Discussion

The warrior mentality

Police academies utilize organizational socialization to condition obedience through humiliation and fear (Simon, 2023). They are taught that the entire world is gunning for them, more now than ever before, and that there are clear cut “bad guys” who would like nothing more than to kill them– therefore, they must be constantly vigilant and afraid for their lives (Kincaid, 2024; Simon, 2023). Essentially, cadets are broken down and rebuilt in a new image of the upstanding police officer. Unfortunately, the image of the upstanding police officer is rooted in racist and sexist beliefs about what constitutes a proper warrior or guardian, and what constitutes a potential threat or criminal.

The most frequently named trait of the distinct police officer personality is a heightened suspicion of others (Simon, 2023). The dangerous nature of police work and certainly the mentality drilled into officers during their training demands they develop a shorthand to determine who is dangerous, who is not, and how to neutralize any given threat; and this shorthand often draws different conclusions based solely on the race of the suspect involved, with certain behaviors being read as dangerous when Black but unindicative of disposition when white (Simon, 2023). Importantly, this suspicion grows to a point where every interaction is treated as though it could be deadly, escalating every situation into a chaotic one where violence is apparently justified in the mind of the officer (Simon, 2023; Kincaid, 2024). “[They] see and respond to violent threats where there are none” (Kincaid, 2024, p. 87). The mismatch between perception and reality most often has to do with profiling, which will be discussed later.

This intense warrior mentality is not just a front; cadets and officers alike internalize it to an extreme degree, and the mentality is seen as the only way to survive the job (Simon, 2023). The problem with adopting the warrior mentality is that it turns domestic life into a war, where there are good guys and bad guys, winners and losers– this is reflected in both the actions of police officers and the language used to refer to them. Consider the “war on drugs” and “war on crime,” which, especially as of late, have been used as an excuse to justify the blatant overreach of executive power and the militarization of the domestic police force (Simon, 2023). 

Simon (2023) points out in her work something she calls the “warrior-guardian binary,” which dictates that officers act both as warriors using violence against criminals and as guardians who protect the weak innocents. These archetypes are rooted in harmful stereotypes of both dominant and protective masculinity, respectively, which enforce white supremacy, sexism, and heteronormativity within the police force (Simon, 2023). White gun-carrying men tend to justify their actions by identifying the threat of a racialized other and their own moral obligation to protect innocent, vulnerable white women and children (Simon, 2023). This patriarchal standard reveals itself in the disproportionate brutality against men of color, who are perceived as not only violent but irredeemably evil (Kincaid, 2024; Pontzer, 2021; Simon, 2023).

Tools of the oppressive police force

There are certain policies that officers and instructors use to enforce and justify these gendered, racialized, and ableist standards. Beyond the insidious culture within the institution itself, there are also somewhat more overt tools that shape interactions with members of marginalized communities. 

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is in the so-called excited delirium policies that are commonplace throughout departments all over the states. Excited delirium is not considered a valid diagnosis by the most reputable medical sources, and it has direct history with medical racism (Kincaid, 2024). However, it has repeatedly been upheld in the courts as a valid justification for police officers’ violence against civilians who are overwhelmingly people of color or people undergoing a mental health crisis, or both (Kincaid, 2024; Obasogie, 2025; Pontzer, 2021). 

Excited delirium is a “diagnosis” of sorts levied by police officers onto suspects who they claim are suddenly acting in a dangerous or violent manner for no reason (Kincaid, 2024). This steadfast belief that it is a diagnosis, despite the complete lack of modern medical evidence to back it up, goes so far that it bleeds into the actual literature, with the word “patient” being used in official training materials (Kincaid, 2024). It has roots in medical racism, particularly the problematic idea that Black people do not feel pain; the man who coined the concept himself believes– without any evidence– that Black people are inexplicably more prone to the “disease” than others (Kincaid, 2024). This has led to a shockingly high proportion of Black people who are killed in custody due to “excited delirium” or its ilk, with almost 43% of these deaths involving Black victims (Kincaid, 2024). As Kincaid puts it,“[Excited delirium] not only incidentally involves racism because of the racism inherent in our criminal legal systems, but it also involves racism at the outset, because of excited delirium’s roots in medical racism, because it is disparately applied to people of color, and because the so-called symptoms of excited delirium echo racist tropes about Black people” (Kincaid, 2024, p. 99).

The very existence of excited delirium and the propaganda surrounding it creates a vicious cycle wherein police officers will single out excited delirium “symptoms” because of their training, causing violence, and leading to increased popularity of the theory– and even police officers who do not earnestly believe their suspects are suffering from excited delirium will claim they were retroactively as an excuse to justify their inappropriate violent response after the fact (Kincaid, 2024). It also pathologizes the very normal and rational fear of law enforcement, as well as punishes anyone who is legitimately having a mental health crisis (Byju & Friesen, 2023; Kincaid, 2024). If someone is legitimately suffering from an acute mental illness, they do not deserve to be killed for it, especially when they do not pose a serious threat to others. Unfortunately, most police report a lack of deescalation training, meaning they lack appropriate responses to these kinds of issues when they arise (Pontzer, 2021).

Additionally, it is easily statistically proven that members of marginalized groups, especially Black people, are at a much greater risk than their counterparts of being killed by police (Kincaid, 2024; Pontzer, 2021). This means that fear of police is completely rational for members of these groups and is, in fact, supported by loads upon loads of quantitative evidence (Kincaid, 2024). It is completely ludicrous to expect that an individual act completely and perfectly calm in a situation that is proven to be extremely dangerous to them, especially as a civilian! The onus is and as well should be on the supposedly highly trained police officer to act correctly during this encounter and prevent violence. It is clear that the violence of police is not predicated on any sort of logic, but rather decades of bigoted ideals throughout the states leaching their way into official training procedures. These are only compounded over time, because violence begets violence. Police officers repeatedly escalate situations, and then the escalated situations are touted as proof that police officers have to escalate or they will die. It is a vicious cycle.

Beyond this, cadets are also taught to profile suspects. While verbally, instructors condemn racial profiling, they also claim you can tell whether someone is an illegal immigrant based on their appearance, and encourage “criminal profiling” (Simon, 2023). However, it is not entirely clear what constitutes a criminal; in practice, the behaviors and mannerisms supposedly associated with criminality are more often used to profile people of color (Kincaid, 2024; Simon, 2023). The same behaviors are usually not seen as threatening or indicative of criminal activity when the subject is white (Simon, 2023).

Intersectionality of biased law enforcement with racism, ableism, sexism, and homophobia

The stereotypes and biases that permeate every level of law enforcement do not start and end with racism. Police training also contributes to ableism, sexism, and homophobia, both within the institution itself and in the communities they enforce in. 

The dehumanization of Black people as well as the dehumanization of disabled people by law enforcement and their policies leads to higher rates of police encounters with these groups and more violent encounters, with officers on the whole believing that people with “mental impairments” are inherently more dangerous or somehow different from their neurotypical peers (Kincaid, 2024, p.101; Petrozzo, 2023). The emphasis on force training and the lack of deescalation training leads officers to respond to people who obviously need help the only way that they seem to know how– with violence (Kincaid, 2024; Pontzer, 2021; Simon, 2023). 

There are also serious issues regarding the patriarchal nature of law enforcement, and the warrior/guardian dichotomy from earlier. Women cadets and officers have to work harder in all aspects of training to be taken seriously, and are often seen by their male peers as liabilities on patrol, or somehow weaker or less valuable than male officers (Simon, 2023). This sexism also operates on a racialized axis, wherein white women are seen as though they were a vulnerable family member, like a pet or mother, and Black women are seen as lazy (Simon, 2023). Women are socially punished if they somehow outperform a man because of their existence in this highly sexist space (Simon, 2023). Overwhelmingly, men (especially white men) seem to believe that women (especially white women) are somehow vulnerable and need protecting more than men (Simon, 2023). In practice, the intersection of sexism and racism leads to higher rates of police sexual harassment of Black women and girls, who are seen as less pure than their white peers and an easier target than their male counterparts (Simon, 2023). 

Finally, there is an additional undercurrent of homophobia and transphobia that stains the fabric of law enforcement. Arguably, this is an extension of the misogynist framework from before, wherein bodies that do not conform to patriarchal standards are seen as dangerous or wrong. There is not much quantitative data available to this point (probably because it is hard to report someone’s affiliation with LGBTQ+ after they have been shot dead by police and can no longer be asked questions), but LGBTQ+ individuals are nearly twice as likely than their cisgender and heterosexual counterparts to report both fear of being killed by police and extreme fear of being killed by police (Briere & Runtz, 2024). With the U.S.’s long history of criminalizing homosexuality, it is not difficult to see why they may feel uncomfortable or targeted during interactions with police officers.

The failure of reeducation attempts

While police departments as a whole have historically been known to oppose reforms that detract from their warrior mythos and ideal, they also may unconsciously resist reeducation attempts due to their own implicit biases (Hoang et al., 2024; Simon, 2023). Hoang et al. (2024) found that even though officers expressed that they thought racial diversity training was beneficial, officers that scored highly on color blind racial ideology (i.e., officers that did not have a baseline understanding of systemic racism or who denied its existence) scored poorly on cognitive engagement with the material presented to them, even when spread out over multiple sessions. 

Deescalation training is not uniformly required across the nation, leading 66% of officers to report that they have not received a minimum of four hours of deescalation training and 64% to report less than four hours in crisis intervention training (Pontzer, 2021). Instead, use of force training is prioritized (Simon, 2023). Even in places that require deescalation training, it is not uniformly applied across departments due to beliefs that it is too expensive, unnecessary, or dangerous to officers as well as a lack of standardization on a statewide or nationwide basis (Pontzer, 2023). So not only are police officers encouraged to utilize force and to turn every encounter into some sort of twisted single combat, they are also largely denied the opportunity to learn other methods of problem solving.

The lack of proper training compounds itself when the police have to deal with people undergoing mental crises. Even the excited delirium protocol that supposedly encourages officers to contact emergency medical personnel falls short in comparison to the overwhelming amount of advice and training they get instructing them to use force or to escalate to violence, and the issue will continue to get worse and worse until the mental health treatment and the criminal justice systems are fixed (Kincaid, 2024). Real attempts at banning excited delirium training have been met by simple name changes without meaningful policy reform as agencies exploit any loophole they can that allows them to continue oppressing marginalized populations (Kincaid, 2024). 

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