by Rosa Brooks
“It’s a shitty situation,” my partner Jake told the older sister, who was by now resigned and apologetic. “But we don’t have a choice. We gotta take you.”
Like most arrestees, she was remarkably well-mannered about the whole thing. “I understand, officers, it ain’t your fault. You mind if I call my boss and explain I ain’t gonna get to work today, and just change my clothes before we go?”
That was no problem, we told her. We let her make calls, change clothes, and issue various instructions to the family members who looked on somberly. Finally, half an hour later, she was ready to go, and we searched and cuffed her. It was a fairly perfunctory search, since, at our suggestion, she was leaving all her personal possessions with her family to avoid the hassle of having to retrieve them from the station when she was released. We assured her that on a first offense, with something this minor, she’d be out again within a day or two. Shaking her head ruefully, she kissed her children good-bye and apologized again for losing her temper, and we loaded her into the car.
Was justice served by taking her off to jail for the night? I can’t see how. But that was the law, and another person was sucked into the ravenous maw of the criminal justice system.
* * *
• • •
Another night, we were dispatched to take a report from a woman who said she had been raped. She was white, which was rare; in all the calls I went on during my time patrolling, I encountered white DC residents on only a handful of occasions.
Before we arrived, my partner Ben told me he had encountered this woman before, and locked her up for filing a false report. I was a little shocked—weren’t we supposed to err on the side of believing women?
“Yeah, we are,” Ben said, “but I know this lady. You’ll see. She’s pretty crazy.”
“Well, she could be crazy and still get raped,” I reminded him. “Crazy people get raped too.”
“You’ll see.” The last two times he had responded to calls to her house, Ben said, she claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a black male, sending police on a wild goose chase in search of black males matching her extremely vague description. Each time, officers had stopped several men for questioning before concluding the crime had been fictitious.
The complainant was in her thirties or forties, leaning on a cane. Her name was Star, and her voice was girlish and vague, with occasional odd pauses between words. She had come out for a smoke, she said, and a man she didn’t know had come up to her.
“He stuck his tongue . . . in my mouth.” She offered a small, rather satisfied smile as she said this, as if she had just said something very clever.
What did he look like?
He was “tall, dark . . .”—she lingered over the word—“probably six-two, he was wearing a hoodie . . . black jeans and red shoes. But I think . . . that describes . . . a lot of people,” Star said, with another strange little smile. “I was out gardening. He tried . . . to drag me into the alley. He thrust his cock in my mouth. I got away and I . . . ran in . . . the house and locked the doors. Yeah. I’m traumatized by it. I can’t believe . . . there are guys who just do this to women.” She sniffled a little and wiped her nose, then added primly, “I have not felt well since then.”
On its face, it wasn’t completely implausible. But after that, the story began to change. The incident had just taken place. It had taken place an hour ago. It had taken place two hours ago. He had hit her on the head. No, he had thrown her down on the ground and she hit her head when she fell.
There were no obvious marks or lumps on her head. I asked if her head hurt.
“No, it’s just the . . . rest of my body . . . that’s . . . tender.”
He had “dragged” her. How had he dragged her, I asked? By the arm, by the leg?
“He grabbed me by my boobs.” She let out a giggle when she said this.
Had anything like this ever happened to her before?
“Yes,” she said, now tearful. “It happens to me all the time . . . I’m so tired of living in this neighborhood. I just want to go to the hospital and make sure that whatever he did to me, it doesn’t give me a . . . disease.”
“Ma’am,” Ben finally said, “do you remember me? We had long conversation, about what was the truth, and not the truth?”
“Yes,” Star agreed. She remembered that last time she called the police, Ben had been there. That time, her cell phone had been stolen, and it was still missing, she told Ben accusingly.
“The cell phone was returned to you,” Ben corrected. “It was in a bar, and you left it there when you were intoxicated, but you reported that a black male had robbed it from you.”
“I’m giving the truth,” she insisted.
“All right,” Ben said, giving me a resigned glance. “We’re calling out our sexual assault unit.”
He didn’t look pleased about it, but agreed that notwithstanding Star’s history of unsubstantiated victimization by vaguely described large black men, there needed to be an investigation.
Two detectives from the sexual assault unit came out. Star’s story changed some more, and the investigators could find no evidence that she had been dragged around the side of the house, as she had claimed; the damp patch of earth where she said she had been dragged and assaulted appeared undisturbed. An ambulance came, but the medics found no signs of injury or assault. And, it turned out, there was an active warrant for her arrest; she had failed to appear at a previous court date.
In the end, we decided to arrest Star but have her taken to the city’s emergency psychiatric clinic.
I climbed into the ambulance to break the bad news.
“I didn’t fail to appear for anything,” she moaned. “I’m a fucking . . . American . . . paying . . . citizen.” Her voice was childlike and quavery. “My husband’s a veteran. There are . . . fucking drug dealers on these streets, and you’re going after . . . me!”
Her tremulousness disappeared, replaced by rage. “There’s real drug dealers on the street. I haven’t done shit! There’s prostitutes everywhere, and black rapists!”
I was starting to run out of sympathy. But, I reminded myself, even crazy racists could still be sexually assaulted. Was it possible something truly had happened to her? I didn’t want to think we were arresting someone who really had been victimized. On the other hand, arresting her might be the only way to get her into some kind of court-mandated treatment.
Star wasn’t easy to like. When I put her ring into the property bag, she almost spat at me. “That’s my wedding ring! It was given me by a . . . veteran. Who fucking . . . died! This is fucking robbery. If I don’t get my ring back—that was from my husband, who fucking . . . died in Afghanistan, saving your asses—he died for you fucking people! And for me!” she shouted. “So go to hell!”
We closed the ambulance door, and she was taken away.
It Can Be Kind of Hard to See Things Clearly
Prior to the end of their shift, members who are assigned [Body-worn cameras] shall: (1) Document activation of the BWC device at the beginning of their non-public narrative on Field Contact Reports, Incident and Offense Reports, Traffic Crash Reports, and Arrest Reports in the Records Management System (RMS), as well as on PD Forms 42 (Injury or Illness Report), PD Forms 43, PD Forms 61D (Violation Citations) and notices of infraction (NOIs). (a) . . . Document in the non-public narrative section of all related reports or their notebook any delay or failure to activate their BWC and any interruption of a BWC recording required by this order.
—MPD General Order 302.13, Body-Worn Camera Program
The truth is, I wasn’t an especially good cop, and I knew it.
I was slow, for one thing, and I tended to fumble. This was especially true in my first few months out of the academy. There were too many physical objects to keep track of: my notebook, my pen, my flashlight, my body-worn camera, my sunglasses, my two c
ell phones, my hat. I was always rushing, and in my first months on patrol, something was always falling or getting stuck or misplaced. I’d reach for my phone and my notebook would fall in the dirt; I’d pick up the notebook and my pen would fall. As soon as I grabbed the pen, my sunglasses would slide off. I’d open the patrol car door and try to jump out, but my holster or my ASP baton would get stuck on the seat belt and I’d have to pause to untangle myself. I hadn’t felt this graceless in a long time. It reminded me of elementary school, when my lack of skill at kickball condemned me to be one of the kids chosen last whenever teams were picked. My klutziness filled me with mild panic, which only made things worse; the more determined I was to exit the patrol car gracefully and quickly, the more tangled up I got.
Also, there was so much to remember, and so much to keep track of. You had to monitor the radio at all times, for instance. This was a challenge. For one thing, some of the dispatchers had heavy accents, and especially in those early months after graduation, I often struggled to decode even the simplest statements. Added to that was the poor sound quality. You’d adjust the volume to hear the dispatcher, then another officer would come on the air almost inaudibly, so you’d turn up the volume, only to have your eardrums blasted when the dispatcher came back on. My arm kept brushing against the radio’s volume knob too, and sometimes when the radio appeared blessedly quiet, I’d glance down to discover I had accidentally turned the volume nearly off.
Over the course of my first year on patrol, I tried various techniques to improve my ability to hear the radio. With no earpiece, the sound was fairly clear, but without an earpiece everyone around you could hear the radio too, which tended to distract interviewees, and was occasionally dangerous or a privacy issue—when you were talking to a suspect, he didn’t need to know that other officers were around the corner in apartment 4B, searching unsuccessfully for shell casings. Many officers wore Secret Service–style earpieces, the kind with a clear coil and earpiece only in one ear. I tried this for a while, but found it unpleasant; the sound was tinny, and it was hard to hear external noises through the earpiece. When I wore it, I felt like I had a head cold and blocked sinuses on one side. Eventually I found an expensive brand of earpiece that was designed to allow external sound to filter through, and settled on this as the best compromise, but it was still awkward.
Even after a year of patrolling, I still sometimes struggled to respond to my own call sign. The trouble was, call signs changed day by day, and sometimes even during a single shift—if you were assigned to a foot beat halfway through your shift, for instance. Call signs were mostly numeric, and for me, at least, they tended to blend in with all the other numeric chatter on the radio. Dispatchers closed all radio interactions with the time; for instance: you’d say, “Copy,” and the dispatcher would respond, “15:03,” or “22:12” to mark the time. There were various numeric codes to contend with, as well. When you went into service you were 10-8, 10-4 (in service or back in service, with two officers in a vehicle), or 10-8, 10-99 (solo). When you wanted a warrant check, you asked for a 10-29. Your location was your 20 (short for 10-20, radio code for “What is your location?”). When you went out of service, you were 10-7. Between numeric codes, time checks, street addresses, and call signs, the radio traffic was a jumble of numbers.
“7041,” the dispatcher would say.
“7041,” the unit would acknowledge.
“7041, are you 10-8? I need a unit to at 1844 MLK, apartment 103 to assist 7032.”
“No, ma’am, I’m still at 1722 Thirtieth Street with 7042, and I need numbers for simple assault.”
“7041, your numbers are 17223976; I repeat, 17223976.”
“I copy. And did you get a result for that 10-29?”
“Negative, 7041. No result.”
“Copy.”
“21:08.”
“7051.”
“7051.”
“Ma’am, you can clear me from 2314 Twenty-second Street. I’m 10-8, 10-7.”
“I copy, 7051. 21:09.”
Especially early on, it was all an auditory blur. I preferred using the car’s mobile data terminal when possible; I was more comfortable reading and writing than going over the air. But the MDT came with its own problems. Sometimes, for reasons of its own, it would reject the same password it had accepted during the previous shift, or decide to log you out just as you tried to check the address of a call. Other times it would freeze, or decide not to process whatever you had just typed in. The cables were always coming loose, and the Wi-Fi was unstable.
Also, it was locked into a stand between the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat, and though you could angle it toward either side of the car, there was no angle that allowed you to view it without straining your neck. Typing was also difficult, as the keyboard was also affixed to the center of the car, requiring you to contort your body to type. But you had to type reports on the MDT, because if you didn’t you’d be stuck back at the station long after your shift was over, finishing reports you should have finished on the MDT, on calls you would by now have half forgotten and have to reconstruct from your notebook or by watching the body-worn camera videos.
The body-worn camera was equally difficult. In theory, we were supposed to start recording as soon as we were dispatched, or as soon as we began to “take police action” if we were flagged down or self-initiated a run (by stopping a car, for instance). In practice, almost no one did this, in part because it seemed silly to turn on the camera when all it would record for the next ten minutes was video footage of the steering wheel or the dashboard as you drove to the call. Often, you would forget to turn the camera on when you arrived, and halfway through the call you would remember with a jolt of alarm. Just as often, you’d remember to turn the camera on but would then forget to turn it off, only to realize while you were in the restroom of the 7-Eleven that your camera was still dutifully recording your every move.
Sometimes, the cameras turned themselves on. The department was undergoing a trial run with Tasers, and someone had decreed that whenever a Taser was turned on, even for testing purposes, all BWCs within a certain radius would turn on automatically. The idea, presumably, was to guard against the known tendency of officers to forget (or “forget”) to turn on their cameras by taking the decision away from them, thus guaranteeing that all uses of the experimental Tasers would be recorded for departmental review. This had the effect, however, of greatly increasing the number of accidental toilet and locker room videos.
All BWC videos had to be labeled by the end of each shift, using our otherwise useless department-issued cell phones, “tagging” each video with the date, case number if there was one, address, and type of call. Officers spent a good deal of time debating how to label accidental toilet videos. Technically, there was a process for requesting that accidental videos be deleted, but everyone assumed that requesting deletion was a good way to guarantee that a video would be reviewed. It wasn’t possible for the department to review all videos, however—there was simply too much footage. The prevailing theory was that accidental toilet videos were best labeled “BWC test,” since test videos were less likely to be reviewed by a human.
For me, the BWC was just another piece of equipment to worry about. More than once, I realized only as a call was ending that I had forgotten to turn it on. No one ever gave me a hard time about it, but I fretted anyway. If you didn’t turn your camera on, you could get in trouble. If nothing bad happened on the call, it wouldn’t matter much, but if something went wrong and you hadn’t activated your camera, who would believe the slip-up was inadvertent?
Of course, forgetting to turn the camera off could get you in trouble as well—not only because you might accidentally wander into the bathroom with the camera rolling, but because officers tended to reserve their franker assessments of suspects, victims, and the department itself for when they assumed the cameras were off. Accidentally keeping your camera on me
ant you’d get dirty looks from whichever colleague had just been waxing eloquent about what a fucking dirtbag the suspect on the last call had been, or wondering how a complete shitbird like Lieutenant Brown had managed to get promoted.
On top of everything else, I quickly discovered that I was probably the least observant cop in Washington, DC. I used up so much mental energy just trying to keep from dropping my notebook while listening to the radio and remembering to turn on my BWC that I didn’t have many brain cells left over to process any of the other information coming my way. My partners were constantly alert, commenting on suspicious vehicles or people even as they chattered away or typed on the MDT. I rarely noticed the suspicious vehicles or people until they were pointed out to me. That car? The one missing the rear plates, oh, yeah. . . . That guy just tossed a baggie into the bushes, really? I didn’t notice.
When I did notice things, I often noticed the wrong things. Dispatched to a call for “sounds of gunfire,” my partner and I found eighteen bullet casings along the sidewalk and street, along with a car with its window shot out (and a very angry car owner). I didn’t spot the bullet casings until I accidentally kicked one and almost tripped over another, but I did note several neat bullet holes drilled into a stop sign. I gestured to my partner and pointed at the sign, but he made an immediate and frantic shushing noise and shook his head violently. Seeing my bewilderment, he gestured for me to turn my camera off. Puzzled, I complied.