Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  By now, we had watched so many officer-safety videos that most of us, regardless of race, could relate to the officers involved in those shootings. “There’s no such thing as a routine call” had been drilled into us. When you watch enough videos of officers getting hurt because they were too slow to react when a suspect pulled out a weapon, it becomes easy to empathize with officers who pulled the trigger themselves.

  And by now, we had all been “killed” during scenario-based role-play practice sessions. In both our classroom practice scenarios and our sessions at the academy’s Tactical Training Center, we had been dispatched to mock calls and conducted mock traffic stops. Typically, we recruits would bumble around asking irrelevant questions or falling prey to intentional distractions. At that point, an instructor would pull out a training weapon and splat! Our backs or chests would be covered in bright-colored paint, and we’d trot off sheepishly to be debriefed on our fatal lack of paranoia. (“You were so busy taking nice neat notes in your cute little police notebook that you didn’t even notice the guy reaching into his pocket and drawing on you!” “You didn’t bother to search the goddamn sofa before you let the ‘victim’ sit down on it, and you were so busy yapping into your radio you didn’t notice when she pulled a gun from between the cushions!”)

  It became natural to see the officer’s side of the story in the wake of controversial police shootings. We watched the same videos the rest of the country was watching, but by now, we had learned to see different things. Ordinary people might see a cop brutally murdering someone who hadn’t done anything wrong, but we could see an officer reacting as we had all been trained to react. True, the guy who got shot turned out to be reaching for his cell phone—but it could just as easily have been a gun, right? True, maybe the suspect wasn’t responding to police orders because he was deaf or mentally ill—but there was no way for an officer to know the suspect wasn’t about to lunge at him with superhuman strength, was there?

  Sergeant Flanagan was the only one of our instructors who took any time to talk about this. Somehow, the 2014 Tamir Rice shooting came up during one of our Saturday defensive tactics classes. Rice, a twelve-year-old boy, was shot by a Cleveland police officer as he ran around in a deserted section of a city park, playing with a toy gun.

  “I got it, guys, you have to be prepared for anything. And I’m trying to teach you to be ready for anything and to react fast. But fast is not the same as stupid.” Flanagan’s eight-year-old daughter had come to work with him and was playing a game on the other side of the gym. He kept glancing over at her.

  “You have to think before you act. You end up killing a twelve-year-old who’s playing with a toy gun, how are you going to live with yourself? And why the fuck would an officer run toward someone he thought was an armed man when he had no backup and no one was shooting or in any immediate danger? Think about it.”

  He seemed taken aback by his own vehemence, and his tone became more apologetic. “Look, I don’t want to second-guess anyone. I wasn’t there, so it’s not for me to say. I’m just saying, from the outside, you have to ask: What could have been done differently in that situation? Maybe wait for backup, take cover, ask the dispatcher a few more questions about the call before rushing in, speak to the kid on the car’s loudspeaker and tell him to drop the gun. You rush in, you’re scared, you’re not thinking straight? Someone gets killed, and you live with that forever.”

  But the contradictions were baked into the training. Tactical officer safety dicta clashed directly with other precepts of successful policing. To maximize officer safety, you had to be decisive and react quickly. You were supposed to control the situation at all times. You had to watch the suspect’s hands and avoid standing too close. You were supposed to put drivers in stopped vehicles at a disadvantage by shining your lights into their mirrors. When you went into someone’s business or residence, you weren’t supposed to let a suspect sit on the sofa, or talk to you in the kitchen. You never let anyone reach into a place you couldn’t see.

  But we were also repeatedly told to treat people with respect. (“It is your responsibility as an officer to portray nonverbal signals that are consistent with a positive and professional image,” advised the recruit instructional materials. “Officers are human and they will have strong emotions while performing their duties. These emotions must be managed and at times concealed. It is important to avoid nonverbal signals driven by anger, frustration, and inattentiveness because they inhibit your ability to gain an individual’s trust and effectively do your job.”) A good officer, we were told, is a patient listener who shows empathy and establishes rapport. But it’s tough to show empathy or establish rapport when you’re staring obsessively at someone’s hands, refusing to let him sit down on his own sofa, or shining a bright light in his eyes.

  Police departments worry about legal liability, and much of what did and didn’t find its way into the academy curriculum seemed to have been dictated more by liability concerns than by common sense. As a law professor, I understood: if an instructor told recruits to relax and stop worrying that every encounter could turn deadly and a young officer was subsequently killed because he didn’t take appropriate tactical precautions, his family could sue the department for failing to provide adequate training. On the other hand, if an instructor simply told recruits to use their own judgment whenever they felt any subjective sense of danger, MPD rules be damned, and a young officer subsequently shot an unarmed citizen, the department would be sued then too. But no one was going to get sued or fired for reading a list of rules out loud. If the rules contradicted one another and pushed officers in conflicting directions, that was their problem.

  And if a lawsuit threatened, the department would be only too happy to throw us under the bus. Our instructors made this crystal clear: MPD was not our friend. If you were facing an assaultive suspect and called a 10-33 on your radio, your fellow officers would race to your side—but if your actions made the department look bad, you would suddenly find that you were all alone. In the age of body-worn cameras and cell phone videos, we were told, you had to dot your i’s, cross your t’s, and pay your union dues, because everything you did would be scrutinized by Monday morning quarterbacks.

  The contradictions bothered me. Officially, almost no one at the academy was willing to acknowledge that they existed, which bothered me most of all. Here we were, at the police academy in the nation’s capital, at a time when the whole country was talking about race, violence, and policing, but you wouldn’t know it from our curriculum. We talked about how to attach leg irons and when to contact animal control, but not about the role police should play in a diverse democratic society. We talked about overlapping jurisdictional issues with other federal police agencies, but not about racial disparities in DC arrest rates.

  People sometimes speak of the “blue wall of silence,” the unspoken rule that cops don’t rat out other cops. I had already seen it in action: When the union representative assured me that I didn’t have to tell the internal affairs detectives anything about Williams, he didn’t have to spell it out. (I’ll never know how many of my fellow recruits took the message to heart and stayed mum about what they’d seen and heard.) But the blue wall of silence often extended to internal discussions as well.

  A strong norm against asking too many questions has long been part of police culture. Perhaps it stems from policing’s paramilitary heritage: Good cops, like good soldiers, follow orders and get the job done. They complain, just as soldiers complain: the uniforms suck, the equipment is shitty, the sergeant is an asshole. But they don’t sit around questioning the whole enterprise or pondering the intangibles. Perhaps senior police officials do so, but recruits and junior patrol officers are not, as a rule, encouraged to ask one another if arresting more people makes the streets safer or less safe; or debate whether the training emphasis on officer safety makes cops too quick to pull the trigger; or discuss the impact of midtwentieth-century restric
tive racial covenants on the demographics and economic well-being of modern DC neighborhoods.

  This is not because cops are stupid or incurious. Some are, of course—stupidity being evenly distributed among all professions, classes, races, genders, and nationalities, as is courage, kindness, creativity, intelligence, and wit. But most police officers are thoughtful and intelligent. They’re also far better educated than police officers in earlier generations: within MPD, more than 75 percent of new recruits already have bachelor’s degrees when they arrive at the academy.

  Recruits come in wanting to ask questions, but they soon learn that there’s no percentage in it. The police academy and the roll call room aren’t like university classrooms: instructors like Kowalski aren’t going to pat you on the head or give you an A for highlighting contradictions and ambiguities. You’re evaluated based on your ability to shoot, cuff people, drive fast, fill out forms, write effective reports, and stay out of trouble. No one cares about your views on the nature of the criminal justice system. But the contradictions still troubled me, and I suspected they bothered more of my peers than were willing to admit it.

  Despite my determination to keep my mouth shut and focus on being a model recruit, I couldn’t entirely hide my dismay. Under the ill-fitting khaki uniform, I was the same person I had always been: too restless, too curious, and too much my mother’s daughter to see problems without wanting to jump in and try to solve them. Toward the end of my academy training, I drafted a short memo proposing a new fellowship program for young MPD officers. The program I proposed was designed to create a space for young officers to talk about all the hard issues never discussed at the academy or in the roll call room: race, poverty, mental illness, excessive force, over-criminalization, alternatives to arrest. Through a combination of workshops, projects, mentorship, and community engagement focused on the role of police in a diverse, democratic society, I argued, young officers could be encouraged to ask hard questions and serve as leaders and change agents within MPD.

  I shared the memo with my reserve recruit classmates for their comments, then gave it to Ben Haiman, one of our primary academy instructors. Ben was a reserve officer—after graduating, I patrolled with him several times—but he also worked for MPD as a civilian, serving as one of the chief’s special assistants. He was young, smart, and energetic, and he struck me as both idealistic enough to think change was possible, and politically savvy enough to know how to get something new through the MPD bureaucracy.

  Ben was noncommittal. It was an interesting idea, he said, but this wasn’t a good time to float it to the higher-ups. This was the summer of 2016, and Cathy Lanier, MPD’s longest-serving police chief and Ben’s boss, had just announced her intent to retire. The DC City Council was reportedly interviewing potential replacements, and no one knew who the next chief would be. Until there was clarity about the department’s top leadership, Ben said, senior officials would be unsure of their positions, and no one was likely to champion a risky new initiative. It would be better to just wait on this until the tea leaves were more favorable.

  I knew that new ideas, like viruses, can trigger the production of bureaucratic antibodies, and I didn’t have the credibility or connections within the department to push the proposal forward on my own. I was willing to trust Ben’s judgment, and returned to being a model recruit.

  Was That Who I Was?

  Application of Leg Irons

  Leg irons may be used to secure prisoners who violently resist arrest, pose an escape risk or at the discretion of the officer to prevent violence, escape or injury. Leg irons function in the same way as handcuffs including the double lock.

  When applying leg irons the officer must remember leg irons must:

  Only be applied to a handcuffed subject.

  Only be applied from the side.

  Adjust for fit.

  Double lock.

  —Recruit Instructional Materials

  On October 14, 2016, my reserve recruit class turned in our khaki recruit uniforms and received our blues. We took a group photo in front of the Lincoln Memorial, practiced marching in formation, and memorized the Law Enforcement Oath. Together with the career recruit class that was graduating at the same time, we chanted the oath, pinned on our badges, walked across the stage in the police academy auditorium, and shook the hand of the newly appointed interim MPD chief, Peter Newsham.

  My mother came to our graduation, and managed to be a good sport about it. She summoned up a smile at the appropriate moments, and even complimented Sergeant Flanagan on his impressive physique when the ceremony was over, making him blush. But on the drive back home, she told me she was disturbed by how militaristic the whole thing was—the marching, the chanting, the dress uniforms, and the honor guard. She was particularly upset, she said, by the video played for family members before the recruits marched into the auditorium.

  I never saw the video. According to one of our instructors, it was an innocuous pastiche of MPD officers through the ages. According to my mother, it was full of images of officers firing tear gas into crowds of protesters. “I might have been one of those protesters,” she told me. “You might have been one of those protesters.”

  “Hmm,” I said neutrally. “I’ll mention that to the instructors. Maybe that video should be retired.”

  Either way, it was over. Our academy training was done. My classmates and I were sworn, armed officers of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police, and we were officially ready to start patrolling.

  I didn’t feel ready. While I was at the academy, I could still tell myself—and my mother, and any friends or colleagues, if the issue came up—that I was just an observer, only there to find out how cops are trained. But now the city of Washington, DC, had given me a badge and a gun. My science experiment was suddenly becoming less theoretical. Unless I made my mother happy by resigning, I was going to be putting someone in handcuffs at some point, and statistically, that “someone” was likely to be poor and black. Statistically, I knew I was unlikely ever to fire my gun at another human being. I wasn’t even likely to use my baton or pepper spray. But it was now a genuine possibility.

  Before we graduated, I was someone with a scholarly interest in how other people justified their willingness to use violence. Now I was someone who had to justify my own willingness to do so. I didn’t plan to use violence, and I didn’t want to use violence. But pinning on that badge and going on patrol meant that I was willing to accept it as a potential option, even a potential duty. Was that who I was?

  More prosaically, I was also worried about the possibility—indeed, probability—of screwing up. My time at the academy left me keenly aware of all the things I didn’t really understand and barely knew how to do. It was the little things that worried me. I was afraid I would fail to hear my call sign on the radio, fill out the wrong property forms, forget to double-lock someone’s handcuffs, get lost while driving, be unable to find the phone number for the duty sergeant, and put my body-worn camera on upside down. Out of the academy, among the real police officers, I would be revealed as the fraud that I was: too slow, too soft, too female, too many fancy degrees, too few policing skills. Everyone—the other cops and probably even the local criminals—would look at me with pity and contempt.

  At the academy, we usually knew exactly what we were supposed to do at any given time. We might not like it, but it was fairly clear. We had a set and relatively unvarying schedule, we sat in the classroom, we took written tests and practical exams, we did PT and practiced defensive tactics. We knew the next steps. If the rules were sometimes rigid or absurd, they had the benefit of being, on the whole, quite straightforward. And at the academy, I was surrounded by people I had come to know. The instructors knew my name, and I liked many of my reserve recruit classmates. We had done push-ups together, taken exams together, survived firearms training together, been pepper-sprayed tog
ether. Now we were about to be separated and cast out of the academy into the big world, and the big world had very little interest in us.

  Career MPD officers are each assigned a field training officer (FTO) as soon as they leave the police academy and arrive at their districts, and they spend their first twelve to sixteen weeks of full-time patrol working under the supervision of their FTOs. Typically, new career officers have a different FTO every four weeks, and work their way through a series of progressively more challenging assignments. For the first month, they focus on honing their radio communications skills, learning their way around the patrol cars’ mobile data terminals, learning local geography, handling less-serious calls, and improving their report-writing. Their vehicles are designated as training cars, and aren’t generally dispatched to Priority 1 assignments (assaults, robberies in progress, or other urgent calls likely to require more experienced officers). As their training advances in the second and third months, they gradually handle more complex calls and write reports with less supervision. After 480 hours of patrolling, they take a certification ride with a training sergeant who evaluates their readiness for solo patrol. Once certified, officers can operate in either a 10-4 capacity—with a partner, in DC police parlance—or 10-99, all alone.

  In practice, the process was often much messier than it was on paper, but the full-time career officers had at least some semblance of a structured field training program. New reserve officers, however, were mostly left to shift for themselves. Like career officers, we were required to complete 480 patrol hours before we could become certified to patrol alone, but we were extras, part-timers. We would set our own schedules, and getting those 480 supervised patrol hours would take most of us far longer than the twelve weeks it took the full-time officers, since we were only obligated to patrol for twenty-four hours each month. Qualified field training officers were in short supply, and with our unpredictable part-time schedules, it made no sense for the department to assign full-time FTOs to each newly minted reserve officer. We were instead instructed to seek out experienced career officers and use them as de facto training officers.