Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is among the most high-profile police trainers in the United States. He’s also one of the most controversial.

Grossman is currently scheduled to deliver presentations to law enforcement officers at an FBI National Academy Associates (FBINAA) retraining conference in Redmond in September, then at the annual Oregon Peace Officers Association (OPOA) Conference at the Spirit Mountain Event Center in Grande Ronde in November. Oregon law enforcement officers will be able to receive state training credit for attending.  

Grossman’s presence at both events raises questions about the extent to which law enforcement organizations working in Oregon, as well as their rank-and-file officers, embrace the ideological positions of a man who has spent much of his career urging officers to be “warriors” who are mentally prepared to view neighborhoods as battlegrounds and use force against the populations they police. 

The events also raise questions about the relative lack of oversight of the trainings law enforcement officers must attend each year, which are overseen by the Department of Public Safety Standards and Training (DPSST). 

The event for Oregon peace officers, which includes in its target audience patrol officers, detectives, street crimes and narcotics officers, features Grossman alongside a range of other law enforcement officers from as far as Connecticut and Florida. 

DPSST has not officially endorsed the OPOA event featuring Grossman, but it functionally matters little whether a training is endorsed or not. That’s because it is up to individual law enforcement agencies to approve training credits, which they then report to DPSST. The agency then counts those credits regardless of whether an event is endorsed. 

“DPSST does not reject reported training hours or otherwise oversee the content of maintenance training,” Sam Tenney, DPSST’s communications coordinator, wrote in an email to the Mercury. “The Board on Public Safety Standards and Training sets requirements for maintenance training subjects and hour requirements, individual agencies determine what non-mandated maintenance training their officers will be provided, and DPSST updates officers’ records to reflect the training.”

That means it’s up to individual law enforcement agencies to decide whether their employees should receive credit for attending a training delivered by Grossman—even if trainings like Grossman’s may conflict with stated Oregon goals around law enforcement. 

Officers who attend Grossman’s Thursday seminar entitled “The Bulletproof Mind,” for instance, will receive eight DPSST leadership credits—an incentive for officers who must receive a certain number of training credits each year to attend.

For people closely attuned to issues of policing and police reform, the relative lack of oversight of police trainings is a major issue. 

“It’s a significant part of the problem that can easily be seen to lead to police officers making erroneous judgements based on the bad information they’re taught—and particularly when it involves the kind of warrior cop training that suggests officers are in a battle situation,” Mike German, a retired FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said. 

That warrior cop approach is what Grossman in particular has popularized. 

In some ways, Grossman’s presence at Oregon conferences this fall is no surprise. Over the course of his 20-plus year career as a police trainer, Grossman claims to have conducted trainings with law enforcement officials in every US state, with every branch of the US military, and with every law enforcement agency. 

His books, including On Killing, have reportedly been required reading at places like the FBI National Academy and have been translated into multiple languages. He also counseled the Trump administration. 

In those books and in past seminars, Grossman has espoused an ideology that his critics say epitomizes everything that is wrong with an American law enforcement culture that is overly militaristic, overly violent, and sees American police kill civilians at a rate that far eclipses other industrialized countries. 

“We are at war,” Grossman says at the end of a seminar shown in the documentary Do Not Resist. “And you are on the frontline of that war. When they come to murder the children, the individuals who tried to disarm our cops will be hunted down.”

Grossman, in his past, traveled the country telling police officers they needed to be prepared to kill in order to survive in their jobs and hold civilized society together. 

“Killing’s not the goal,” Grossman said in a Frontline interview in 2004. “We’re satisfied if he’s wounded or satisfied if he surrenders. But we all understand that killing is the likely outcome of what we do.”

Grossman, who was described by University of South Carolina law professor Seth Stoughton as a glorified “motivational speaker” in a 2017 Mother Jones article, is also an outspoken Christian who has written books and spoken extensively about the need for spiritual warfare in the US. 

His methods have been under fire for years, beginning in earnest in 2016 after it was revealed that the police officer who killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Minnesota had attended a seminar called “The Bulletproof Warrior” held by Grossman two years prior. 

In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the national uprising against police brutality that followed, criticism of the warrior cop approach to community policing intensified. 

Two years later, Grossman pivoted away from “killology” — renaming his Killology Research Group to Grossman On Truth. Nevertheless, Grossman has defended his approach in the aftermath of 2020 and claimed that he teaches a form of “mindfulness” that makes police killings less likely. A representative for Grossman did not respond to a request for comment on this story. 

But the issue around police training is bigger than Grossman, who has never himself served as a police officer. A general lack of transparency around who is designing, delivering, and receiving credit for attending trainings means the police training industry often remains shrouded in ways that police departments are not. 

“It’s just a waste of resources,” German said of the current training setup. “It’s not just the resources that go to this erroneous and improper police training, but then having to retrain those officers to cure them of any misunderstandings or errors they have been trained to believe are true.”

This is not a new problem for DPSST. A 2021 audit by the Oregon Secretary of State’s office found that the agency has limited oversight over police training and a limited ability to hold officers accountable for misconduct. 

“DPSST absolutely should screen their offerings to lessen the likelihood of law enforcement officers enrolling in harmful trainings,” Marc Poris of Portland Copwatch, a volunteer-led police oversight group, wrote in an email to the Mercury. 

Questions about the content of trainings have similarly dogged the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), which was compelled to hire a civilian, Dr. Rebecca Arredondo Rodriguez, to direct all “educational aspects” of its training division as part of its settlement with the Department of Justice. 

But Rodriguez and the bureau’s Training Division are responsible only for reviewing in-house PPB training—not external trainings that PPB officers can sign up for. When PPB officers want to sign up for an external training for DPSST credit, they must only get an application approved by their Responsibility Unit manager. 

If PPB officers want to attend external trainings on their own time and at their own cost, they are not required to notify the bureau. 

A PPB spokesperson wrote in an email to the Mercury that the bureau’s training division is not aware of any officer who is planning to attend the Grossman session at the FBINAA conference, but, because there is no requirement to report training attendance plans to the Training Division, the bureau “cannot say for certain.”

German said agencies like DPSST likely need more resources in order to do the kind of oversight that ensures trainings meet public safety standards and do more good than harm. 

“I could understand how a state agency might not think it’s important to do that kind of oversight, but I think it’s essential to good government—let alone good policing,” he said.