by Rosa Brooks
And humans can justify almost anything to themselves, no matter how horrific. In his 1992 book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, the historian Christopher Browning writes about the German police officers ordered to hunt down fleeing Jewish families in the forests of Poland in 1942. They didn’t see themselves as war criminals; for the most part, they persuaded themselves that they were doing painful, difficult, but necessary work for the sake of their comrades and friends. It wasn’t that hard for them to convince themselves—after all, everything they did was “legal” under Nazi laws, and they operated within an institutional architecture that praised and rewarded those who killed Jews, and often punished those who didn’t.
The Germans who participated in the Holocaust weren’t unusual. Look at any of the worst horrors humans have inflicted on one another—the Holocaust; the Soviet gulag; genocide and ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia. In each case, it took only a few short years for thousands of ordinary, “decent” people to join in the abuses and the killing—and most did so in the full belief that their actions were justified, patriotic, even praiseworthy.
Even those whose acts of violence aren’t sanctioned by the state readily persuade themselves of their own righteousness. In the late 1990s, I was sent to Uganda by Human Rights Watch to investigate reports of atrocities carried out by a rebel group calling itself the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In terms of numbers, the LRA had nothing on the Nazis or the Rwandan genocidaires—the LRA’s victims numbered in the thousands, not the millions. But in terms of sheer brutality, the LRA gave the Nazis a run for their money. Like many rebel armies, the LRA looted, raped, murdered, and press-ganged others into serving their cause. But unlike most rebel groups, the LRA focused particularly on children. To replenish their ranks, LRA units abducted children from villages throughout northern Uganda to serve as servants, concubines, and soldiers. Since the children rarely served willingly, the LRA developed gruesome rituals to separate their child captives from their past lives. Often, they would force their young conscripts to slaughter others, including their own family members, telling them that they could choose: they could kill, or they could die. I met children who had been forced to beat and hack their own friends and siblings to death.
To this day, nothing I have ever seen or encountered comes close to the sheer horror of LRA activities in northern Uganda. But despite their seemingly gratuitous cruelty, even the toughest LRA fighters worked hard to convince themselves that their brutality was justified. Those they killed were possessed by evil spirits, they sometimes claimed, so killing them was in fact a kindness; alternatively, they argued that the killing they carried out or ordered was necessary to set an example. “We [only kill people] because they are misbehaving,” a vexed LRA commander told a young captive who had the courage to challenge the group’s actions. “Jesus did not ask his disciples to come with him, he just told them, ‘Follow me.’ But today Ugandans do not follow the Holy Spirit, so they must be forced. . . . You don’t know what we are doing. . . . One day . . . you will see we are God’s people.”
When I told my mother about my plan to join the DC police reserve corps, I tried to say some of this. We were in the car, heading out from Alexandria, Virginia, where we both lived, for a quiet family weekend on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“I just don’t understand this police officer idea at all,” my mother said. “Police use violence to suppress dissent. They oppress poor people. They oppress minorities. That is not an incidental aspect of what they do. It’s at the center of what they do. Why would you want to join them?”
I was defensive. “I’m not ‘joining’ them. I’m trying to learn about them. If we want to understand why police officers do what they do, we need to understand how they see the world.”
“So go interview some cops. You don’t need to become a cop.”
“But maybe I do,” I insisted.
The kids and the dog were in the back seat, the dog snoring and the girls plugged into their earphones, oblivious to our tense exchange.
Violence, I argued, can be understood only through a nuanced attention to the narratives people create to justify and explain their behavior. If I became a police officer—a part-time police officer, yes, but a police officer all the same—I could, maybe, begin to understand how the world looks through the eyes of those with badges and guns, and how so much that seems baffling or wrong from the outside has come to seem acceptable, even necessary, to those on the inside.
I don’t remember how the argument proceeded, except that at some stage my mother quoted Nietzsche on gazing into the abyss, at which point she was interrupted by one of the girls asking for a bathroom break. I pulled into the first gas station we passed, and took the dog for a walk while my mother and the girls went in search of restrooms and snacks. I was upset, but after walking for a while I calmed down.
When the drive resumed, neither of us returned to Nietzsche and the abyss.
“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” my mother said, looking out the window at the meadows and, in the distance, the afternoon sun glinting off the water of the Chesapeake Bay.
“You know,” I said, “one the neighbors I met out here told me that the guy who lives three houses down is a retired DC homicide detective.”
My mother didn’t respond.
I Am Pleased to Inform You
Reserve Corps members shall . . . Conduct themselves in a professional manner as governed by applicable Federal and District of Columbia laws and regulations . . . [and] While on Department duty, be held to the same duty obligations as career sworn members, including the duty to make arrests for crimes committed in their presence, the duty to take appropriate police action when required, and the duty to comply with all laws, regulations, Department directives, and lawfully issued orders.
—MPD General Order OMA 101-03
In the summer of 2015, despite the near unanimous opposition of my family and friends, I submitted an “expression of interest” through a form on the Metropolitan Police Department’s website, averring that I was a US citizen, was at least twenty-one years old, had completed sixty semester-hour credits at an accredited postsecondary educational institution, and was in possession of a valid driver’s license.
My form vanished into cyberspace, but a few weeks later, I received an email inviting me to attend a reserve corps information session at the police academy.
If your image of how police academies look was formed by the 1984 movie, you’ve got the wrong image. In Police Academy, the eponymous academy looks like a small liberal arts college, complete with landscaped grounds and a green, manicured central quad. In real life, no such luck, at least not in budget-strapped Washington, DC.
The DC Metropolitan Police Academy is tucked away in Southeast DC—in what I later learned was part of the Seventh District—off a small road no one would ever take if they weren’t a city employee. You drive past the fire department’s training center, full of burned-out buildings and vehicles the firefighters use for practice, then past a lot full of parked city buses, then you get to a locked gate.
The gate is chain-link metal, ten feet high—just in case anyone’s trying to break into the police academy, though it’s a little hard to see why someone would. The gate opens, slowly, with the swipe of a magnetic card, if you possess the right kind of card. If you don’t, you push the call button and hope someone decides to answer. (This is Washington, DC, a city President John F. Kennedy famously described as combining “southern efficiency and northern charm,” so maybe they’ll answer and maybe they won’t.)
When the gate opens, you drive into a scruffy parking lot. The asphalt is pocked with ruts and potholes, and the scraggly grass on the edge of the lot is choked with weeds. To the left is the headquarters of MPD’s K-9 unit, and sometimes a few large, silent German shepherds follow you with their eyes as you drive into the lot. (Slowly.
You really don’t want to speed in here.) You back into a space so you can park facing out, because cops always park facing out; it’s supposed to make a quick getaway easier, though no one ever manages a quick getaway from the Metropolitan Police Academy. It’s a sticky sort of place.
Off in the far corner of the academy is the Tactical Training Center, a vast, hangar-like structure containing a mock town where officers can practice clearing rooms, approaching dangerous suspects, and dealing with school shooters. There’s a small “gas house” where recruits can learn what it’s like to be tear-gassed and practice putting on their gas masks. Up some cracked concrete steps, there’s a big brick building that houses classrooms, offices, a cafeteria, a gym, a pool, and the firing range. Behind that, a smaller annex building holds more classrooms and an auditorium.
Inside the main building, the smell of food from the cafeteria mingles with smoke and gun oil drifting up from the underground firing range and chlorine from the pool.
Over time, I grew to hate that building. It was a place of push-ups and punishment runs, shouted orders and the sour sweat of two hundred frightened recruits. I was just a part-timer, immune from the worst of it, but even so, I’d feel my stomach muscles tighten as I drove through the academy gate, and clench tighter as I walked up the buckling concrete steps. But on that first evening, as I followed the emailed directions and went past the main building, past more dying grass and pitted sidewalks to the smaller annex behind it, I was just surprised by the academy’s air of neglect. It was evening, and the parking lots were nearly empty. Deer were grazing in the trees next to the Tactical Training Center, and they paused to gaze at me. A sign declared the parking space closest to the building reserved for chief of police. Another sign, at the top of the pitted and cracked steps, urged passersby to hold on to railing in case of wet or slippery conditions.
The door was propped open, and a sign directed me to a room filled with tiered rows of seats, each facing a large computer keyboard and monitor.
“Welcome, welcome . . . Ms. Brooks! So glad you could make it! Take a seat, take a seat.”
The genial man at the front of the room didn’t look much like a cop; he was too friendly. I couldn’t see him very well, though, because the computer monitors facing each seat blocked my line of sight.
“I’m so sorry about this room; it’s the only one we could get. I’m so sorry!” This guy was much too nice to be a cop.
Scattered around the room were a handful of other potential reserve corps applicants. None of them said anything to me, and after that night, I never saw most of them again.
The too-nice-to-be-a-cop guy walked us through a short PowerPoint presentation about the reserve corps. The Metropolitan Police Department was the “lead law enforcement agency for the nation’s capital,” he informed us enthusiastically, responsible not only for ordinary crime prevention and investigation but also for “the largest number of National Special Security Events of any US city,” including mass protests, presidential inaugurations, and frequent visits from foreign heads of state. The MPD Reserve Corps (which strove for “Excellence in Volunteer Policing”) provided supplemental manpower both to patrol districts and to specialized police units.
Manpower was the right word: the PowerPoint presentation was full of photos of smiling police officers, all of them male. But despite the dearth of colleagues with two X chromosomes, MPD reserve police officers were, apparently, happy people. In the presentation, they smilingly directed traffic, rode mountain bikes, practiced defensive tactics, spoke into their radios, and posed with President Obama. Maybe they smiled as they arrested people too, but there was no way to know, as the presentation didn’t show anyone being arrested.
The PowerPoint was as sleek and professional as the academy grounds were seedy. Later, I learned that Mr. Too-Nice-to-Be-a-Cop was a reserve officer, but in his day job he worked in the Marine Corps’ public affairs office. The Marine Corps is very, very good at making PowerPoints.
“That was a good PowerPoint,” I told him on my way out.
He beamed. “Thank you! Ms. Brooks, I’m so glad you were able to come. I really enjoy meeting people who are interested in the reserve corps. You can contact me anytime if you have questions.”
I did have questions. First, was I really doing this? But I could hardly pose that question to the nice recruiting officer.
The reserve corps application process was a lot of work for something I wasn’t sure I really wanted, or ought to want. I filled out lengthy forms, listing every address and job I’d ever had and every school I’d ever attended. I provided MPD with my birth certificate, my driving record, and my credit report. I was fingerprinted and weighed, and submitted to a vision test, a hearing test, a physical exam, an EKG, and a body fat analysis.
A police psychologist administered a lengthy battery of psychological tests designed, presumably, to weed out the more blatant sociopaths and sadists from the applicant pool. I was skeptical about the efficacy of the tests—all but the dimmest sadists surely knew not to give an affirmative answer to questions such as “I enjoy watching other people suffer.”
I was hooked up to a polygraph and grilled about my past, and successfully ran a short obstacle course in the police academy gym, racing up and down stairs, dragging a heavy dummy along a mat, crawling under tables, clambering over a chain-link fence, and dry-firing a pistol.
None of this was hard, exactly, but there were a lot of steps. The reserve corps application process took months, with periods of complete silence from the MPD recruiting office alternating with sudden imperious demands: Report to the Police and Fire Clinic at 0800 tomorrow for a physical; schedule a home visit ASAP; provide copies of all medical records by next week.
Finally, on Christmas Eve 2015, I received an email from a sender identified only as “D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.” The body of the message was brusque: “Dear Rosa Brooks: Attached to this email is a letter from D.C. Metropolitan Police Department regarding your application for employment. Please open the attached letter and review it immediately.”
I felt a jolt of anxiety. Perhaps, I thought, I had somehow messed up during the application process. I had too much body fat. I had failed the polygraph. The psychologist who interviewed me had seen through my bland insistence that I “just wanted to serve my community.” Looking at my résumé, he had discerned that I was really an activist, an academic, a journalist: the Enemy. I would be dropped from the applicant pool. Not that it mattered, I reminded myself, since I wasn’t going to do this anyway, was I?
When I finally opened the attachment, I saw that I had gotten it all wrong.
Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been selected for the position of Reserve Police Officer effective April 12, 2016 with the Metropolitan Police Department.
Beginning in 1951, Reserve Corps members have served the Department and the District of Columbia by performing law enforcement, crime prevention, crime detection, community policing and other specialized functions. The Reserve Corps plays an integral part in the Department’s endeavor to provide high quality police service . . .
Reserve Corps training classes occur every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 6:30 PM until 10:30 PM in addition to Saturdays from 8:00 AM until 4:30 PM (excluding the 1st Saturday of each month). The training will last approximately 50 weeks with occasional breaks for major holidays. You may be required to take firearms training during standard business hours (80 hours) and vehicle skills (40 hours).
You are to report to the Metropolitan Police Academy (MPA) on Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 6:30 PM to begin your training.
Dirt in My Eye
ADW (Knife): On the listed date, between the listed times, Complainant reports being stuck in traffic . . . While in traffic, Complainant reports allowing pedestrians to cross in front of his vehicle and while doing so the driver of a silver colored vehicle became upset that he was all
owing [a] person to cross in front of him. Complainant then states as he was allowing the pedestrians to cross Suspect began to blow his horn at him. Suspect then exited the vehicle and approached him with a knife in his hand. Suspect and Complainant began to argue and Suspect stated to Complainant: “You gotta respect me mutha fucka!!”
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
What was I trying to prove?
I could offer up my usual rationalizations: my interest in police reform, my previous writing on violence and the law, and so on. The trouble is, as my mother argued, none of this required me to become a police officer. I could have just read books and articles about policing. I could have interviewed cops, done police ride-alongs as an interested community member, or asked for permission to observe academy classes.
Maybe I was just bored. I lived in a pleasant, leafy Virginia suburb; I took my kids to school each morning in a Honda minivan; I walked the dog and drove to the office each day. I missed the excitement and variety of my earlier work for human rights groups, the State Department, and the Defense Department. Driving to work in my minivan was painless; I could listen to the radio or put on an audiobook. But it was nothing like traveling by helicopter over the green jungles of Sierra Leone or the arid mountains of Afghanistan.
Or maybe I just missed being young, and some subterranean part of my brain decided it was time for a midlife crisis. But I didn’t swap my minivan for a sports car or have a wild affair. Instead, I became a part-time police officer.
So maybe it was all to do with my childhood and the muddled, conflicted messages about authority, gender, and class I absorbed from the adults around me, my mother most of all.
* * *
• • •
As a little girl in the 1970s, I was what people used to call a tomboy. In our blue-collar Long Island neighborhood, there were no other girls on my street, only boys. After school each day, we ran around in a loose pack, climbing trees, wrestling, tossing balls, and trading tattered baseball cards.
