'Have a plan to kill everyone': Investigators say cop training firm taught 'likely illegal' tactics

A law enforcement training company that held a summit attended by roughly 1,000 police officers nationwide has been accused of encouraging cops to adopt violent, discriminatory and unconstitutional behaviors, News From The States reports.

Investigators with the office of acting New Jersey Comptroller Kevin Walsh said that the training firm Street Cop — which held a 2021 conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey — promoted "views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal," according to the report.

Walsh's office also called for a separate investigation by the state attorney general's office.

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"The fact that the training undermined nearly a decade of police reforms — and New Jersey dollars paid for it — is outrageous," Walsh said in a public statement.

In the 43-page report, Walsh's office detailed how Street Cop instructors encouraged conference attendees to profile drivers when conducting vehicle stops, noting that many of their recommendations violated directives from the state attorney general and flew in the face of the Fourth Amendment. One instructor reportedly told session participants to "be the calmest person in the room but have a plan to kill everyone." Another boasted that he was "batting .500" when shooting people in the line of duty, killing four people while shooting in eight in 13 recorded instances of excessive force. An Oklahoma sheriff leading one session said "sometimes you have to shoot folks" when talking about police officers having an affinity for firearms.

Street Cop founder Dennis Benigno initially sued to stop Walsh's office from investigating his firm, but lost in court. He told the New Jersey Monitor that he planned to "impose stricter standards on colloquial and jocular language occasionally used by some instructors" in future training sessions, and that some of the comments Walsh's office highlighted in his report were "an attempt at humor."

"[T]here is not one single instance in the OSC Report where we have advocated any practice that is inconsistent with quality policing," Benigno said. "Isolated excerpts taken out of context from a week-long training are not reflections of the overall quality of the education that Street Cop provides."

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Walsh said during a press conference that Street Cop is just one of several firms he wants to investigate, saying "systemic risks seem to extend far beyond Street Cop, and Street Cop and this particular training provides an example of what can go wrong, and went very wrong there."

The full report is here.