Welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight’s gonna be a rough one. It’s time for me to talk about a period of my life that fills me with a lot of shame and regret and self-loathing. Normally I’m content to just avoid talking about this but recent events here in 2020 make me think that maybe I have a responsibility to say something about my experiences in an effort to, i don’t know, help turn public opinion? Or, help stop a brutal machine from ruining more lives? I don’t know… I feel powerless and helpless and hopeless, so I’m just trying to do SOMETHING to help.

Tonight, I want to talk about the fact that I was a police officer for almost ten years and specifically the way policework taught me to dehumanize people. I could talk for hours about the profession and how complicated but ultimately toxic it is, but after the #BLM protests and the Kenosha militia murders, I think zeroing in on the slow, seductive process of dehumanization is appropriate.

No true cop can resist tellin’ war stories, so I’ll start with one. So there I was, fresh from the academy and in training at my department. Our community was a dense urban area that was fairly low-income and about 90% first and second generation Hispanic. This meant lots of drivers without licenses driving cars with broken tail lights. We pulled one such car over and the driver turned out to be a single mother with three kids in the car and probably 20 bags of groceries. She was unlicensed which meant we could legally impound her car. When my FTO told me to call for a tow truck, I said “Sir, we’re actually just down the street from her house. I mean, she’s got kids and groceries and-” and my training officer said “I don’t care, fuck these people. Call the tow.” And so we watched her and her kids unload bags of groceries onto the sidewalk in the hot sun, trying to figure out how to get them the 5 or so blocks back to the apartment.

The image of her and her kids and her groceries thrown out onto a sidewalk is burned into my brain as much as any murder scene I was ever at. I just felt like such a tool for doing that to her. My FTO saw I was a little perturbed and pulled me aside and explained to me that “these people” think they can just break the law without anything bad happening. He said that unlicensed drivers have hit and killed people before and if we let her take her car and she crashes into someone after, we’d get in trouble. “So,” he says, “I got no sympathy for them.”

I would hear versions of this a lot. I remember when this young teen gangster got shot at a family party and was bleeding to death, I remarked that it was really sad, dying in front of your family like that. A fellow officer said “He’s a gangster, fuck him.”

When a homeless person OD’d in an alley, “It’s just a transient, fuck em.”

Or, “It’s just some addict, fuck em.”

Just to really skeeve you out, one of my FTOs put it this way: “These fuckin’ people come up from Mexico and think they can just live like they did in their little villages with no rules or anything. Well I’m not going to let them turn our town into Juarez.”

Do you see the subtle (or not so subtle) ideology at work here? People who break the law don’t deserve sympathy. We should make law breaking as painful as possible to teach them a lesson, to dissuade them from crime, or to prevent them from turning our cities into… you know…

I want you to put a pin in this concept that breaking the law should be painful,I’m going to come back to it in a bit.

Because next, we need to talk about using force. My police academy was probably 40% about law codes and procedural stuff and 60% about physical toughness,use of force, and officer safety. Early in the academy, you watch lots of dashcam of cops being murdered. Cops being ambushed. Cops on a “routine traffic stop” being shot to death as they scream for help on the radio. And they drill it into you “there’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop.” At any moment, someone could run up on you with a gun and you better be ready.

Once your head is full of cop death, that’s when you start doing boxing, wrestling, judo, aikido, firearm training, and learning the laws about when you get to use force and how much you get to use. And I’m being precise on that last part: most of the use of force instruction I received was on knowing what was the maximum you could get away with.

The court case Graham vs Connor is the mantra we all learned for using force: would a reasonable officer responding to the scene also use this force?

You also learn a case like Tennessee vs Gardner which says you “get to” shoot a fleeing suspect if you have probable cause to believe they pose a deadly threat to others.

So without getting deep in the weeds between Reasonable Officer standards and Probable Cause standards, I want you to imagine this for a second: a bunch of fresh-faced rookies spend hours watching cops getting murdered by members of the public and then get told that justifiable use of force revolves around the officer’s perception of how dangerous members of the public are.

This indoctrination continued into my time on the streets. FTOs were relentless about officer safety. Every traffic stop, every ped check, every call for service, they would list off all the things that could have happened: they could have popped out of the trunk with an AK-47, he could have had a gun in the glovebox, she could have stabbed you when you turned your back, they could have ambushed you when you went around that corner. It probably sounds silly and dramatic, but to be fair, it does happen occasionally. Cops do get shot, stabbed, and ambushed. And so, they train you to be ready to kill, to WANT to kill, so that you don’t become a victim.

So again, if the legal standard for use of force relies on what a reasonable officer would do at the scene, what is a reasonable response to years of training that tells you everyone might try to kill you? Let’s pin that idea up too.

Next, let’s sprinkle in a landmark essay from Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, a law enforcement trainer and combat researcher who is a hero to cops everywhere. He divided the world into the sheep (members of the public), wolves (bad guys), and sheepdogs (the police). The sheepdogs protect the sheep from wolves, but they are not themselves sheep and, per Lt Col Grossman, the sheep distrust the sheepdogs.

I know it’s supposed to be a cute metaphor, but think of the messaging at play here: cops are not members of their communities, they are above and apart from it. They are in charge of their community and the community rarely appreciates it. All the sheepdogs have is each other. Pin it!

Alright, let’s see what we have pinned in the brains of cops:

1. Cops are fundamentally separate from members of the public

2. Members of the public might try to kill a cop at any time

3. Breaking the law should be painful to deter crime.

Now, if you’re a regular, nice person getting into law enforcement for all the right reasons, mentally, what must you do if you want to hold these three lessons in your head at the same time and still feel like a nice person?

You’d pretty much have to begin dehumanizing the community in your head so that you can do “what’s necessary” to stay safe from them, punish them, and prevent them from killing you and your partners. And to be clear, this dehumanization doesn’t necessarily mean that as a cop I snarled at children and refused to be nice to people. I was a pretty charming, funny cop who liked to make people smile when I was on patrol. Many cops I worked with were individually kind in individual circumstances.

However, when someone disrespected us, refused to comply with us, or otherwise failed to honor their friendly neighborhood sheepdog, it was VERY easy for me to slip into a mode where I made life very difficult for them. The rule in training for dealing with people was “You ask, you tell, you make.” Sometimes, we could make you by roughing you up. Sometimes, we could make you by towing the family car. Sometimes, we could make you by arresting you or your friends on flimsy charges, knowing that even if they didn’t stick, you’d be the one stuck in jail all weekend. To be clear, many times I single-handedly shoved someone deep into a cycle of poverty and incarceration that they might still be stuck in to this day. I believe deep in my heart that I have personally ruined people’s entire lives with my choices (choices that were technically legal for me to make!).

And yes, visiting all manner of hardship on a community of low-income immigrants feels pretty bad at first, so you have to harden yourself.

“They’re just illegals, fuck em.”

“They’re just addicts, fuck em.”

“They’re just gangsters, fuck em.”

So, when you see Ofcr. Tim Loehmann shoot 12 year old Tamir Rice after only one second on scene, when you see Ofcr. Derek Chauvin grinding George Floyd’s neck into the pavement, when you see Louisville Metro PD botch a raid and gun down Breonna Taylor in her bed, when you see Ofcr. Rusten Sheshkey shoot Jacob Blake 7 times in the back in front of his children, and when you see Kyle Rittenhouse take a rifle across state lines to gun down BLM protestors 20 miles from his community, understand what has happened in their heads.

They have ceased to see some people (often Black people) as humans worthy of dignity and respect. They see themselves as separate and above the public. And they believe that the only way to keep order and prevent the city from turning into… you know… is to violently punish people, to convince the rest of us that any deviation from social control will be painful, maybe deadly.

You see it in the way police across the country are torturing protestors and shooting chemical weapons at members of the press indisciminately. Remember, the protests are condemning police brutality, and the only response from law enforcement is to up the brutality! Why would they do that unless they have completely dehumanized the public and believe that only fear and pain will dissipate civil unrest.

Now look, am I saying that All Cops are Bastards? …

Let me start over, am I saying that every individual cop is privately waging a racist crusade against Black people, that they harbor hatred in their hearts? No, of course not.

But if you’ve watched any of my recent videos, you know that I’m not interested in individual actions, I’m interested in the way that structures and systems and unjust hierarchies harm people. So, it’s irrelevant to me what’s in this or that individual cop’s heart, because the system encourages all cops to dehumanize people. The system protects cops who do it, and polite white society applauds them for keeping a boot on the neck of those…. you know…

So why am I telling you this? Because I think you need to know this when you read stories of police violence and watch footage of the protests. And, I think you need to know this so that YOU don’t dehumanize your fellow humans. I don’t want you to say “They’re just thugs, fuck em” and avert your gaze when your fellow human is tortured by the state.

Many of the people murdered by police are people in some kind of crisis, be it addiction, desperation born from poverty, or a mental health episode. Many people murdered by police are disabled in some way. Many are poor, many have been traumatized by past experiences with authority. As someone who did the job for many years, I’m telling you that the majority of people killed by police are people who deserve help, not death.

And if you believe me when I say that, I want you to ask yourself this: “Am I sure I’ll never need help one day?” The people who are killed by police are people like you, sometimes people who made bad choices, or in the case of Tamir Rice or Breonna Taylor, people who did nothing wrong at all. Is that the kind of world you want to live in, one where you could be killed for one bad decision, or simply because a bunch of cops got the wrong house?

When you watch the protests, when they get rowdy, when they get heated, remember something: the protestors aren’t just protesting for George Floyd or Jacob Blake, they are protesting for YOU, for your right to be alive, for your right to need help, for your right to be human in the eyes of state agents. If we can make police stop murdering Black people, it makes all of us safer from unaccountable state terror.

Do I have some ideas on what should happen to the police as a state function?

…DISARM / DEFUND / ABOLISH...

Sure but I don’t want to get into it for this video. We have lots of options and besides, you should be listening to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color on what they need in their communities, not me.

All I want you to do is think a different way about the images you see on social media and to soften your heart. I promise you, I know this from experience: if you dehumanize people long enough, you won’t like who you become.

Anyway, thanks for watching, please share this video with anyone you think needs to see it, and maybe I’ll catch you next time. Good night.

Transcript

Further Reading:

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

In Russian and French Prisons by Peter Kropotkin

Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists

Learn More From:

What is Abolition? by Olurinatti

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Haymarket Books

Prison Abolition: What About The Rapists...? by Kathrin