These days, cops rarely grapple with knife-wielding suspects. It’s too dangerous, and it’s contrary to the warrior mindset. In recent years, videos have emerged showing police officers in San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Chicago killing suspects holding knives. In 2010, a police officer in Seattle killed John Williams, a 50-year-old Native American wood-carver. Police dash-cam video of the incident shows Williams crossing the street in front of the officer’s car, carrying a piece of wood and a small knife. The officer gets out and pursues Williams around a corner, gun drawn. He shouts at Williams, who was deaf in one ear, to drop the knife. Then five shots ring out. The whole encounter lasts less than ten seconds.

Despite opposition from many police officials, PERF’s guidelines to curtail the use of excessive force have been endorsed by police departments in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and elsewhere. And there are other signs that police culture is starting to shift away from the warrior model. Calibre Press, the company that pioneered warrior-policing tactics back in the 1980s, has eradicated the word warrior from its course listings and added new classes to align its curriculum more closely with reform trends. New offerings such as “The Guardians of Democracy” and “Balancing our Bias” read like chapter titles from a PERF report.

Grossman acknowledges the debate between guardians and warriors only when it allows him an opportunity to remind his audience of the warrior’s rightful claim on the soul of the American cop in these “dark and desperate times.” The symbol for his brand may be a sheepdog, but it’s a dog that favors the wolf’s instincts to fight over the sheep’s aversion to violence. “The definition of a warrior is one who is a master of what? War,” he tells the auditorium full of cops. “Is our nation at war? Are you the frontline troops in this war? The people screaming the loudest about never using that evil word warrior are going to look very, very foolish in the near future, do you understand?”

In Grossman’s view, warriors and guardians agree on one crucial point: Unlike soldiers, their mission is to avoid killing. “Our strength comes from that, our purity comes from that,” he says. “We must never fail to communicate that message. That’s what the guardian model is about. And they’re right—they’re very right. Treating people with dignity, without a doubt, is at the foundation of what we have to do. That’s what they lost track of in Ferguson.”

Three stories came out of Ferguson. The official story was that officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in self-defense after Brown assaulted him. A counter-narrative quickly emerged from witnesses who claimed that Brown was surrendering with his hands in the air when he was executed by Wilson. Less well-known is the third story, which was laid out seven months later in the Justice Department’s investigation of the shooting. The investigation confirmed the official story, but it also provided important context that explains why the counter-narrative took hold.

Witnesses didn’t come forward to refute the bogus execution story, for a simple reason: The community’s relationship with local police was totally broken. The Ferguson Police Department, the investigation found, had engaged in a “pattern of excessive force” against the city’s black residents, and “with extremely limited exceptions” all of the arrest warrants issued by the city’s municipal court were for unpaid parking tickets, housing code violations, missed court dates, fines, and other minor infractions. Police, judges, and city officials weren’t protecting or serving the citizens of Ferguson—they were systematically preying on them.

Grossman views Ferguson as a cautionary tale about what can happen when police officers violate the warrior’s code. “The social contract says you have the right to use deadly force,” he says. “But the moment that person is not a deadly force threat, their life is as precious as any other life on the planet.” After Wilson shot Brown, he tells his audience, the police made no effort to save Brown’s life. “Not one single person jumped on that body and gave chest compressions,” he says. “If somebody had even tried to take action—slap on a tourniquet, a couple of Band-Aids, doing chest compressions—it would’ve been a different story.”

Ferguson provoked national outrage over racism and police violence, launched a mass protest movement, and forced police departments to rethink the warrior model. But in Grossman’s view, all of that might have been avoided if one cop had performed CPR on Michael Brown’s dead body. After the seminar, I followed up with Grossman multiple times to clarify this point, but he stuck to his guns. As he sees it, the rising homicide rate, a recent spike in murders of police officers, and the election of Donald Trump have combined to discredit Black Lives Matter and others seeking to curb police violence.

“There’s going to be a backlash of enormous magnitude in the other direction,” Grossman predicts. “Back to broken windows, back to stop and frisk, back to cops in the street aggressively pursuing crime.”

To Grossman, serving as a police officer is ultimately about being willing to sacrifice oneself for others. It is a distinctly Christian ethos that he backs up with frequent Bible quotes and references to medieval times. His ideal cop is a modern Crusader in the eternal battle between good and evil, a paladin whose violence is sanctified by his higher purpose. Even if he kills the wrong person, a true warrior cop kills only for the purest of motives.

At the end of the seminar, Grossman uncaps two markers, bends toward the easel, and writes the word LOVE in large block letters on a fresh sheet of paper, underscoring it with a squiggly flourish. Then he turns to face his audience. Projected on the screen behind him is an image of Christopher Amoroso, a Port Authority police officer who died rescuing people on September 11.

“Only the sheepdog loves enough to die for other people’s loved ones,” Grossman says, his face lit by the ghostly glow of the projector. “You believe in who you are, you believe in what you do. For greater love hath no one than this.”