Since 2008, Baltimore Police officers have been trained such that the citizens of their communities can find “no better friend, no better diplomat, and no better role model” while the criminals have “no worse enemy.” The ideals represent the four points of a diamond in the Diamond Standard Training that nearly every Baltimore Police officer has undergone under the command of Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld III. A department spokesman credits the training for a reduction in police-involved shootings and improving community relations.

But an Independent Review Board (IRB) empaneled by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake singled out Diamond Standard Training for criticism in its October report after a police shooting at a downtown club last year. In the first City Council meeting of 2012, a freshman councilmember introduced a resolution questioning the Diamond Standard and a related hand-to-hand combat tactics course called Hicks Training.

“Today is the anniversary of a very unfortunate event in our city’s history,” Councilmember Brandon M. Scott (D-2nd District) told fellow councilmembers on Jan. 9. He was speaking about the shooting death, by four fellow officers, of Officer William Torbit in the parking lot of the Select Lounge as the club let out in the wee hours of Jan. 9, 2011. Forty-two shots were fired after Torbit, who was in plainclothes, discharged his gun into one of several assailants who had taken him to the ground in a chaotic street fight. Sean Gamble, a patron at the club, also died and three women were wounded.

“The IRB recommends that a formal evaluation of the ‘Diamond Standard’ program be conducted with respect to the crowd control situations that frequently occur in the Central District,” the 169-page IRB report reads, in part.

“[The resolution] is to make sure we implement some of the changes called for” in the IRB report, says Scott, who was elected to replace the retiring Nicholas D’Adamo and is vice chairman of the Council’s Public Safety Committee. His resolution calls on Bealefeld to report to the City Council “on the Baltimore Police Department’s relationship with the Diamond Standard Training and Hicks Training programs” and to discuss their effectiveness and how they might be “improved and made more cost effective.”

Although some police officers have grumbled about it for years, Bealefeld has staked his reputation on the unique training program. It was conceived and is overseen by Adam Walinsky, a New York lawyer with political roots in John F. Kennedy’s administration. Its “arrest and control” tactics were developed by Lewis Hicks, a former Navy SEAL and longtime Walinsky ally.

Neither Hicks nor Walinsky were ever police officers—a point against them in some officers’ eyes. Walinsky spent most of the 1980s and ’90s lobbying Congress to create a novel program called Police Corps, which recruited college graduates to police forces across the country and gave them special training. Some big-city police chiefs declined to take Police Corps cadets despite their college degrees and federally funded training, but with backing from then Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D), Maryland was the first state to implement the program. Hicks (who did not return an e-mail or voice mail from City Paper) joined forces with Walinsky after leaving the Navy in the late 1990s and was hired by then Commissioner Ed Norris to train Baltimore police in “skeletal manipulation” techniques in the early 2000s. The array of joint locks and other hand-to-hand combat methods were meant to instill confidence in police and allow them to subdue and control suspects without harming them or resorting to pepper spray or other weapons.

Hicks’ $2 million contract was canceled in 2003, halfway through its four-year implementation, according to a report in The Baltimore Sun. But Bealefeld brought Hicks Training back after becoming commissioner, in part because he was concerned with the number of officer-involved shootings, many of which arose from patrol officers getting into situations where they were wrestling assailants for their guns. “In 2007 we had 33 police-involved shootings,” Baltimore Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi says. “In 2008 there were 21, in 2009 there were 22, in 2010 there were 10, and in 2011 we had 11—one of those includes Officer Torbit. So you’re seeing a downward trend in terms of the number of times officers use their weapons.”

One recently retired officer who asked that he not be named told City Paper that, although he considered it good training, many police officers tried to avoid Hicks because the intense week-long program sometimes results in injuries.

Deputy Commissioner John Skinner, who handles training for the department, acknowledges that injuries happen because Hicks Training is realistic. “Whether firearms training or hand to hand . . . any time you’re doing anything physical there is the possibility you could get injured,” he says. “I don’t think it’s an epidemic problem, or a glaring problem.”

Over the past several years, Bealefeld has defended Diamond Standard training to both skeptical officers and city officials. The IRB was not convinced, saying in its report that it “does not have enough information to determine whether the program specifically addresses crowd control and club/bar response operations, or whether it does so sufficiently. There is not enough information to determine or independently validate the effectiveness of the ‘Diamond Standard’ training curriculum, which is not widely used by law-enforcement agencies.”

Reached by phone at his Westchester County, N.Y., home, Walinsky says many other departments would like to incorporate Diamond Standard. “Of course it’s not being done anywhere else, not because anyone doesn’t want to do it, but because no other department has had the vision and commitment to make this kind of effort,” he says. “This has been a huge effort by Bealefeld and John Skinner, and people in City Hall—a huge effort.”

> Email Edward Ericson Jr.