(By Adam Andrzejewski, RealClear Wire) The Portland Police Bureau in Oregon pays a consulting firm $495,000 annually to give police officers controversial and woke training that Portland cops have called “hilariously ridiculous” and a “colossal waste of time.”
The contract is with Rosenbaum & Associates LLC, who according to the City of Portland has served as compliance officer community liaison since 2015 and began a contract with the city in 2020. The firm’s current contract stipulates they receive $440,000 for their consulting services, with an expense and travel allowance of $55,000.
The training presentations given to Portland police officers are controversial, with many officers reporting the presentations espouse politically biased views on gender, National Review reported.
“Three training videos in question were rolled out by the bureau’s Equity and Inclusion Office as part of a new directive, ‘Interacting with Members of the LGBTQIA2S+/Queer Community,’ that includes instruction on how to address people who are transgender,” NR reported.
The videos instruct, “it is wrong to ‘guess or assume a person’s gender,’ that pronouns may change over a long period or ‘it could be the next day,’ and that the ever-expanding LGBTQI2S+ acronym is increasingly being replaced with the term ‘queer community,’ which includes ‘people who engage in kink, polyamory, and sex work.’”
The officers who gave anonymous feedback on the training said they were “patronizing,” “childish,” “offensive,” “garbage,” and “unnecessary.” One officer wrote that the videos were “indoctrination masquerading as training.”
Another part of the training involved “one of the video subjects … speaking in front of a home with rainbow stairs and a Black Lives Matter sign in the window,” which officers commented was “highly inappropriate” after the violence in Portland in the summer of 2020.
Ironically, according to Rosenbaum, these critical comments only show the need for more equity training by him and his firm.
With out-of-control crime in cities and chronic police shortages in departments across the country, the last thing cities need to spend time and resources on is radical equity presentations that its officers find both laughable and insulting.
