Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  To pass, you had to get forty-three rounds on target, out of a possible fifty-one. My problem was that at least two of those rounds had to go into the target’s head during the “body armor” component of the course, and I still seemed unable to get any rounds into the head. Worse, you had to successfully pass the “daytime” shooting course three times in a row, then pass the night shooting course twice in a row. Passes had to be consecutive—if you passed the daytime course twice but were a single point short the third time, you had to start all over and get three passes in a row. Each time I passed one course, I’d mess up the next. I was constantly having to start over. I was starting to feel like Hardy. What if I failed? What if I just couldn’t do this?

  By the end of the day on Thursday, all but five of us had successfully qualified. Those who qualified were sent off to practice “shoot/don’t shoot” scenarios using the MILO Use of Force training simulator, a sort of giant interactive video game. Hardy and I were among the five laggards still on the range, together with a bewildered young woman from Uganda, who seemed unable to get a single round into any part of the target, and two male recruits who looked mortified to be stuck with the girls.

  Finally, the instructors started to focus on teaching. They had wanted to move along everyone they thought could pass quickly, Garcia told us, so they could now give special attention and coaching to those of us still having difficulty.

  My rounds were hitting down and to the left because I was anticipating the recoil, he told me—I was tensing up in anticipation of the noise and the recoil, and jerking my hands down a bit before I finished pulling the trigger. Even if I only moved my hands a couple of millimeters, that would be enough to pull all my rounds down. He took away my magazines and reloaded them with a mix of live ammunition and dummy rounds. My goal, he said, was to keep the barrel steady when I pulled the trigger, no matter what. When I got to an unexpected dummy round, I would see that I was jerking the barrel down needlessly.

  Garcia was right, and the drill helped, but I was still having trouble with my head shots. It was maddening.

  “Come on, Brooks, stop messing around, we know you can shoot,” Kowalski bellowed at me over the loudspeaker.

  Suddenly, I loved Kowalski. He wanted me to succeed. I no longer hoped someone would sue him into bankruptcy. I wanted to hug him.

  I nodded weakly. Model recruit. Model recruit.

  “You got this?” said Garcia.

  “Yeah. I got this.”

  And I did. I got through one of the daytime courses. Then another. Then another. Finally, three in a row. My head shots were just barely in, but they were in. Then I got through one of the night courses. When I finished shooting the second night course, Garcia went over to my target to count the rounds. I closed my eyes and prayed. He pulled down my target and walked back to me.

  “Okay,” he said with a small smile. “Get out of here.”

  “I’m done?”

  “You’re done.”

  “I passed?”

  “You passed. Now get lost. Go do MILO. I’ll see you back in the classroom.”

  The two men had passed as well, but on the other end of the range, Hardy and the Ugandan girl were still struggling. I cast an anxious glance in their direction.

  “Stop worrying,” Garcia told me. “I’m gonna take care of them.”

  And he did. Somehow, they both eventually passed.

  * * *

  • • •

  After that, I more or less collapsed. The bruises on my arms started to fade, but I was still shaky and dizzy, and when it finally occurred to me to take my temperature, I found I had a fever. My neck hurt and my back hurt. My knees and hip joints still hurt. There was a strange electrical fizzing sensation between my shoulder blades.

  “I think there’s something wrong with me,” I told my husband. He told me again that I should go to the doctor.

  I stared at the fading red ovals on my arms.

  “You know, I wonder . . .” We spent as much time as we could out at our weekend house on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where I was constantly getting tick bites. In previous summers, I had twice gotten the classic “bull’s-eye” rash associated with Lyme disease, and each time I had immediately started a short course of antibiotics. Perhaps because I had always taken antibiotics as soon as I noticed the rash, I had never gotten any other symptoms.

  When I started googling “lyme disease rash,” it didn’t take long to discover that while the bull’s-eye was the most common type of rash to appear in those bitten by Lyme-infected ticks, the rashes could take many forms, and sometimes looked much more like . . . pinkish red bruises. Untreated, Lyme disease could cause a wide range of symptoms, some of them debilitating, from minor flu-like aches and pains to fever, nerve pain, and severe head, neck, and joint pain.

  I went to the doctor.

  The Fourth of July was coming up, and we had a full week off from our academy classes, our first real break since April. I spent that week shivering and moaning. I couldn’t get comfortable; I ached all over. It hurt to stand up, and it hurt to lie down. But by then I was taking antibiotics. Finally, I began to feel better. I was still weak, but things didn’t hurt quite as much. I even began, slowly, to run again. I still hated it, but once the antibiotics kicked in, I found that I could run without too much misery.

  I had qualified on my firearm, and I could run 1.5 miles within the time limit. I was almost giddy with relief.

  With all the new skills and all the stress—all the emphasis on drills and counting rounds—there hadn’t been much time to think about why we were being trained to do all this.

  Two to the body and one to the head! When my head shots went in I was delighted. It wasn’t a real head. It was just an oval printed on a piece of cardboard. It moved, rotating to face you unexpectedly, but it didn’t cry out or bleed when you shot it. When it got all torn up, I replaced it with a new target. Once I was no longer sick, and no longer terrified, going to the range was even sort of fun.

  One day when I was practicing, one of the range instructors checked my gun. “No wonder your rounds aren’t going where you want them,” he said. “Look at this, your sights are off center.” He showed me. Sure enough, my rear sight was skewed to the side. “Take your gun to the armorer. They’ll get that fixed for you.” After that, my head shots went right in, leaving satisfying little holes in my target’s blank face.

  Later, on patrol, I found that I hardly ever thought about the gun in my holster. It might as well not have been there. To the extent that I thought about it, it was mostly because it was sometimes in my way, pinching my skin or banging into my elbow. Sometimes, when I was tired, I used it as an armrest.

  But when I got home from each patrol shift, the first thing I’d do was take my gun out of its holster and put it away in its locked metal box. And each time the heavy lid snapped closed, I felt a small wave of relief. It was like slamming the lid on a dangerous viper.

  You Live with That Forever

  As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve the community; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception; & the weak against oppression and intimidation; & the peaceful against violence or disorder, & respect the constitutional rights of all to liberty, equality and justice. . . . I will maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn or ridicule. . . .

  —The Law Enforcement Oath

  After firearms training, it was back to the classroom. Our class was chugging through the curriculum, covering basic investigation skills, crime scene management, and arrest warrants, along with various practical skills. We learned to use an atrial defibrillator and apply a clotting agent to a bleeding wound, we practiced handcuffing one another, and we learned pat-down and search techniques. (Don’t skip the crotch! Everyone feels weird about running their hands over someone else’s crotch, we were told, which is why bad
guys love to hide everything from knives to heroin in their undies, and why cops need to be willing to get up close and personal while conducting searches. Bras were also said to be favored hiding places. Nonetheless, I noticed, even the instructors were reluctant to demonstrate good search techniques when we practiced.)

  We practiced directing traffic, raced police cars through driving courses laid out with traffic cones, lights flashing and sirens blaring, and went through the time-honored police academy ritual of getting a face full of pepper spray.

  We had units on handling infectious diseases, industrial accidents, bomb threats, and offenses involving diplomats (a significant issue in Washington, DC, where local law often runs up against the brick wall of diplomatic immunity enjoyed by employees of the city’s many foreign embassies). We learned the proper procedures for handling incidents involving members of Congress or government couriers carrying classified national security information—topics similarly not on the typical police academy curriculum, but the kind of thing that comes up in a city that hosts a hundred US senators, 435 members of the House of Representatives, and thousands of Defense Department and intelligence agency employees.

  We practiced searching local and national criminal records databases, and operating tint meters to check automobile window tint levels. We covered sex crimes, animal bites, homicides, credit card fraud, theft offenses, assault offenses, domestic violence offenses, and a host of other offenses, major and minor.

  Some of the arrestable misdemeanor offenses on the books were minor indeed, or remarkably obscure. We were authorized to arrest people without a warrant for, among other things:

  Digging for bait in Rock Creek Park

  Operating more than five eel traps

  Keeping bees within five hundred feet of human habitation

  Owning or keeping a dog that disturbed the peace (by barking or in any other manner)

  Selling vehicles on public space

  Poster—lewd

  Misconduct in public toilets

  Climbing streetlamps

  Hitching animals to streetlamps

  Landing an amphibian craft without permission

  The list of Washington, DC, misdemeanor offenses was long, and included much that I would never have imagined constituted criminal offenses rather than civil offenses. Citizens could be imprisoned for up to ten days for walking their dog on a leash with a length exceeding four feet, an offense of which I had frequently been guilty myself.

  The list of traffic violations was even longer. While only the most serious constituted arrestable offenses, we were authorized to conduct traffic stops and issue tickets for people driving too fast; driving too slow; driving with improperly affixed, illegible, or improperly illuminated tags; driving with the front, rear, side, or windshield obstructed; or driving with a sign or other unauthorized item attached to the mirror, window, or window frame. The pamphlet listing moving violations and parking violations ran to thirteen pages.

  * * *

  • • •

  The academy curriculum was as striking for what it didn’t cover as what it did. For instance, we had eight units on vehicular offenses and one unit on use-of-force policies—but nothing at all on race and policing.

  Our instructors occasionally talked about race, but only to insist that it didn’t matter. As one of the recruit sergeants—an African American former marine renowned for punishing recruits for minor uniform infractions—bellowed at us, “You graduate from my academy, you gonna go out there and treat people right! You the police. I don’t care if you got a rich white lady in Georgetown or a black drug boy in Southeast, you gonna put some respect on it! And I don’t care what color you are, black, white, yellow, brown, or purple. From now on you all gonna bleed blue.”

  Citizens were citizens, and cops were cops. We were legally and morally obligated to refrain from discrimination of any sort, and to assist all citizens who believed they were victims of hate crimes, a category defined in DC broadly enough to include crimes motivated not only by race, sex, religion, and national origin but also by marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or orientation, family responsibilities, homelessness, disability, political affiliation, and matriculation status.

  Officially, we also didn’t study the demographic differences between Washington’s seven police districts, though those differences were obvious, stark, and the subject of much derisive commentary from instructors and recruits alike. In the Second District, which covered prosperous, mostly white Northwest DC, there were five homicides and 358 violent crimes in 2016, the year I graduated from the police academy. In the Seventh District, which was poor and predominantly African American, there were forty-five homicides and 1,123 violent crimes. We didn’t talk about how the city came to be so segregated, or discuss the impact of Washington’s growing gentrification on crime and policing, or ask why 80 percent of all arrests and 90 percent of drug arrests were of African American suspects in a city where black residents made up 47 percent of the population.

  For that matter, we didn’t receive any information at all on overall crime rates, arrest rates, or patterns in crime and arrest rates. Theories of policing (the “broken windows” approach, “hot spot” policing, community-oriented policing, and so on) merited only a single paragraph in one of the early lesson plans, and we didn’t talk about what effective policing might look like. If the police did a good job, what would that mean? Was effective policing measured by a high arrest rate? A low crime rate? High levels of community trust? Did it require more cops, fewer cops, or cops who did different things? What kind of policing correlated with what kinds of outcomes?

  Over-criminalization and over-incarceration were also never discussed. Throughout the United States, recent decades have seen a well-documented explosion of over-criminalization, at both state and federal levels. Minor civil infractions have been legislatively redefined as criminal misdemeanors, and numerous violations of complex regulatory codes have been criminalized—often creating brand-new and obscure crimes. At the federal level, there are now some three hundred thousand laws whose violation can lead to prison time; at the state level, a recent study found that Michigan legislators created an average of sixty new crimes a year during the six-year period the study looked at, while Oklahoma created forty-six new crimes a year, and South Carolina created forty-five new crimes a year. But we didn’t talk about why so many trivial forms of misbehavior—particularly trivial forms of misbehavior more common among poor people of color than among affluent whites—were punishable by jail time, or about the potential relationship between our national fondness for inventing new “crimes” and the nation’s skyrocketing incarceration rates.

  We didn’t discuss the fact that nineteen out of twenty arrests in DC are for nonviolent offenses, or that the vast majority of people arrested for driving without a permit or after a license suspension are African American. We didn’t talk about the reasons people might be driving without a license, or the consequences befalling individuals who got arrested, or the impact of high incarceration rates on already challenged communities, or the reasons Washington, DC, has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the country (in a country that has the highest incarceration rate in the world).

  We also didn’t discuss the national controversies raging over policing, race, and use of force. While I was at the academy, several police shootings made the headlines. On July 5, 2016, while I was still celebrating my successful completion of the firearms qualification course, Louisiana police shot and killed a black man named Alton Sterling. The next day, a Minnesota police officer shot and killed another black man, Philando Castile, during a traffic stop; the officer panicked when Castile told him he was carrying a licensed, concealed weapon, and shot him as he reached for his license and registration. Both shootings sparked mass protests. The day after Castile�
��s death, a black sniper who said he was motivated by anger over police killings ambushed police officers in Dallas, killing five officers and wounding nine others. Three weeks later, there were mass protests in Baltimore after city prosecutors dropped charges against the officers involved in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray. In September, an Oklahoma officer shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed African American man, and a Charlotte, North Carolina, officer shot and killed a black man named Keith Scott. There were more protests, and the protests sometimes turned violent. In Charlotte, the mayor declared a state of emergency, and the governor sent in the National Guard.

  All over the United States, people were talking about race and policing, police violence, and police reform. But virtually none of this conversation made it into the police academy’s classrooms. Recruits talked about it, of course, but mostly in the hallways and the lunchroom, and the discussions were hushed and awkward. About half of the new recruits at the Metropolitan Police Academy each year are African American, and it was clear that most recruits weren’t comfortable talking about race. We were all blue now, weren’t we?

  Outside the academy gates, most Americans seemed to be choosing sides: Black Lives Matter, or Blue Lives Matter. Particularly for black recruits, it was a painful dilemma. We all knew that black men make up a disproportionate percentage of those killed by police in the United States. The worst of it was that many of the police officers who fired the fatal shots were also African American. More than once, I heard black recruits offer a wry justification for their decision to join the police: “Why’m I here? Because the safest place for a young black male in this country is behind a badge.”