by Rosa Brooks
We all looked at one another.
“Um, ‘I need help’?” suggested Lowrey.
Flanagan gave him a withering glance. “No, Mr. Rocket Scientist, you are not going to say, ‘I need help.’ Everyone already knows that, because you just hit your emergency button and said, ‘10-33.’ What else are you going to say?”
“My location,” said Wentz.
“Yes, thank you, Wentz. Lowrey, you are going to tell everyone where the fuck you are, because if you do not tell them where you are, no one can find you or help you! Got that?”
Lowrey looked dismayed. “Shouldn’t the dispatcher already know that? Isn’t there some kind of GPS in the radio?”
Flanagan rolled his eyes. “Are you going to trust your life to some piece of equipment that might or might not work, and a dispatcher who might or might not be doing her nails instead of monitoring the radio? I hope not. You better know exactly where you are, all the time, and you better get on the air and tell everyone.
“So, listen up, everyone. When you hear Lowrey come on the air and shout, ‘10-33!’ you need to move, and move fast. You getting to your colleague fast could be the difference between life and death. Okay? So we’re going to practice. Every now and then, when we’re in the classroom or doing PT, I’m going to blow my whistle three times and shout, ‘10-33.’ And when I do that, you are going to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing, and you are going to run—not walk, not jog, run—to the gatepost at the front of the academy, and touch that post.
“You can walk back, for all I care. But you’d better get there fast, because whoever gets to that post last is going to do it all over again. You need to get used to moving fast the second you hear ‘10-33.’ And I don’t want to hear you complain. When the career recruits run 10-33s, they have to run to the post and then run all the way around the whole academy parking lot too.”
After that, running 10-33s became a routine part of our training. Flanagan would wait until we were all preoccupied with something else, then blow his whistle, and we’d all scramble up and sprint out to the gatepost.
I wasn’t particularly good at any of this, but for the most part, I wasn’t bad enough to be a problem child, either. Sergeant Flanagan seemed to approve of me. With their military backgrounds, most of my classmates breezed through the physical training and defensive tactics lessons. Smith, the young coast guard officer and the only other woman in the group, was particularly impressive. She could do one-armed pull-ups, and punched out more push-ups than most of the men. I was nowhere near as fit, but I mostly managed to keep up with the group. Still, as time went on, I grew more and more anxious about the PT test we would all have to take in order to graduate. It consisted of sit-ups, push-ups, a sprint, and a 1.5-mile run.
The passing threshold varied by age and gender, and when we took an early practice test to establish our baseline, I had no trouble getting a passing score on the sit-ups, push-ups, and the sprint. On the 1.5-mile run, however, I struggled, huffing and puffing my way around the track, legs and lungs burning. I was much too slow. I had to get serious about running, or I wouldn’t pass when the time came for the real test.
Despite my determination not to complain, I resented the PT test. The 1.5-mile run struck me as particularly pointless. Sprinting made sense—you might have to chase a suspect, or respond to a genuine 10-33. But no suspect was going to lead you on a 1.5-mile run around the city. You’d either catch him or lose him in the first few hundred yards, and losing him was far more likely, since suspects tended to be fit young men in athletic shoes and comfortable clothes, while cops—even the young, fit ones—wore clunky boots and were weighed down by thirty pounds of uncomfortable, clanking equipment. Adding insult to injury, the PT test in the academy was the only one ever required; after graduation, MPD officers were free to grow as fat and slothful as they wanted.
Flanagan was too smart to waste his time questioning bureaucratic dictates. When I complained about the 1.5-mile run, he just shook his head. “Yeah, you’ll probably never actually run that far. Me, I don’t chase people anymore anyway. I’m too old. I stay in the car and leave the foot chases to the young guys.”
Being a middle-aged lady law professor, I suggested tentatively that I too might leave the foot chases to the young guys.
Flanagan shook his head again. “You’re missing the point here. The point of this isn’t whether you’re ever really going to run for a mile and a half on patrol. You’re not. No one does that. The point is to make sure you build up some cardiovascular endurance. On average, it takes about three minutes for backup to arrive in an emergency. Maybe three minutes doesn’t sound like a lot of time to you, but trust me, when someone’s sitting on you and trying to pound your head into the pavement, it’s forever. If you’re all alone and you get into a fight, you need to be able to hang in there for three minutes without giving up and letting the bad guy win. And running’s one way to build up your endurance.”
So every other day, I laced up my running shoes and went out to the track at a nearby middle school. I ran and ran. I read dozens of internet articles on how to start running if you were a complete beginner, and did exactly what they advised. At first, I alternated between walking and running, and increased speed and distance only gradually.
Each week, I ran a little farther and a little faster. I started to think I’d pass the 1.5-mile run after all. But although I was getting faster and could now run the whole course without as much panting, I was in more pain with each passing week. Despite all my warm-ups and stretches, each week, more body parts started to hurt. My shins were covered in bruises. My knees swelled up. My hip joints hurt so much I could barely walk.
“This is not good,” Flanagan said. He inspected me and eyed a scar on my swollen left knee. “Did you get that knee injured at some point?”
“A long time ago,” I admitted. “I messed it up skiing.”
Flanagan nodded. “Why don’t you take a break from the running, and work on the exercise bike to get in some cardio while the rest of the group runs. See if your knee settles down.”
Wentz, who had just had knee surgery himself, was also consigned to the exercise bikes in the academy gym.
“Don’t worry about it,” he told me as we pedaled side by side. “They’re not going to stop us from graduating just because we can’t run a mile and a half in whatever time it is.”
I wanted to believe him. “You think?”
“Sure. They know this running shit is stupid. In New York we didn’t even have to take a PT test at the academy. If running a mile and a half was actually job-related, everyone would have to retake the PT test every year, not just recruits. The truth is, cops don’t really need to run. Maybe they’ll make us do something else, like bike for the same amount of time to show we can do it without keeling over, but MPD’s short on officers. They need us. And look at all the fat slobs out there on patrol. If they really cared about fitness they’d fire their lazy asses.”
It was true that Flanagan didn’t seem particularly troubled by the fact that neither Wentz nor I was running with the rest of the class. He reserved his wrath for Lowrey, who had a tendency to flop down on his back, panting, halfway through his sit-ups.
“He thinks Lowrey’s not trying hard enough,” Wentz observed. “Whereas he can see that whether you’re running or not, you’re willing to bust your butt.”
I thought Lowrey was trying his best, and wished Flanagan would go easier on him. Lowrey was a good guy, just a little out of shape. I empathized. I was definitely busting my butt, though. I hurt all over. And I wasn’t sure Wentz’s view of the PT tests was correct. I had to find a way to run farther and faster without falling apart.
I went to a physical therapist, who analyzed my gait and put me to work with foam rollers and giant rubber bands. But I still hurt. I started getting scared. What if I couldn’t do this? After all those fights with my mother, a
fter memorizing all those property forms and weapons offenses and learning to shout, “Back down!” in a command voice, what if I blew it all because I couldn’t manage the long-distance run?
Then it was time for firearms training.
The academy’s firearms instructors, we were told, refused to work weekends or evenings, so everyone in our reserve recruit class would have to slot in with one of the career recruit classes for two weeks of daytime range training.
At the academy, the day began for the career recruits at six thirty a.m. and ended around three. “You need to arrive here by oh-six-hundred if you want to find a parking space,” Flanagan warned. “And after that, you want to go right downstairs to the classroom next to the firing range and you want to stay there in that classroom, because the career recruits have drill and formation first thing in the morning. If you’re standing around upstairs in a recruit uniform, one of the class officers is going to start screaming at you and try to put you into the formation.”
He looked at our alarmed expressions and laughed. “Don’t worry. If that happens just explain that you’re a reserve recruit, just there for firearms training, and they’ll lay off. But trust me, it’s going to be a different world. You guys have no idea how easy you have it here, coming in the evenings and working with nice guys like me. Now you’re going to see how the other half lives.”
What Happens on the Range
Deadly force [is] any use of force likely to cause death or serious physical injury. The primary purpose of deadly force is to neutralize a subject who poses an immediate threat of death or serious injury to the member or others.
—MPD General Order 901.07, “Use of Force”
Upstairs, the police academy’s main building has sunlit classrooms, offices, a lunchroom, a cafeteria, and a gym. But go down two flights of stairs and you really are in a different world. It’s windowless and dank, filled with the acrid smell of copper and lead, spent powder, and gun-cleaning oil.
“What happens on the range stays on the range,” Officer Kowalski declared with a jovial smile. He had twenty-five of us in his classroom—twenty career recruits and five reserve recruits—ready to start firearms training, and he was warming up the crowd.
We all chuckled dutifully.
“Hey, did I fucking say something funny?” Kowalski hoisted his belt above his bulging belly and glared around the room. “I did not fucking say something funny.”
Everyone instantly stopped chuckling.
“All right, okay,” he relented. “Let’s just do some introductions here. Name, where you from, what you did before this. If you just fuckin’ sat around jerking off, do not tell me. I don’t want you to share that. This is not a fucking college campus. This is not a place where we overshare, snowflakes. Okay, you first, Creatine.”
“Creatine” was a meaty-looking kid with a blond crew cut and the physique of a serious bodybuilder. He gave a slow, good-natured shrug. “My name’s Graves, I’m from New Jersey, and I used to drive trucks, then I went back to school, and now I’m here.”
“So, how many times you work out a day, Creatine?” demanded Kowalski.
“I try to work out three times a day,” Graves said modestly.
“Fuck, okay! So on the range I’m gonna be standing behind you when the bullets start flying. Because your fuckin’ giant hard muscles can stop bullets, right, Creatine? Ha ha no, dude, I’m just kidding you, man. Don’t stop wearing your ballistic vest. But hey, maybe your fuckin’ thick skull will stop bullets for real, right? Okay, next?”
Next were twin sisters of Serbian origin, Mirjana and Yasna. Kowalski dubbed them Marta and Sparta, and asked if they’d committed any war crimes lately.
After that was a young black guy from Louisiana, fresh out of the army. “Shit, Louisiana?” said Kowalski. “I used to know a guy from there. His name was, like, Gumbo or something. You people eat that shit there, right? Hey, you happen to know him? Big black dude called Gumbo?”
This went on.
“Anyone else here in the military?”
A young Hispanic guy raised his hand.
“What service?” asked Kowalski.
“Coast guard,” answered the recruit.
“No, I mean the real military, not the fuckin’ puddle pirates. Oh hey, man. Where’d you get that little tattoo on your bicep? Adams Morgan? Tattoo Delight? Guy called Z? No fuckin’ kidding! I got the exact same tattoo, except mine’s on my dick, so it’s a little bigger.”
To the Indian American woman: “Sweetheart, I can’t even fuckin’ pronounce your name. No, sweetheart, I’m not gonna even try. What is it, like Kumaraswamy or something, or Mulligatawny? Isn’t that another fuckin’ soup, like gumbo? Listen Mulligatawny, you know how to cook that shit? You gonna cook us some soup?”
To the arson investigator: “Okay. Arson. Hey, Arson, you spend your time setting things on fire when you were a kid?”
I reluctantly copped to having gone to law school, and was dubbed Counselor. I was relieved. I’d gotten off lightly. Privately, I dubbed Kowalski “Lawsuit,” as in “this guy is a hostile environment civil rights lawsuit waiting to happen.”
Kowalski favored a stream-of-consciousness instructional style that often had little to do with the nominal topic of the class:
“Man, back when crime here was high, in the eighties and nineties, it was fun to be a cop. Now it’s just these crappy little crimes. A woman calls us this one time, someone’s taken thirty-seven cents out of her ashtray. I couldn’t believe it—she wants me to dust for prints like we’re on fuckin’ CSI. I said, ‘Lady, that crackhead is gone, your thirty-seven cents is gone!’ She’s still moaning and wailing about it, you know, ‘Why you ain’t investigatin’,’ and shit. I couldn’t believe it. Thirty-seven cents! I started to curse her out, but we’re not allowed to do that anymore.
“So, you gotta be careful out there. You know, sometimes you can’t tell the chicks from the guys. This one time, I’m coming home from the beach, and I get pulled over by this Maryland state trooper, and I’ve got my badge out and I’m all like, ‘Sorry, sir,’ when I see that the trooper has a fucking bun. It’s a fucking chick! She’s a chick, but she’s built like a goddamn tree. Like, she could fit two of you inside her uniform, Creatine. Anyway, so I switch over to ‘Oh, so sorry, ma’am,’ because I knew she could crush me if she just leaned against my car, her butt was so big . . .
“Anyway. These days you get these, you know, trans people and shit. Maybe she was actually a guy after all. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. But you gotta be careful out there, because if you’re a dude and you’re patting down some other dude and suddenly he’s all like”—Kowalski went falsetto—“ ‘Oh, excuse me, officer, but I identify as female,’ well guess what? You’re fucked, man, and you gotta get on the radio and ask Marta and Sparta to come over and help you finish the fucking frisk, because trans people get to choose their fuckin’ gender and choose which gender searches them.
“Hey. You guys think I’m fuckin’ fat? It’s okay, you won’t hurt my feelings. I didn’t use to be fat. What happened was, I got hurt trying to arrest this dude. You know that Starbucks by Dupont Circle? So this dude was just one of my regular crazy guys, he was always hanging out by the door to Starbucks bothering people and asking for money, and I was always telling him to move on and not be blocking the fucking door to Starbucks, because people need to have free access to their fucking soy skim caramel lattes. But one day he decides he doesn’t want to move on, and finally I had to put my hands on him. Well, so he’s this skinny little black guy, and this is Dupont Circle, right? So you know what that means. Hey, where’s my little special ed child? Yeah, you, Creatine. So what does that mean, Creatine?”
Creatine looked blank.
“Fuck, Creatine, you need to go get a protein shake or something, man, you’re fuckin’ even dumber than usual. Don’t say we don’t hire the handica
pped. Okay, come on, people, what does Dupont Circle mean? It means there’s, like, a thousand rich white people with their fuckin’ soy lattes in one hand and their fuckin’ iPhones in the other and they’re all recording. Because I’m struggling with this guy, just trying to get him into cuffs, but he’s actually incredibly strong and he’s kicking at me like crazy, with, like, steel-toed boots or something, and I feel something in my ankle go ‘pop!’ and it hurt like you would not believe, I was practically fucking crying.
“By now I’m pissed, and I’m thinking, man, if this was 7D I’d be beating on him. Used to be, you could use a neck restraint in a situation like that, which worked pretty good. But not these days. These days, no neck restraint, no chokehold, no tickee, no laundry, not allowed; you do that, you’re gonna be the poster child of stupid, and the department’s gonna throw you under the bus. So I am treating this fucking crazy dude like he’s made of glass, but it doesn’t matter, because all these Dupont Circle rich white assholes with their cell phones see is this big white cop roughing up this skinny little black dude, and I realize I just gotta arrest this guy quick and get the fuck out of there before I’m the next YouTube sensation. So, long story short, finally I get the guy cuffed but now my ankle’s swelling up like a balloon. He fucking kicked it so hard he fractured it. And then I couldn’t work out—not like you, Creatine, which is actually a fuckin’ blessing—but anyway that’s how I got so fucking fat.”
We spent most of our first week of firearms training sitting in the classroom memorizing the parts of a Glock 17, MPD’s primary duty weapon, and trying to avoid being singled out by Kowalski. At first we just studied blurry diagrams, labeling them appropriately. There was the extractor, the magazine floor plate, the slide stop lever. We repeated the Four Rules of Safe Firearms Handling in a chorus:
Treat all firearms as if they are loaded.
Point the muzzle in a safe direction.