund the police,” it doesn’t mean abolish the police, but rather change the way policing works and increase funding of social services. I encourage others to check out their website.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid change is unlikely to happen as long as our leaders, such as county prosecutor Larry Haskell, can’t even countenance the phrase “racial equity” when voting on non-binding guiding principles for tackling overcrowding in the Spokane County Jail. That kind of resistant mindset is exactly what we’re trying to overcome.

Linda Greene

Spokane