by Rosa Brooks
Only Reid, the officer who proudly declared himself a Second Amendment single-issue voter, took the time to offer extensive comments on my training forms.
Officer Brooks and I operated Unit 7043 in a 10-4 capacity. The main focus of our time together was situation awareness, tactical mindset and officer safety. Officer Brooks began the tour well. She was properly dressed in full MPD Class B uniform and she arrived on time. We began our tour by performing mock traffic stops. We discussed the “A” and “B” pillar concepts, approaches, keeping her eye on the threat and how to position the scout car. . . . Further officer safety lessons included being sure not to stop next to the window of a neighboring vehicle and being sure to leave enough room for evasive maneuvers. . . . While responding to calls for service, Officer Brooks learned about fatal funnels . . . and about watching subjects’ hands. . . . We visited various hot spots to walk through specific high stress situations (i.e., sounds of gunshots), including a discussion of cover versus concealment.
After putting together my field training binder, I was required to meet with the reserve corps’ field training coordinator. He flipped through my binder, counting arrests and traffic tickets, then grilling me on procedures. “So you get to a domestic violence call. What do you do?” “You’re dispatched to a suspected child abuse situation. How do you proceed?” When he finally declared himself satisfied, I was allowed to move on to the next phase of the certification process, the “cert ride.”
Cert rides had to be arranged with district training sergeants. Essentially, you spent a shift driving around with a sergeant rather than another officer. After observing you for a few hours, the training sergeant would either recommend certification or order you to complete additional supervised patrol hours, focusing on your areas of weakness, before you were permitted to try again.
Cert ride horror stories abounded. Some sergeants, I had heard, grilled certification candidates relentlessly on geography, MPD general orders, or the arcana of district procedures (“When filling out a property form, are days of the week spelled out in full, or given using two-letter abbreviations?”). My weakest area was geography—unlike much of Washington, most streets in 7D follow neither a grid pattern nor an alphabetical principle, so there were no shortcuts to learning your way around. Before my cert ride, I spent several days driving around 7D and poring over maps, trying to memorize the district’s many geographical quirks (both Second Street and Sixth Street SE somehow merge with Fourth Street, for instance, and Savannah Street, Savannah Place, and Savannah Terrace are all in different places). I read through all the recruit instructional materials and my class notes from the academy, memorized lists of required notifications, and practiced spelling out names using MPD’s idiosyncratic phonetic alphabet (“Brooks”: Brown, Robert, Ocean, Ocean, King, Sam).
My cert ride itself was an anticlimax. On a sunny early May afternoon in 2018, I was assigned to spend a shift with Sergeant Matthews, one of 7D’s rare female sergeants. I liked Sergeant Matthews; she was smart, with a wry sense of humor. We drove around for a bit, and checked out a complaint about some men conducting a car repair business on the street. I managed to drive to the appropriate address without consulting my GPS. Then we were dispatched to take a robbery report. The victim, a young white guy who was new to DC, had put his iPhone up for sale using the Letgo app. He had been contacted by a potential buyer, who proposed meeting in 7D. When the victim arrived he was met by three young teenage boys claiming to be potential buyers. They asked to look at the phone before making a decision, then ran off with it into an alley. The victim was able to give a detailed description of the boy who had taken his phone, however, so we left him with another officer and drove around the neighborhood. Within minutes we spotted the young thief, who hadn’t even bothered to remove his distinctive sweatshirt. The victim confirmed the thief’s identity, and we arrested him.
Just then, something urgent came over the radio. Sergeant Matthews told me she needed to get back, and asked the other officer to give me a ride to the Juvenile Processing Center to get the kid booked in.
“My cert ride’s over?” I asked.
She gave me a half smile. “Yeah. Just handle the arrest, and you’re good.”
I spent the next few hours dealing with the paperwork for our fifteen-year-old thief. Because he was only fifteen and had no prior record, he was eligible for a new pilot youth diversion program, but no one seemed to know how the process worked. After a good deal of back-and-forth discussion between the officers assigned to the Juvenile Processing Center, I was instructed to fill out the arrest forms in longhand or as PDFs instead of entering the information into the online reporting system, so the station would have a record of what had happened but the arrest would not appear in electronic searches. The boy’s mother was called to pick him up. She berated him (“I told you not to be spending time with those boys! I knew they’d talk you into some kind of trouble! You are grounded!”) and took him home. I hitched a ride back to 7D with another officer.
Later that day, I was cc’d on an email from Sergeant Matthews:
MEMORANDUM
TO: Commander, Seventh District
RE: Patrol Certification of Reserve Officer Rosa Brooks
Officer Rosa Brooks was appointed to the Metropolitan Police Department on April 12, 2016. Upon graduation from the Maurice T. Turner Institute of Police Science, Officer Brooks was assigned to the Seventh District. During her training period, I assisted with the monitoring of her training.
Officer Brooks successfully completed all tasks and assignments required of her during her training period. She has demonstrated a working knowledge of the laws and regulations of the District of Columbia as well as a substantial working knowledge of laws of arrest, search and seizure. Officer Brooks has also demonstrated knowledge of General Order 901.1.
On May 5th, 2018, I rode with Officer Brooks in order to ascertain her readiness to ride in a 10-99 capacity. During the (6) six-hour evaluation period, Officer Brooks demonstrated an ability to respond to various locations within the Seventh District without assistance. She responded to various radio assignments and handled each in a professional manner.
At the conclusion of the certification ride, I reviewed her training progress and it is my opinion that Officer Rosa Brooks has acquired the necessary skills to carry out the duties of a Metropolitan Police Officer and it is recommended that she be certified to patrol in a 10-99 status.
* * *
• • •
It was a milestone, and I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about it.
Whatever it was I wanted to prove had been proven, I supposed. I was one of just a few women in the MPD Reserve Corps, and when I finished my field training, I became the only woman serving as a certified level one reserve officer. I had weathered my family’s skepticism and survived the academy; I had done more push-ups than I ever imagined I could do, and learned how to fight, shoot a gun, and administer emergency medical care. As a patrol officer, I had handled hundreds of calls in Washington’s most difficult and violent neighborhoods, and for the most part, I felt like I had handled them reasonably well. If I never entirely mastered the skill of managing my countless pieces of equipment or remembering to fill out the correct forms in the correct manner, I felt good about my ability to calm tense situations and treat both victims and perpetrators with respect.
I mostly felt good about my fellow MPD officers, too. Each year, nearly a thousand people are killed by police in the United States, a level of violent death so high that policing can reasonably be compared to war, and critics of policing are justified in viewing both the stunningly high number of police killings and the racial inequities marring our criminal justice system as tragic and inexcusable. But policing is not a malevolent conspiracy; most police officers take seriously their role as public servants. The widely publicized incidents of police violence and abuse often lead us to forget that the vast majority o
f police officers spend the vast majority of their time helping people who ask for their help. Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don’t get to choose whether to respond.
Often, police officers help people in concrete and direct ways. They give CPR and Narcan to addicts lying unconscious on the street; they check for intruders when residents are too frightened to enter their homes; they wade into the middle of fights and put their own bodies between the combatants. They help victims of domestic violence apply for restraining orders against their abusers, try to persuade the mentally ill to seek care, drive homeless people to shelters, comfort victims of robbery and assault, and mediate disputes between family members and neighbors. During my time as a patrol officer I did all these things, and if much of what I saw made me sad, I went home after most shifts feeling that my colleagues and I had helped a few people, or at least prevented some bad situations from getting worse.
I felt less good about many of the arrests I made. They were all lawful arrests—“good” arrests, from MPD’s perspective. But I doubt most of those arrests made the community safer or more prosperous.
It’s hard to say for sure, but I know that of the twenty or so arrests I made or helped make during my field training period, almost all involved minor, nonviolent offenses: driving without a permit, destruction of property, unlawful entry, failure to appear at a court hearing, and the like. Even the arrests I made for violent offenses mostly involved misdemeanor-level assaults.
In the majority of those cases, arresting the perpetrators accomplished nothing of value. By the time we arrived on the scene, their brief burst of violence was usually over. After a night in jail, the perpetrators were released back into the same unhappy situations that had led them to break the law: too little money, too little education, too few decent jobs, too much family conflict, too few conflict resolution skills. Getting arrested didn’t help the people driving without permits get properly licensed, and it didn’t help the people who lashed out at friends or family members learn to control their tempers.
Mostly, those arrests just made bad situations worse. The people I arrested ended up with longer criminal records and a reduced ability to get or keep a job. If they went to prison, their families lost caregivers and income; their communities gained more children with absent parents, more children being brought up by distant relatives or strangers, and more children in desperate and painful situations.
Those arrests weren’t costless for “the system,” either. Even arrests for minor offenses take officers off the street for several hours, and the city bears the expense of feeding, housing, and guarding prisoners awaiting their first appearance, as well as the expense of all the work prosecutors must put in to review arrest paperwork. All told, the average arrest costs the city several thousand dollars—even when arrestees are ultimately released without formal charges.
Nearly a third of all DC arrests are “no-papered,” meaning they don’t lead to formal charges because prosecutors decide not to move forward with the case. Sometimes, this is because the underlying police work was poor quality—the police reports don’t establish probable cause, or police errors in handling suspects or evidence make a successful prosecution unlikely. But much of the time, cases are no-papered because prosecutors deem the offenses too minor to merit formal charges. Prosecutors have heavy workloads, and very few want to spend hours pursuing cases against people who steal cans of soda or hit someone with a broom. When police make arrests that are subsequently no-papered, thousands of dollars of taxpayer money—money that might have been spent on education, job training, and mental health care—is essentially wasted on cases too trivial or weak to merit prosecution.
As an uncertified officer, I’d been required to patrol at least twenty-four hours each month or risk being dropped from the reserve corps, and while there was no formal arrest quota, the reserve corps training coordinator instructed uncertified officers to aim for at least eight to fifteen arrests during the field training period. Since everyone wanted to get certified, officers had a strong incentive to make the requisite number of arrests during field training. I was no exception. I didn’t go looking for reasons to arrest people, but when I found them, I was pleased to have more arrest reports to add to my field training binder.
After certification, reserve officers are free to spend their MPD volunteer time as they wish. They can teach reserve recruit classes at the academy, participate in optional training workshops, or sign up to help in specialized units or at headquarters. Once I was certified, I cut down my patrol time to a shift every month or so and found other ways to fulfill my volunteer obligations. I didn’t want to lose all the skills I had so painfully acquired—but I didn’t want to keep arresting poor people for trivial offenses, either.
There are people who need to be arrested and imprisoned. I lost no sleep over arresting the man who beat his girlfriend and spat out angry threats as we wrestled him into the wagon, for instance. His girlfriend’s battered face and his enraged cries—“I’m coming for you, motherfuckers!”—were enough to make me glad he’d been caught and cuffed. But most of the people I arrested didn’t need to be in jail. They were poor and sad; sometimes they were addicts, or mentally ill. And I didn’t want to keep locking them up.
Epilogue
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
At the police academy, I was bothered both by the contradictory messages we received and by our instructors’ near-complete silence on so many of the most difficult issues facing modern policing. Shortly before graduation, I had written up my proposal for the fellowship program designed to encourage young officers to confront what I thought of as “the hard questions”: What’s policing for? Do we know what “good policing” looks like? Can we measure it? How should we foster it? How should modern police grapple with the painful legacy of past police abuses, and the ways in which the legacy of racial discrimination still distorts our criminal justice system?
What I wanted, I suppose, was a way to build a bridge between my own two parallel lives: my life as a part-time police officer and my other life, my “real” life as a law professor, a writer, and someone committed to making the world a little bit more just.
Ben Haiman, the MPD official to whom I originally handed the proposal (and my occasional reserve corps patrol partner), was initially cautious about trying to move forward. MPD was between chiefs at the time, and it wasn’t the right moment, Ben thought, to float something new and potentially risky. But in early 2017, shortly after Peter Newsham was confirmed as MPD’s new chief, I got a call from Ben. MPD, he told me, had sent him to a course on public management offered by George Washington University. All the students in the program worked for the DC government, and they had been divided into small teams and instructed to come up with a project that could be sponsored by one or more city agencies and implemented, or at least launched, by the end of the spring semester. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You know that fellowship proposal you wrote? No promises, but I think the chief might have some interest in getting behind an effort like that. How would you feel if my team in the DC public management program adopted your proposal as our course project, and worked with you to make it happen? If you’re okay with that idea, I think we might be able to do something real with this.”
* * *
• • •
We did something real.
Throughout the spring of 2017, I worked with Ben and the rest of his team to flesh out the project, which we dubbed the Police for Tomorrow initiative. We would invite applications from officers and MPD civilian employees with less than a year on the job, we decided. Those selected as fellows would participate in intensive monthly workshops on topics such as race and policing, implicit bias, poverty and crime, DC’s changing demographics and the impact of gentrification on policing, mental illness, adolesce
nt brain development, police use of force, and innovative approaches to reducing violence, over-criminalization, and mass incarceration. At the end of the workshop phase of the fellowship, each would develop a capstone community project related to one of these issues.
With some trepidation, I suggested that we invite a few of my Georgetown Law colleagues to help design the workshops. As a rule, cops are wary of both lawyers and professors, and I wasn’t sure MPD would be open to working with strangers who combined both of these suspect professions. But Ben liked the idea, and the higher-ups gave it the thumbs-up as well, seeing a collaboration with Georgetown as a way to give academic credibility to the Police for Tomorrow program.
I was also worried about the reaction of my law school colleagues. At Georgetown, I was part of a student-faculty working group on racial justice established by the dean and chaired by my colleague Paul Butler, who had written extensively about race and policing. As I had feared, some members of the group were vehemently opposed to anything that looked like helping the cops. But others were intrigued by the idea of opening up a dialogue with the Metropolitan Police Department.
And just like that, the Police for Tomorrow program was up and running. The dean of the law school offered to provide start-up funding, and I pulled together four of my colleagues to run things on the Georgetown end.
They were a diverse and talented group. There was Paul Butler, who spent his early career as a prosecutor in DC before coming to the conclusion that he was no longer willing to be a black man who spent his days sending a parade of other black men to jail. He became a law professor instead, and a powerful chronicler of how racism continues to shape the American criminal justice system. There was Christy Lopez, who had spent much of her career at the Justice Department investigating police abuses before coming to Georgetown; Christy had been the primary author of the Justice Department’s report on discriminatory and abusive practices by the police department in Ferguson, Missouri. Then there was Kristin Henning, a former public defender, the head of Georgetown Law’s Juvenile Justice Clinic, and a major national voice on race and juvenile justice. Finally, there was Shon Hopwood, one of Georgetown’s newest faculty hires. Shon had spent twelve years in federal prison after a failed bank robbery committed in his early twenties. In prison, he became a “jailhouse lawyer,” writing briefs so powerful they caught the attention of Supreme Court justices and the Solicitor General. After his release, Shon went to law school, becoming a prominent prison reform advocate.