Kelly: NJ taxpayers should be outraged over report on police training. Reform is needed

For six days in October 2021, more than 1,000 cops descended on Atlantic City. What took place was a disaster.

The officers did not come to investigate crimes. They came — most of them on the public’s dime — for extra training. Put another way, they purportedly wanted to improve their skills as officers.

This was supposed to be a good idea.

It wasn’t.

A devastating report, released by the New Jersey state comptroller, found that the so-called training sessions in Atlantic City over those six days have become a stain on the reputations of police, especially the officers who have worked so hard in recent years to reform their departments.

In a statement, the state's acting comptroller, Kevin Walsh, said such training essentially undercut a decade of reform efforts in New Jersey. Who knows what it did to police reform nationwide?

“We found so many examples of so many instructors promoting views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal,” Walsh said. “The fact that the training undermined nearly a decade of police reforms — and New Jersey dollars paid for it — is outrageous.”

'Likely illegal': NJ comptroller says hundreds of cops attended training that 'undermined' key reforms

What did the NJ comptroller's report say about the training?

The 43-page report lays out devastating evidence of how the seminars were filled with a disgusting array of comments that included instructors talking about the size of their genitals, disparaging women, gays and minorities and encouraging cops to embrace tactics that violated the U.S. Constitution.

One instructor, who is described as a former U.S. Army Green Beret, talked of “loving violence” and “drinking out of the skulls of our enemies.” Another instructor displayed a meme of a monkey while offering a description of how he stopped a car driven by a “75-year-old Black man coming out of Trenton.”

Numerous videos that were included in the comptroller’s online version of the report show instructors frequently using the “f-word.” One speaker, described as a former New York police detective, bragged that he felt “victorious” after killing people in the line of duty. He said he had shot eight people in his career, killing four of them. Is this true? Who knows? But this was presented as "training" for cops.

Another instructor, described as a sheriff from Oklahoma, joked about loving guns. “Sometimes you have to shoot folks,” he said.

And on and on. The facts are mind-numbing. The ultimate impact, said the comptroller’s report, was that the trainers encouraged a “warrior” approach to policing that dehumanized people and essentially reduced police encounters with civilians to an “us versus them” set of tactics.  One instructor even referred to people he encountered as “pieces of shit.”

Memo to readers: Your tax dollars paid for most of the cops who were in Atlantic City to sit through this nonsense.

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Former New Jersey cop was the central attraction

The central attraction for this so-called conference was a series of seminars by a self-proclaimed police trainer, Dennis Benigno. What you need to know about Benigno is that he began his police career in 2001 as a 19-year-old New Jersey prison guard. Three years later, he moved on to the United States Park Police in Washington, D.C. A year later — in 2005 — he took a job with the Woodbridge Police Department in central New Jersey. In 2012, he started training cops.

That’s not exactly the kind of wide-ranging resume and deep law enforcement experience that police chiefs and other government officials with access to tax dollars ought to be looking for if they are hiring someone to train their officers. But Benigno seems to be a good talker who runs Street Cop, a private firm based in East Windsor, New Jersey, that claims to be the “fastest growing law enforcement training company in the country.” Business seems to be booming.

Among other things, Street Cop brags on its website that it is “changing the world of law enforcement by properly educating police officers on what they CAN do” — note the capitalized word, CAN — and that “our powerful, career-changing courses help cops catch more criminals, save more lives, have more impact and get home safely.”

Apparently Benigno's self-marketing resonated big-time. Some 240 of the 1,000 officers who showed up in Atlantic City came from New Jersey departments, including the state police. Every state sent officers except Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada and Idaho. In other words, this was no small beach party.

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Of course, NJ's Blue Wall has stayed silent

But as shocking as it is to learn about the frat-boy statements by instructors, what’s also troubling is that the comptroller’s investigation discovered that not one of the 1,000 officers who attended the Atlantic City conference complained to their departments about this so-called “training” after they returned home. Not one.

In other words, the old-fashioned “Blue Wall” of police keeping silent about wrongdoing, corruption and mistakes on the job now apparently also includes stupid training that encourages cops to violate people's civil rights. It’s understandable that some officers find it hard to face up to their shortcomings on the job — even though it's immoral to keep silent about such problems. Facing up to mistakes and poor judgment is difficult for anyone, in any job. But why would any responsible police officer put up with shoddy training?

The obvious answer is that the 1,000 officers who attended the Street Cop seminars in Atlantic City saw nothing wrong with the training they received — or, at least, nothing that was so bad that it needed to be reported. All the nonsense from instructors about insulting people or even killing them did not bother anyone. How else can anyone explain the complete absence of complaints?

For police leaders and the government agencies who fund them, the message from the comptroller’s report ought to be worrisome — namely, that cops who are badly trained are inviting costly lawsuits.

And guess who pays the judgments in those lawsuits?

Yep, taxpayers eventually end up with the bill.

Another problem involves the instructors themselves who are still working as officers. The New York Times reported that the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office recently dropped drug charges against a suspect because of controversial statements by one of the prosecutor's detectives involved in the case during a lecture at one of the seminars in Atlantic City.

On Wednesday, Benigno, the trainer, released a five-minute video in which he apologized for "inappropriate or offensive language." But he went on to defend the training offered by Street Cop. "While we were painted as the bad guys we are, in fact, the good guys, creating better, more well-trained police officers for a country that expects the best from their men and women in blue — and everybody in this profession knows that," Benigno said in the video.

The comptroller’s report also discovered a disturbing lack of government regulation or even modest oversight to monitor police training companies like Street Cop. Establishing rules and standards for police training seems like a reasonable place to start.

Taxpayers can’t control cops’ attitudes. But we can control how they are trained.

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com, part of the USA TODAY Network, as well as the author of three critically acclaimed nonfiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in the Northeast, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ police training report: Taxpayers should be outraged