Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  “This call is over. You did not see any bullet holes in that stop sign,” he instructed once the camera was off.

  “I didn’t?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you saw any bullet damage to that stop sign, we’d have to report it to the city office that deals with damaged DC property, and we’d have to fill out, like, a thousand forms, then we’d be stuck here all night waiting for someone to come inspect it.”

  In the end, I got stuck filling out forms for hours anyway. We put the bullet casings together in a single evidence bag and I filled out the appropriate forms describing our find as “eighteen shell casings,” but the next day I received an email instructing me to return to the 7D property room to repackage the shell casings; the eighteen shell casings, I was informed, required eighteen separate evidence bags and eighteen separate forms.

  One March night in 2017, when I was about six months out of the academy, we responded to a call for a drive-by shooting. A car window had been shot out this time as well, but on this occasion, the car had been occupied. Incredibly, no one was hurt, but the two women who’d been in the car were badly shaken. One of the women insisted that the shooter was the other woman’s ex, and the two women started arguing about whether this was so, and whether the shooting was the result of her poor judgment in choosing her partners. The argument became so heated that the women started fighting physically, swatting at each other with their handbags, pulling hair, and scratching. We pulled them apart, positioned them on separate sides of the street, and urged them to refrain from further assaults on each other. By now several other officers had arrived and the detectives were on the way, so I went back to looking for potential evidence. A few minutes later, sweeping the street with my flashlight, I spotted something shiny in the gutter.

  It was a ring. In fact, it looked like a wedding ring.

  Aha, I thought. A clue.

  Delighted with myself, I summoned my partner and pointed. “You think that could have something to do with this shooting?”

  He gave the ring a jaundiced look. “Nah.”

  “But it sounds like this shooting was domestic—don’t you think a discarded wedding ring in the gutter might be related?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He was probably right, I knew.

  “But—”

  He interrupted. “You know what’s going to happen if you touch that ring, even if it’s totally unrelated to the shooting?”

  “Um . . . I’d have to treat it as . . . lost property?”

  “Mmm-hmm. And you know what that would mean?”

  “I’d have to fill out a whole lot of forms and go back to the station?”

  “You got it. So, you see a ring on the street?” He looked at me meaningfully.

  “Ah. No. I . . . thought I saw a ring, but . . . now that I’m looking more closely, I think it was maybe just . . . some kind of reflection off a puddle, or something.”

  He nodded approvingly. “Yeah, it’s pretty dark out here. It can be kind of hard to see things clearly, you know?”

  As a reserve officer, I was a sort of permanent rookie. While my full-time colleagues worked forty hours a week, I typically worked less than a quarter of that time. Cop skills are perishable; they improve with constant practice, and deteriorate rapidly when not in use. So even after more than a year on patrol, I was always starting over, trying to remember whether my username for the MDT was rosabrooks, rosa.brooks, rbrooks, or brooksr.

  Or maybe it was just age. Most of my partners were young enough to be my children, if I had started having kids at twenty or twenty-one. They were millennials, used to shifting between cell phones and video game consoles. Maybe their brains were just more elastic than mine.

  Either way, it was humbling. Here I was, with two advanced degrees and years of professional success under my belt. But in my role as part-time cop, I was . . . adequate. On a good day.

  It was an uncomfortable realization. By the time I hit forty, I had grown accustomed to being good at what I did and being recognized for it. In other parts of my life, I was an expert. Reporters called and asked me for quotes on the news of the day; students sent me emails soliciting my advice on their careers; strangers paid me to speak at their conferences. Being merely adequate was a jarring experience.

  The only thing that consoled me was my growing awareness that being a good cop was hard. In fact, it was nearly impossible. There was just too much to keep track of. Many officers were better at it than I was, but no one consistently did it well, because no one could always do it well.

  On top of the radio, the cameras, and all the rest of the gear, there was the actual policing to be done. You had to know the law: Was this shoplifting or theft? Burglary 1 or Burglary 2? You had to stay calm in chaotic and sometimes frightening situations, and stay polite even when people were screaming at you. You had to notice the right things, ask the right questions, write down the right information, fill out the right forms in the right manner, and notify the right officials. Some calls required you to notify your sergeant; others required you to notify the command information center or the teletype office, or detectives, or Child and Family Services, or the watch commander, or all of the above. Certain incidents and all offenses required you to request a “central complaint number,” or CCN, from the dispatcher; tow trucks—“tow cranes”—required TCNs, or towing control numbers. If you needed an ambulance you asked the dispatcher to notify “the board,” and you had to record the engine number and medic number of the responding fire trucks and medics.

  Then there were all the officer safety lessons drilled into us at the academy, which were impractical and often impossible in the chaos of real scenes. You could hardly avoid interviewing people in their kitchens, for instance, and unless you were willing to summon enough backup to put everyone preventively in cuffs, a tactic unlikely to produce cooperative witnesses, you couldn’t really prevent half the people present at a domestic violence call from wandering around and reaching into pockets, drawers, closets, and bags at will. In 7D, even the tiniest apartments were often bursting with people. Grandma was napping on the sofa; adult siblings sat at the table and offered commentary on the protagonists’ character flaws; small children ran about underfoot; dogs barked; and neighbors barged in to complain about the noise or offer corroborating or contradictory information. Half the time, scenes were out of control when you arrived and they simply stayed that way, no matter how many cops showed up and stood around looking stern.

  And most officers spent a lot of time being anxious. You had to worry about your physical safety, to start—would that crowd on the corner turn nasty? Would the suspect you were interviewing in the kitchen, against your better judgment, prove the officer safety videos right by suddenly grabbing a knife?

  But mostly, officers worried about being second-guessed. The thicket of rules and regulations was impenetrable. MPD general orders were constantly being revised, and every day, new teletypes arrived outlining new requirements or modifying previous procedures. Making things worse, when teletypes landed in your inbox, they often had subject headings like “TT-05-031-20: ADDENDUM TO TELETYPE #03-064-20,” and the body of the email contained no information beyond “see attachment,” forcing you to download and open an attachment before you could even determine whether the teletype contained vitally important information or merely corrected a typographical error in a previous announcement.

  Even if you didn’t screw up in some major, obvious way—getting mad and cursing at a witness, or losing vital evidence, or, God forbid, shooting an unarmed citizen—you were sure to screw up in a multitude of minor ways. You would forget to turn your camera on or off, or fail to notify the right official, or fill out the wrong form, or fill out the right form the wrong way, or write the report the wrong way, or piss off the sergeant or the lieutenant. Citizens could complain about you.
The crazy lady you lost your temper at could turn out to be the mayor’s best friend from elementary school, and she’d have it all recorded on her cell phone. And you were tired, so tired from working ten-hour shifts and still having to show up for court in the morning. So you were going to make mistakes.

  All this meant that if some desk jockey in the department wanted to fuck you over, they could always find a reason. Screwing up was preordained; it was the nature of policing. It was just a question of whether the department wanted to go after you. There were always rumors swirling around about cops getting jammed up for silly things. Every officer I knew, including the best ones, was absolutely convinced that they were one trivial mistake away from being scolded, suspended, or fired.

  There is an irony here. Structurally, cops are in precisely the same position as drivers. There are so many traffic rules, some of them so trivial and ambiguous, that any cop worth his salt can easily find a reason to pull over almost any car. No driver, no matter how careful, will manage to abide by every single traffic rule 100 percent of the time, because there are just too many rules, and no one can remember them all. This makes all drivers vulnerable. A racist cop can always find reasons to stop a black driver; a sadistic cop can always find reasons to hand out multiple costly tickets.

  Similarly, cops are always vulnerable to the bureaucracies that send them out on the streets. If the bureaucracy chooses to skewer one of its own, it can do so for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. There are too many rules, and too many contradictory imperatives. Every police officer, no matter how conscientious, has done something wrong. And most of those mistakes are on video.

  Add one more source of pressure and stress, the toll taken by each day’s dose of misery and pain.

  Police officers see a lot of bad things. A 2015 study of officers in small and midsize police departments found that on average, officers had experienced 189 “critical incidents” in their careers. Critical incidents were defined as the type of experience that frequently leads to trauma, such as dealing with dead bodies, neglected or abused children, or sexual abuse; making death notifications; being held hostage; experiencing or being threatened with serious injury; dealing with threats to harm family members; seeing another person killed or seriously injured; and the like. Cops don’t talk about this much; police culture, like military culture, has historically favored stiff upper lips.

  Looking at the list of critical incidents identified by researchers as likely to trigger trauma, I added up my own exposure as I worked on this book. In the period between graduating from the police academy in October 2016 and finishing my field training in May 2018—a bit more than 480 hours of patrolling, spread over eighteen months—I had experienced eight different types of critical incidents myself, several of them more than once.

  I was fortunate—my life gave me all the ingredients needed to process difficult situations without much lasting trauma. I was older; I had worked in many other difficult situations and had, perhaps, more sense of perspective than many young officers; I was female, and women face less stigma than men when openly discussing difficult experiences; I was well informed about the ways in which trauma can manifest itself; and I had friends and family I could talk to (including my father, a psychologist who provides consulting services on trauma to international human rights and humanitarian organizations).

  Most of all, I was just a part-timer. Whereas full-time career officers spent forty or more hours immersed in other people’s misery each week, I only had to spend twenty-four hours on patrol each month. I was a volunteer—if I didn’t like the roll call sergeant on Saturday evening duty, I could choose a different shift, or even patrol in a different district. And I didn’t need the job. It’s easy to be resilient when you can just walk away. It’s a lot harder when you’re trapped.

  And traumatic experiences add up. Officers who have experienced more critical incidents are more likely to have substance abuse problems or show signs of PTSD. Police officers experience PTSD at roughly five times the rate of the general population, and most years, suicide kills far more police officers than on-duty incidents. The trauma of policing hurts communities too: PTSD can interfere with judgment and risk perception, making officers with unaddressed symptoms more likely to use force or respond angrily instead of defusing tense situations.

  In impoverished high-crime communities, like 7D, the estimated incidence of untreated PTSD is also sky-high; virtually every resident has family members and friends who’ve been robbed, beaten, stabbed, shot, or taken to prison. Trauma affects both how community members respond to one another and how they respond when approached by police. And when traumatized citizens interact with traumatized cops, a lot can go wrong.

  You’ll Get Yours

  Injured Officer: Officer [redacted] was bitten on his right arm while breaking up a large group fight. The Officer will report to the Police and Fire Clinic in the morning.

  —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

  During my time as a patrol officer, I helped break up several fights, was dispatched to numerous “sound of gunshots” calls, and responded to countless calls involving assaults in progress. Sometimes, people shouted insults and epithets as I walked by (“Fuck the police” and “Fucking white pig bitch!” were the most common, though “I smell bacon!” remained a runner-up). Once, a drunk and combative suspect had to be held down by other officers while I cuffed him. We were arresting him for punching his girlfriend in the face, and when we tried to get him into the wagon, he went into a rage, twisting and writhing and shouting threats over his shoulder: “You’ll get yours! I’m coming to get you! Until the day I die, I promise, you’ll get yours—I’m coming for you, motherfuckers!”

  Despite all this, I never seriously worried about my safety. In part, this is because I was so preoccupied by my fear of making embarrassing mistakes that I had no time left to worry about being injured or hurt. But mostly, I wasn’t frightened because the existence of serious threats to my safety seemed largely fanciful. Despite all the officer safety videos we had watched in the academy, I wasn’t persuaded that policing in Washington, DC, was particularly dangerous. Certainly, it wasn’t more dangerous than traveling as an unarmed civilian in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Palestine, or many of the other places work had previously brought me.

  It’s almost heretical to say this; the belief that police face constant mortal danger is a central part of most officers’ sense of professional identity. Statistically, however, being a police officer is less dangerous than most people think. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the most dangerous jobs in America are logging, fishing, being a pilot or flight engineer, roofing, refuse collection, structural iron- and steelwork, truck driving, farming and ranching, construction supervision and first-line extraction, and ground maintenance. Police work doesn’t even make it into the top ten. As dangerous jobs go, being a cop ranks just below construction labor and just above electrical power line installation and repair.

  Granted, police officers face a higher risk of death due to intentional harm than those in most other lines of work. While roofers and farmers have high fatal injury rates, they rarely die in workplace homicides. But taxi and limousine drivers are twice as likely to be murdered on the job than cops. (Oddly, food service workers have the third highest homicide victimization rate.) When cops die on the job, it’s usually the result of illness or accident. In 2018, for instance, just thirty-nine police officers were “feloniously killed,” according to FBI statistics; another thirty-one died in accidents (almost all of which involved vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions).

  Washington, DC, is a particularly safe place to be a police officer. The Officer Down Memorial Page lists 122 line-of-duty deaths since MPD was founded in 1861. Of those listed, sixty-nine were intentionally shot, stabbed, or deliberately run over by vehicles, while the rest died in
accidents—mostly vehicle crashes—or from illnesses. Of the seven MPD officer deaths in the past twenty years, three were due to accidents and three were due to illness. The only MPD officer to die in a homicide in the past twenty years was Sergeant Clifton Rife, and there’s no reason to believe he was killed because of his occupation—Rife was off duty and outside Washington, DC, when he was shot during an attempted robbery. (Although Rife is listed as an officer killed in the line of duty on MPD’s website, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals found that the DC Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board was justified in refusing to pay an annuity to his widow, since Rife “died while off-duty in the State of Maryland from a fatal gunshot as a victim of an attempted robbery, and not in the performance of duty.”)

  Cops do have difficult, dangerous jobs. The fatal injury rate for police officers is roughly four times higher than that of the average American worker, and police officers really do run toward the sound of gunfire while everyone else is running away. People call the police only when something goes wrong, and officers willingly walk into potentially volatile situations a dozen times each day. They deal with all the problems too dangerous, dirty, or dull for anyone else: shootings, stabbings, assaults, robberies, rapes, traffic crashes, overdose deaths.

  It’s just that being a cop isn’t nearly as dangerous as cops think it is. This matters, because an exaggerated sense of risk drives how officers respond to the unexpected. When you start with the belief that you’re in constant danger, you’re more likely to perceive situations as threatening. You’ll shout and jump at a girl for reaching into her handbag in her own living room. You’ll stop and frisk people who look at you funny and put their hands in their pockets. And maybe, eventually, you’ll shoot and kill a driver who’s reaching for his wallet, or a child playing with a toy gun.