State of Policing: St. Paul Police's "Response to Resistance or Aggression Training"
ST. PAUL, Minn. – The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis changed the world, and put a greater emphasis on police accountability.
You told us transparency with police training is paramount. We listened, and started working on a special, months-long project to offer the first real look at training for use of force.
We'll give you a rare inside look at that training, you'll hear from the community, we'll talk with police chiefs and the regulatory agency over training and standards.
Our partner in the project is the St. Paul Police Department. WCCO's Jennifer Mayerle watched their quarterly training, which is a requirement for all officers.
The Mat Room is where St. Paul officers go through Response to Resistance or Aggression training. Mat training goes about an hour each quarter. With each technique, there's a demonstration.
We set up two cameras to capture every angle of training, and photojournalist Grant Verdon rolled on the entire training with a third camera, moving around the room to capture the movements closer up. What you're seeing in the video above are the camera shots edited together.
The techniques are created to be simple and retainable. The idea behind the training is to give officers options, so they don't have to escalate to higher uses of force.
"This is about control," said Sgt. David McCabe. "Engaging physically, you know, might look rough, but in all actuality what we're doing are trained tactics that are very safe and the idea is we're doing them because we don't want to cause injury."
You can see more of the training and hear what's behind it in WCCO's streaming special "State of Policing." It debuts Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. on CBS News Minnesota.
