by Rosa Brooks
“No, I don’t,” the witness said sulkily. She glared at him.
“Yes you do,” the detective insisted. “And if you don’t feel like telling me the truth, you can just leave.”
“Fine,” said the witness. She picked up her bloodstained purse and stood up, and that was that. Murphy and I drove her back to her car. She didn’t say another word.
A little later, we were sent off to the hospital to guard one of the shooting victims, just in case the shooter decided to return and finish the job. A doctor was in with him, and all we could hear from our station in the hallway was an occasional inquisitive murmur from the doctor, and the shooting victim’s intermittent yelps.
“Ow! Fuck! Ow!”
“He’ll live,” the doctor said when he came out. “He has about seven holes in his leg and his butt, though.”
Still later, another detective appeared to interview the victim, who refused to say anything to him beyond “Shit, man, my fucking ass hurts, okay?”
“You believe this shit?” the detective asked us.
That sounded like a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer. I looked at Murphy.
He gave a lopsided smile. “You can’t make this shit up.”
* * *
• • •
I first heard of Washington, DC’s police reserve corps program in the summer of 2011. At the time, I was working at the Pentagon. I had taken a two-year public service leave from my teaching position at Georgetown Law to work for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and I was due back at Georgetown for the start of the fall 2011 semester. I was wrapping things up at the Pentagon when I received an email from the human resources department instructing me to attend a day of mandatory orientation for new senior executive officials.
“But I’m not new,” I told the HR staffer who sent the email. “I’ve been here for more than two years. In fact, I’m leaving in just a few weeks. I don’t need an orientation.”
“Right,” he said, “but you didn’t attend this required training when you were new, so now the system won’t let us check you out, because you never finished checking in. We can’t process your exit paperwork until you attend this orientation session.”
Ungraciously, I agreed to put the orientation session on my calendar, and the following week, I joined fifty or sixty other grouchy civil servants in an auditorium at the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House.
We sat through sessions on leadership skills and HR rules, then after a boxed lunch (a stale sandwich, chips, a bruised apple) we shifted to a session on diversity in the federal workplace. The speaker was an animated woman in her sixties. “Listen, everyone has biases,” she announced. “And sometimes those biases create no-win situations for people. Ask yourself if you have any biases. You don’t think so? Well, I’m telling you, we all do. Okay, here’s an example. Think for a minute about the ways we typically react to a senior executive woman with a high-powered, demanding job. Okay? If she’s single, everyone figures she couldn’t get a man—or she’s a lesbian. She’s married? She must be neglecting her husband in favor of her career. She’s divorced? She probably drove her poor husband away. She’s a widow? She probably killed him!”
Polite laughter.
This was better than hearing about HR rules, but I was making a mental list of everything I had to do before leaving the Pentagon, and listening with only half an ear. When I tuned back in, the speaker was telling another story.
“So, stereotypes can be misleading,” she was saying. “Look at me. I’m a reserve police officer. I’m the oldest person who ever went through the DC police academy, and no one ever thinks I could possibly be a cop, right? Talk about implicit bias! I’m a sixty-year-old lady with white hair. People think I should be knitting. But let me tell you, putting them in cuffs dispels their stereotypes really fast.”
She began to tease out the implications of this story for managers in the executive branch workplace, but I had again stopped listening. I was thinking: She’s a police officer? A reserve police officer? You can do that? What does that even mean?
When I got home, I googled “reserve police officer DC” and clicked my way through the Metropolitan Police Department’s website. Sure enough, there it was:
We are looking for dedicated, community-oriented individuals to serve alongside MPD career officers in our mission to serve and protect the citizens and visitors of Washington, DC. MPD invites you to explore the opportunities offered by the Reserve Corps and consider applying for this truly unique volunteer experience. Reserve Police Officers receive world-class training which mirrors that of a career officer and emerge as sworn, armed Police Reserve Officers that work in our Patrol Services or specialized patrol functions.
Apparently, anyone could do this. A sixty-year-old lady with white hair who looked like she should be knitting could do this.
Could I do this?
All of a sudden, I wanted to. There was no good reason for me to want to, but I did.
But reading on, I learned that all Metropolitan Police Reserve Corps applicants had to complete police academy training, two nights a week and every Saturday for six to ten months, plus two weeks of full-time firearms training and a week of full-time emergency vehicle skills training.
My heart sank.
Well, I thought, that’s that. I can’t do this.
At the time, my two daughters were seven and nine years old, and I was a single parent. I couldn’t be away from home two nights a week and every Saturday for six to ten months.
Which was fine, I reminded myself, because it made no sense anyway. I was busy. I already had a job. Also, I doubted I could justify such a mad scheme to my colleagues, friends, and family members, most of whom considered the police part of a harsh, unjust, racially biased criminal justice system. I didn’t disagree: the US criminal justice system is harsh, unjust, and biased, and the police are assuredly part of that system.
* * *
• • •
At least initially, there was no real need for me to sort through any of my own contradictory impulses about policing, since joining the DC police reserve corps was logistically impossible. But every now and then I thought about it.
I thought about it whenever I felt restless, whenever another birthday came and went, and as my two girls moved from childhood into adolescence.
I thought about it when I remarried in 2012 and my husband deployed to the Middle East, off to prove himself in America’s endless murky wars. There I was, safe on the sidelines, keeping the home fires burning like millions of women before me, in a thousand other wars. It wasn’t a comfortable role. I thought about it again when Joe came back home.
I thought about it whenever policing was in the news, and between 2011, when I first learned about the reserve corps, and 2015, when I applied to join the DC police, policing was in the news more and more. The stories were rarely positive. Immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, when fifty police officers lost their lives in the collapse of the Twin Towers, there was a burst of media enthusiasm for police and other first responders. A decade later, however, that enthusiasm had mostly faded, replaced by a steady drumbeat of stories about police abuses. There were stories about cruel cops, corrupt cops, racist cops, and incompetent cops. And there were stories about excessive force and the staggering number of Americans killed by police each year. In July 2014, Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by New York City police. In August 2014, eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking a nationwide outcry. In November 2014, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by a Cleveland cop who mistook Tamir’s toy gun for a real one. In April 2015, Freddie Gray died while being transported to jail by Baltimore police.
American police killed at least 1,146 people in 2015. Inadequate record keeping made it hard to know the numbers fo
r sure, but there was no doubt that those killed by the police were disproportionately young, male, and black, and many were unarmed at the time of their fatal encounters with the police. All over the country, there were investigations and protests. The protests were not as large, sustained, or ubiquitous as those that followed the killing of George Floyd in 2020, but the sense of crisis was the same. American policing was broken. No one knew if it could be repaired.
* * *
• • •
If I had simply announced that I was planning to write a book about policing, my sudden determination to become a cop would probably have encountered less resistance from my family and friends. As a form of scholarly inquiry, “participant observation” is a long-established sociological and anthropological research method. Outside the ivory tower, reporters call it “immersion journalism.” My mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, spent months in low-wage jobs while researching her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed; for instance, working variously as a maid, a Walmart stocker, and a waitress at a chain diner. My brother Ben, also a journalist, spent months living in a tiny West Bank village, preparing to write a book about Palestine. If I had said, “I’m going undercover as a reserve officer so I can expose the brutality and corruption of the police,” my family and friends might have worried about my safety, but they wouldn’t have worried about my sanity.
But I didn’t tell anyone I planned to write a book about policing, because initially the idea didn’t occur to me. I just . . . wanted to see what being a police officer was like at such a fraught moment. Were police officers troubled by the violence of their profession? How did they view the prospects for change? In 1924, asked why he wanted to summit Mount Everest, British climber George Mallory famously replied, “Because it’s there.” I joined the DC Metropolitan Police Department Reserve Corps because it was there. It was there, and I was curious.
This is perhaps not the best analogy, as Mallory disappeared during his third attempt to climb Everest. His body was discovered only in 1999, and to this day, no one knows if he succeeded in reaching Everest’s summit. My journey into the world of policing was not nearly as grueling as Mallory’s journey up Mount Everest, and I did eventually reach my own summit: in June 2018, after six months at the DC Metropolitan Police Academy and another eighteen months of field training and patrol, I passed my certification ride, got through a certification review panel, and was officially designated a “Level One Reserve Police Officer” by the DC Metropolitan Police Department, fully qualified to carry out all police functions on my own.
It was only in 2017, midway through my field training, that I begin to think seriously about writing a book. Colleagues and friends kept asking me if I planned to write about my experiences as a police officer, and after a while it seemed easier to just say yes. Yes, of course I would write about policing, I said. Yes, of course, that was why I had done this crazy police thing. Yes, of course, it was all part of a plan.
For a while, I thought I might write a scholarly book about law and policy, focusing on the problems that plague modern policing and leavened by only occasional anecdotes drawn from my own experiences. But after some time, I abandoned that idea. My scholarly expertise lies mostly elsewhere, for one thing, and for another, plenty of other people—including several of my Georgetown colleagues—have already published thoughtful, well-researched books and articles on policing and the American criminal justice system. In the end, I decided I was unlikely to add much to current debates by writing another book analyzing police shootings or examining the role of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. But what I could do—what I was perhaps uniquely positioned to do—was offer some stories drawn from my own messy, complicated experiences.
This book contains those stories. Because none of my DC Metropolitan Police Department colleagues and none of the people I encountered while patrolling knew I would be writing a book about my experiences (and I couldn’t have told them, since for most of the time period covered by this book, I didn’t know it myself), I have changed all names, except those of officials and those whose involvement in events is already public. In many cases I have changed other details as well (including physical descriptions, biographical details, and chronology) to protect the privacy of the people I have written about. I have also removed all personally identifying information from the excerpts from MPD crime reports that are quoted in this book. Excerpts from these reports and other MPD documents are otherwise given verbatim, aside from light editing for clarity (e.g., spelling out acronyms and abbreviations).
As a recruit officer going through the DC Metropolitan Police Academy, I took detailed notes in academy classes, with particular attention to comments that surprised or dismayed me. After graduation, as a rookie patrol officer, I took notes on calls in my official patrol notebook and jotted down my own “unofficial” reactions and observations on my iPhone. As I was writing this book, I also checked my own recollection of events against video footage from my body-worn camera when possible. When I could not obtain videos, I have relied on my notes and my memory, and in those cases events and dialogue are reconstructed to the best of my recollection.
Throughout this book, I have tried my best to show, not tell—to give an honest account of what I saw and what I did. Readers can decide for themselves what to make of it all. And I want to be clear that my experiences are just my experiences; I can make no claims about their universality or even their representativeness. This book is about what it was like for me, a particular individual with a particular set of prior experiences and assumptions, to serve as a part-time patrol officer in Washington, DC, with most of my time spent in the very poorest sections of the city. I don’t know what it’s like to be a police officer in a different city, or a rural area, or a wealthy area. I don’t know what it’s like to be a detective, or a vice cop, or a harbor patrol officer, or a staff officer assigned to police headquarters. And, of course, my experiences were inevitably filtered through my own identity: white, female, over-educated, brought up on the political left. Can readers generalize from my experiences? I have no idea.
But I hope that the stories I tell here are useful nonetheless. Attitudes toward police in our divided nation are as polarized as our political discourse: to some Americans, police officers are brutal, racist bullies; to others, they’re courageous, undervalued heroes. I hope the stories I offer in this book will complicate matters rather than simplify them, and will give pause both to those who think police can do no wrong and to those who think they can do no right.
Police officers have an impossible job: we expect them to be warriors, disciplinarians, protectors, mediators, social workers, educators, medics, and mentors all at once, and we blame them for enforcing laws they didn’t make in a social context they have little power to alter. The abuses and systemic problems that plague policing are very real, and readers will see them reflected in these pages, particularly in the flashes of cynicism and casual contempt I sometimes saw in officers with whom I worked. But the compassion, courage, and creativity I saw are real too.
Animals
Felony Threats (Hate/Bias Crime): Complainant reports that while inside the location Suspect became irate about inconsistent paychecks and proceed to yell “You all are a bunch of South East Ghetto Animals, and South East n*ggers and Southeast b*tches.” Suspect . . . then stated to the Complainant “I will gun you down, I will destroy you.”
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
The unconscious guy didn’t look unconscious. He looked dead.
He lay on the sidewalk, his legs on the grass and his torso on the concrete, one arm down by his side and the other extended, palm up, fingers curled. His mouth was open, his lips were gray, and his eyes had rolled up into his head, only the whites still showing. His chest didn’t seem to be moving.
The radio call was for a “man down,” so a dead guy wasn’t completely unexpected. Still, I we
nt and crouched down by his shoulder. With all the gear on my belt and vest, a graceful crouch wasn’t possible, and I barely avoided pitching over on top of him.
“Hey. Buddy. You okay?”
No response. I gave his shoulder a cautious nudge. Still nothing.
I tried again, nudging harder this time. “Hey there. You all right?”
To my amazement, his eyes rolled back from his head, his mouth twitched, and he muttered, “Hey, you know, hey, what’s going on?”
An ambulance had arrived, and one of the medics ambled over. “Hey, man. You hurt? Did you fall?”
The guy pushed himself up on his elbow. “No, man, no, I jus’, I jus’, y’know I jus’—” His speech was slurred.
“What’d you take, man?” asked the medic. “What’re you on?”
“I din, I jus’—” His eyes flickered closed.
“Listen, it’s okay, man, we’re not trying to jam you up, we’re just trying to help, okay? We just wanna know what you took so’s we can make sure you’re okay.”
The guy didn’t answer, just blinked and looked around groggily.
The medic tried again. “Listen, man. What’s your name?”
Nothing, just a blank look.
“Buddy,” said the medic. “You know what day it is?”
A light went on inside the dull brown eyes. “Hey, yeah, man, it’s like, I think it’s like . . . it’s . . . Sunday, right, man? Sunday.”
“You know who the president is?” The medic was running through the standard mental status checklist.
The guy paused, looking puzzled and, for the first time, a little alarmed. “Is Donald Trump the president?”
“Sorry, man, yeah.”
“Shee-it.” He closed his eyes again, this time with some determination.