Henry and Fulton County Sheriff’s office are teaming up with Pepsi and Shaquille O’Neal to bring a new comprehensive de-escalation training to officers across the state.
CBS46 Tori Cooper attended the new training in Henry County to gather details on Shaq’s mission and the tools officers will be learning.
Shaq said he’s done waiting. “The time is now because we need to start talking about closing the gap and we need to do something.”
He said it’s time for the police and the community to make up.
“I know people are tired of hearing, oh there’s a bunch of good cops out there. We need to start seeing them. So I want to be the guy to bring that together.”
He said in order to accomplish that mission it starts with joining forces with the police force, to address the ever growing concern between police and community.
”It’s time to roll up our sleeves and walk these things out so that we can bring the community back together with us,” Henry County Sheriff, Reginald Scandrett said.
Henry and Fulton County law enforcement, Shaq and Pepsi have now teamed up together to bring a new de-escalation program to police officers in the peach state, as part of their new community outreach project.
“Eventually train approximately 1,000 officers here in the Metro Atlanta area to give them areas and ways to calm the waters on scenes,” Scandrett said.
Shaq and police wasted no time. On Wednesday officers and instructors jumped into action and began learning other ways to avoid deadly tactics.
“He’s getting me here hold freeze, so what he’s got here is a shoulder lock pain compliance off the shoulder,” De-escalation Program instructor, Jon Athan Burke said while demonstrating new methods to officers.
Burke said he has spent his career training police and military personnel.
On Wednesday, he led several demonstrations to show officers additional ways to get suspects into custody without using lethal force while also maintaining safety for everyone.
They said the last step of the program will be to deal with officers holistically, by making sure they are psychologically and clinically sound before and during their time on the force.
“Typically when a psychological test is given its given when they start or when there is a shooting or some other time frame but we want to mandate that we do this once a year and we believe if we do this we can calm the waters.”
Several officers trained Wednesday but they said their plan is roll out this program to ensure it reaches every officer across the state.
No comments