Torres: Controversial police training, banned in 9 states, coming to central Florida

What would you say to a six-day police training seminar where they taught unconstitutional policing tactics? What if they glorified violence and dehumanized civilians? Would you tolerate demeaning remarks toward women or sexist behaviors? How about encouraging insubordination and openly making fun of the internal affairs process?

What if one of the instructors were to put up a slide of a monkey while discussing stopping a car with a 75-year-old Black man behind the wheel?

If you find that kind of stuff to your liking, then you're in luck! "Street Cop Training" comes to Orlando this Sunday. The cost to attend the event by the for-profit private company, that was banned in nine states last year, is only $699 per person.

The horrible thing is that I'm not even kidding. By the way, that grotesque bit of racism took place during a previous Street Cop training seminar. All these examples and more are cited in a scathing report issued by the New Jersey Office of the Comptroller. A breakdown of what is taught at the event and how encouraged behaviors violate the constitution can be seen on an in-depth video by Civil rights lawyer John D. Bryan's Youtube channel. Beware of offensive and dehumanizing language in both the report and video taken from the training.

Want more? OK. One of the featured speakers at this weeklong celebration of thuggery is none other than our very own top lawman and most popular politician: Constitutional Sheriff Wayne Ivey.

Our tax dollars pay for the training

That's right, the training, which has been banned in nine states, was described by the acting New Jersey State Comptroller, Kevin D. Walsh, as "disturbing" and wiping out any progress in police reforms. The program is calling Orlando home for a week to seemingly try to reprogram many Central Florida law enforcement officers. Want to hear the really disturbing part? We're paying for it.

Between 2020 and 2023 there were public agencies in Florida that provided direct payment to Street Cop Training. Locally, at least one Melbourne officer is attending the training with the department paying for it. Palm Bay and Cocoa have none and the Brevard County Sheriff's Department did not respond to my inquiry about how many deputies were attending. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement could not tell me how many officers were attending.

So, why am I quoting what the New Jersey Comptroller's Office said? Well, a few years ago, there was a Street Cop Training conference held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word got out about the questionable content and the Washington Post wrote an article. The article prompted the state comptroller to investigate. You can take my word for it, but you don't have to. Read the report here or go to https://www.nj.gov/comptroller/reports/2023/20231206.shtml#section3.

Excerpts include:

• This training wasted public dollars. Officers who attended need to be retrained — on directives, policies, and even on basic constitutional law.

• This type of training normalizes discriminatory and harassing conduct. It also increases the risk of lawsuits for civil rights violations, discrimination, and hostile work environments.

• Street Cop founder and CEO, Dennis Benigno, mocked police academies and seemingly officers killed in the line of duty. He said “90 percent” of those (slain) officers were “failed by their academy, their field training, their administrations, the world, and/or themselves.”

"Hookers and cocaine"

There is video on Youtube and other sites of Benigno telling attendees, “I want to die at 91 with hookers and cocaine around me…I mean why wouldn’t that be your goal?” Benigno was a former police officer who was disciplined three times in his first five years on the job and who "retired" a month after Woodbridge Township in N.J. paid $50,000 to settle a lawsuit against Benigno for excessive force and racial bias.

Yep, that's the guy training Florida cops all next week. Perhaps not surprisingly, Benigno did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He has also refused to speak with numerous other media outlets. Four months ago, after the damning report and videos surfaced, Benigno recorded a five-minute Youtube video where he apologized for "any inappropriate or offensive language." But he remained defiant saying the report "cast a negative light on our training," and "we were portrayed as the bad guys but we're the good guys."

One of his instructors, a reserve sheriff's deputy from Louisiana, gloated during one conference about shooting at those trying to flee. Sure enough, video surfaced of Shawn Pardazi shooting at a car after it fled during a traffic stop. He has since been charged with illegal discharge of a firearm and obstruction of justice because he allegedly deleted the video from Facebook.

Retraining officers who attended Street Cop

Here in the Sunshine state, Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis would be the equivalent of another state's comptroller. I reached out to Patronis on Tuesday and Wednesday to see if he was aware some agencies were using public money for this kind of police training. But I was directed to reach out to individual agencies.

So, I contacted Ivey as well as the public information person for the sheriff's office and heard crickets in reply. I even reached out to Ivey's campaign manager, to no avail.

Matt Platkin, attorney general for New Jersey, said the 240 New Jersey cops that attended the conference (out of 1,000 overall) now have to be retrained.

"No one should be attending street cop training," he said during an interview with a CBS television news show.

Why would constitutional sheriff agree to speak?

What about agreeing to be a speaker? Well, our sheriff, who touts being a "Constitutional Sheriff" because he "took an oath to support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States," is a featured speaker for the group accused of not only trampling on constitutional rights but encouraging law enforcement officers to violate those rights.

Not a good look.

The nine states that have already banned the training are: New Jersey, Maryland, California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, and Oregon.

"The New Jersey comptroller's Street Cops Training investigation is based on video evidence and speaks for itself," said Bob Norman, Journalism Program Director for the non-partisan Florida Center for Government Accountability. "Our basic question for Sheriff Ivey was why he would endorse a group that has been found to glorify violence, teach unconstitutional tactics, and use demeaning language about women and minorities. We also wanted to know if public funds were being used to pay for deputies who might attend the conference. Unfortunately Ivey and the sheriff's office has yet to provide any answers."

Lawsuits and dropped cases

The first thing local defense attorneys may do in the future is to find out if the arresting officer in the case being tried attended this training. It could yield a treasure trove of future civil rights litigation. A drug case was already thrown out in New York late last year when the judge discovered the arresting officer was one of the Street Cop instructors.

The Street Cop Training group, which filed bankruptcy earlier this year before relocating to Florida, is getting it from all sides. The Street Cop Facebook page advertising the six-day conference is littered with criticism and disparaging comments that get posted quicker than organizers can take down. A sampling:

"Training cops to destroy our country by spitting on our constitution, spitting on the graves of fallen soldiers, spitting in the faces of our veterans, spitting in faces of any good officers, breaking laws and terrorizing communities," said one.

"(expletive) thug training," wrote someone else.

And it goes on and on as do the questions, like why is this training being allowed in our state and why is one of our elected officials speaking at it?

Contact Torres at jtorres@floridatoday.com. You can follow him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter @johnalbertorres. You can also find updates about the Murder on the Space Coast Podcast on our Facebook page.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Brevard’s Sheriff Ivey to speak at police training event banned by 9 states