Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  We were to refer to all instructors and academy staff as sir or ma’am, or by their title and surname, and were required to greet them if they passed us in the hallways or entered the classroom; we were to raise our hands and wait to be recognized prior to speaking in class; we were to rise from our seats whenever an instructor or other official entered the room, and remain standing until told to sit. We were not permitted to step onto the rectangular rug bearing the MPD seal in the annex lobby—it lay below photos of MPD officers who had died in the line of duty, and as new recruits, we were unworthy to set foot on it. Instead, we were to walk carefully around the edges. We would be expected to be present and on time for all classes; tardiness or unexcused absences would be cause for dismissal.

  We would take numerous exams, and would have to achieve a score of 70 percent or higher on each exam, as well as on each substantive subtopic being tested. Good note-taking skills would be required for success; to that end, we should always come to class with notebooks and pens, but we were to use only pens containing black ink, blue ink being prohibited by MPD.

  We were informed that along with the career recruit class that had also just started at the academy, we were the first group to have the benefit of the academy’s new curriculum, which would be scenario-based and, we were assured, a great improvement over the old curriculum. (There was no textbook and, at first, no handouts or assigned readings; the new curriculum, it transpired, was being prepared week by week. None of our instructors had seen the lesson plans before, and occasionally our class went too fast and ran out of curriculum, causing temporary training lulls.)

  Our first lesson covered the history of policing, from which I gleaned the following:

  First there was the Code of Hammurabi (PowerPoint slide: Babylonian stele showing Hammurabi handing a scroll to a minion). “If a man destroys the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. If one breaks a man’s bone, they shall break his bone.” Moral: people have had laws for a long time. But Hammurabi forgot to assign anyone to enforce the law, an oversight corrected by Augustus Caesar, who created the Praetorian Guard (PowerPoint slide: Roman holding spear). Later, the emperor Justinian reformed Roman law and established the right to a fair trial.

  Unfortunately, Rome fell. But then King Alfred reigned, and did something important but not specified in the lesson (PowerPoint slide: King Alfred). Later, each English shire had a chief called a reeve, and the shire reeves collected taxes, which is why today we have people called sheriffs. Then there was King Charles, who made use of the Court of the Star Chamber, which no one liked, so he was beheaded by Oliver Cromwell. Charles II, reflecting on his father’s fate, signed the Habeas Corpus Act, requiring law enforcement officials to persuade a judge of the validity of arrests and launching the modern era of law (PowerPoint slide: Charles II on throne).

  By this time, England had colonies in North America. The colonies imported English law to the New World, then fought the Revolutionary War and became independent. Then as now, it was dangerous to be a police officer. In 1791, New York sheriff Cornelius Hogeboom became the first law enforcement officer in the new American republic to be killed in the line of duty; while serving a “‘writ of ejectment’ to move squatters off a parcel of land . . . he was ambushed, shot, and killed by a group of men disguised as Indians” (PowerPoint slide: gravestone of Cornelius Hogeboom).

  This was one of the more tendentious oversimplifications in a lesson full of tendentious oversimplifications. In 1791, upstate New York was essentially the Wild West, and land ownership in the region was frequently ambiguous and constantly disputed. Legal and political skirmishing over control of land on what was then the frontier of the expanding young nation continued for decades, and in many cases turned violent. Much of the time, the interests of wealthy gentry were pitted against those of small farmers. It was in this context that Sheriff Cornelius Hogeboom met his end in the town of Hillsdale.

  After the death of wealthy landowner John Van Rensselaer, Rensselaer’s son-in-law Philip Schuyler sought Sheriff Hogeboom’s help in evicting some farmers who had settled on land that Schuyler considered part of his wife’s rightful inheritance. Schuyler went to court and obtained a writ of ejection ordering farmer John Arnold to leave his land, but when Sheriff Hogeboom arrived to oversee the ejection and the forced sale of John Arnold’s personal property, the sheriff and his party were set upon by seventeen men “painted and in Indian dress,” some with their faces “blacked.”

  The Albany Gazette reported on subsequent events: the “companions of the sheriff desired him to spur his horse or they would all be shot; to which [Hogeboom] replied that he was vested with the law, and they should never find him a coward.” At this, one of the supposed Indians “leveled his piece, and lodged a ball in the heart of the sheriff; upon which [Hogeboom] said, ‘Brother, I am a dead man!’ fell from his horse, and expired.” The farmer John Arnold and several others were subsequently arrested and tried for Hogeboom’s murder, but to the great consternation of the landowning elites, local juries acquitted them all.

  Thus the first law enforcement death in the United States—like so many that came later—involved complex elements of race and arose out of conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

  None of this made it into the Metropolitan Police Academy’s history of policing. Instead, Reserve Recruit Class 2016-01 moved briskly from Sheriff Hogeboom’s death to Sir Robert Peel and his London “bobbies” (PowerPoint slide: a portrait of a London police officer, circa 1850), and thence to the reforms of Chief August Vollmer by way of Tammany Hall. The police corruption endemic in the era of machine politics was replaced with professionalism, and police call boxes were replaced with portable radios.

  In the 1960s, the civil rights movement began, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and there were riots in numerous American cities. Subsequently, police departments diversified. Rodney King was beaten. The Justice Department investigated many police departments. Reforms ensued. Later, the 9/11 attacks “provided a clear example of what modern policing can be at its best,” and placed terror prevention “at the forefront of modern policing, especially here in the nation’s capital.”

  Our instructor concluded “The History of Policing” by speed reading out loud from the end of his lesson plan: “We have covered almost four thousand years of history over the course of this lesson. As we’ve seen, police work has been constantly changing and evolving and will continue to do so over the course of your careers.”

  Winded, he looked up at us with palpable relief. “Any questions?”

  No one had questions; the whirlwind tour of four thousand years of law enforcement history had left all sixteen members of Reserve Recruit Class 2016-01 numb and bewildered. I was still wondering how King Alfred fit into the picture.

  In any case, I had pledged to myself that I was going to keep my mouth shut. My goal, I had decided, was to be as invisible as possible. I was not going to act like a law professor, a journalist, or an ACLU member. I was not going to act like a smart-ass. Insofar as possible, I was determined to act like a model recruit: I would be respectful, obedient, and dull. I would strive to perform solidly on all exams, while eschewing academic excellence.

  * * *

  • • •

  Good grades always came easily to me, but by the end of elementary school I had figured out that no one likes kids with straight A’s. By the time I started high school in 1985, I had learned to throw in a few egregiously awful grades to balance out the excessively high ones, and to add a small amount of bad behavior to my generally straitlaced existence. I was never much of a drinker, but I raided my parents’ liquor cabinet and marijuana stash so I could show up at the occasional high school party with an illicit offering. From time to time, I skipped school, just to show I wasn’t a goody-goody. At some point, protective coloration became habit: by 1987, I had become what DC law calls a “habitual truant,” ultimately missing more than half
the school days during my final year of high school. I’d sleep until noon or one, sometimes making it to school at three for sports or drama practice, but mostly I just stayed home all day, sleeping or reading. School officials left puzzled phone messages on our answering machine. After a while their tone became stern, then angry, warning that I was jeopardizing my chances of graduating. I deleted the messages.

  In hindsight, I was depressed. Things at home were falling apart. My mother and stepfather’s marriage had grown tense and angry, and my mother was struggling with back pain that sometimes kept her in bed for days at a time. My stepfather worked long hours as a union organizer; at home, he paced around, muttering curses, or planted himself in front of the television with a sheaf of papers on his lap. My brother, Ben, now fourteen, joined him most evenings in front of the TV, where together they formed an impenetrable male wall of silence, responding to my occasional interjections with indifferent grunts. My mother’s public speaking career had taken off and she was away from home more and more. When she wasn’t traveling or confined to bed with back pain, she buried herself in her writing, disappearing all day into her office in the basement. She didn’t wake me in the mornings to tell me to go to school, and if we happened to encounter each other in the kitchen early in the afternoon, she taking a quick lunch break and I eating a late breakfast, she always seemed surprised to discover that I was still home.

  This was the eighties, before the term “helicopter parent” was coined, and no one was talking about adolescent anxiety and depression. No one asked me if something was wrong, and it didn’t occur to me to tell anyone how miserable I was, or to ask my mother or brother or stepfather if they were miserable too. None of us had the right vocabulary for such a conversation. We could all talk with wit and eloquence about politics, history, or philosophy when the occasion seemed to demand it, but we didn’t know how to talk to one another.

  My erratic grades and the increasingly menacing calls from school officials upset my father, who warned me about the importance of self-discipline. My mother took the opposite line: when school officials finally called a meeting to discuss my diminishing odds of graduating, she nearly sabotaged my father’s campaign to persuade the school that my chronic absences stemmed from some sort of debilitating but undiagnosable ailment by tartly informing the principal that her daughter had “better things to do than waste time at your school.” But I had already gotten an acceptance letter from Harvard, and in the end—after some well-timed musings from my father about what the local media might say if a Harvard-bound student with an obscure but challenging health problem was kicked out for poor attendance—the principal decided it was simpler to delete the “no credit” notations from my transcript and wave me off to Cambridge.

  My mother and stepfather drove me to college a few months later. Strolling through Harvard Yard in a shiny satin Teamsters jacket, my mother kept up a stream of commentary on the pretentiousness, corruption, and general worthlessness of elite Ivy League institutions. She insisted that we all visit the office of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, which was then locked in a bitter struggle with the university over unionization, and assured the union’s president, Kris Rondeau, that her daughter was eager to support the workers’ struggle. I was resentful and embarrassed. But a few days after my mother and Gary left, I found my way back to the union office and asked how I could help.

  Freed from the miasma of depression and anger hanging over our home, I pulled out of my funk, but I still struggled to balance being my mother’s daughter with becoming my own separate self. How do you rebel against a rebel? I marched with union workers, demanded that the university divest from apartheid South Africa, and picketed Harvard’s all-male finals clubs. But when it came to romance, I ignored the earnest campus activists and went off instead with prep school boys, self-declared future investment bankers, and ROTC cadets. I wanted their acceptance and admiration; I wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves.

  Unsurprisingly, few of these relationships lasted long. But this was okay, I told myself. I was infiltrating.

  You could say I was struggling to find myself, though this has always struck me as a strange formulation—not only because the notion of the “self” is an odd construct, but because when we say “I want to find myself,” usually we mean exactly the opposite: we really want to escape from our muddled, unsatisfying selves and become some other, better kind of self. The kind of self who goes to art galleries and listens to classical music, or does push-ups and tracks down serial killers. The kind of self who knows how to have honest conversations with the people they love.

  In 1988, during my sophomore year in college, I stumbled onto a new ambition: I wanted to go to medical school. If I became a doctor, I thought, I could help people in direct, immediate, and uncomplicated ways, with no need for picket lines or internecine quarrels about socialist-feminist theory. Relieved to have come up with a postcollege plan, I enrolled in pre-med courses and called my mother to share the news.

  “So, I figured out what I want to do after college. I want to go to medical school and become a doctor.”

  Long silence.

  Finally: “A doctor?”

  I was unnerved, but repeated, “Yes, a doctor.”

  More silence.

  Then: “Anyone can be a doctor.”

  “Right. So, I could be a doctor.”

  “But doctors are dumb.”

  I had forgotten that my mother, who had a PhD in cellular biology, had started her writing career with several books on the flaws and follies of the American medical profession. There was The American Health Empire: Power, Profits and Politics, which she coauthored with my father, John Ehrenreich, and published in 1971, along with several feminist critiques of the medical profession, including Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, published in 1973, and For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women, published in 1978, both coauthored with my godmother Deirdre English. All in all, my mother didn’t think much of doctors.

  “Doctors are dumb? So, I’d be a smart doctor,” I countered.

  I could feel my mother’s consternation through the phone line. “But—Rosa, you need to do something special. You could write brilliant novels. Or lead great movements for social change.”

  I don’t remember how the call ended, but I do remember my sense of pained frustration. I yearned for my mother’s approval, and at some other time, I might have been flattered that she thought so highly of my potential. But right then, I just felt burdened. What if I didn’t want to do something special? What if I couldn’t? What if I just wanted to be ordinary, like the blue-collar parents of my childhood friends?

  Still, I dropped the pre-med courses.

  * * *

  • • •

  I wanted to be an ordinary police recruit too. Or at least as ordinary as possible, given my gender, age, and day job. As one of only two women in my academy class, I couldn’t exactly blend in with the crowd, but I promised myself that I could, and would, keep quiet about the lacunae and inadequacies of the recruit instructional materials. I didn’t yet know much about the Metropolitan Police Academy or my classmates, but I was fairly sure that launching into a disquisition on the history of policing and class conflict in the early American republic would not lead to being voted most likely to succeed. So I nodded attentively at the end of the history lecture and wrote “KING ALFRED” in my notebook.

  During our next session, we were issued khaki recruit uniforms. I hadn’t worn a uniform since my brief membership in the Brownies as a seven-year-old (a membership terminated a few weeks later for nonpayment of dues, which I justified by arguing, to my mother’s delight, that I preferred to try to integrate the Cub Scouts, anyway). I found I didn’t much care for the recruit uniform. In fact, it bore a passing resemblance to my long-ago Brownie uniform, being similarly mud-hued and shapeless. The uniforms were supposedly
unisex, which meant, in practice, designed for male bodies. Pants that fit around the hips pooled at my ankles and gapped at my waist; shirts that fit around the waist were too tight at the bust.

  “We had a guy in a reserve class here a few years ago,” one of the instructors observed as we paraded out of the gym locker room in our ill-fitting khakis. “When he realized he was going to have to actually wear a uniform, he up and quit. Can you believe that?”

  Yes, I could. But in my new role as model recruit, I refrained from comment.

  Although we worked our way through the same curriculum as the career recruits who filled the academy’s classrooms during the day, the majority of our instructors were reserve officers themselves, rather than full-time academy staff. While many had been reserve officers for years or even decades, they had day jobs as lawyers, engineers, web designers, and, of course, “consultants,” and with a handful of exceptions, they had little interest in the hazing and paramilitary discipline that pervaded the police academy experience for career recruits. We wore the same uniform as the career recruits, but did far fewer push-ups, and received only a desultory introduction to drill and formation.

  “It’s pointless,” our instructor declared. “And you don’t have to be good at it, because it’s completely irrelevant to anything you will ever do as a police officer, but you need to learn it just well enough to avoid embarrassing the reserve corps during your graduation ceremony, because you’re going to have to march alongside the career recruits.” I positioned myself between two former marines and parroted everything they did. I was always half a beat behind, but the instructor declared my marching marginally acceptable, and we moved on.

  Exams at the academy were challenging only insofar as the questions often appeared to have been written by people determined to win a prize for “most bizarre multiple choice questions.” Occasionally, I suspected the exam writers of having a little fun at our expense: