by Rosa Brooks
And, of course, there was me—a writer, a law professor, and an ambivalent, part-time police officer.
At times, our meetings reminded me of those old jokes: “A cop, a robber, a prosecutor, and a defense lawyer walk into a bar . . .” In many ways, we could hardly have been more different. But although we each saw different pieces of the elephant that is the American criminal justice system, we shared a common belief in the magic that can occur when people are willing to ask each other hard questions.
We dubbed ourselves the Innovative Policing Program, an entity we invented solely for the purpose of sponsoring the Police for Tomorrow Fellowship. Before long, we had hashed out a memorandum of understanding between Georgetown Law and MPD. Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program would plan and host the Police for Tomorrow fellows’ workshops, providing the physical space, arranging guest speakers and readings, and managing the discussions. MPD would provide each Police for Tomorrow fellow with a handpicked senior “mentor” in the department, someone who could help our young fellows navigate the bureaucracy as they launched their careers. We would jointly interview applicants and select the fellows. At the end of the program, after a year of workshops and a successful capstone project, the Police for Tomorrow fellows would receive certificates signed by both the dean of the law school and the chief of police.
In June 2017, we formally launched the program. Brenda Richardson, a community activist who lived in the Seventh District, hosted the launch at her nonprofit’s headquarters, and Chief Peter Newsham, the law school’s vice dean, and a host of other Georgetown faculty and MPD officials welcomed nineteen new Police for Tomorrow fellows into the program.
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It was an experiment, and like most experiments, it was not initially clear whether it would succeed or implode. But in this case, it didn’t take long for us to see that the experiment was working. The young officers who joined the first cohort of Police for Tomorrow fellows were an extraordinary group.
There was Cody, a young officer from Massachusetts who arrived at his Police for Tomorrow selection interview fresh from his first shooting scene. He was so upset that he was still shaking. “I knew this kind of thing would happen,” he told us. “But seeing someone just bleeding on the street like that—it shocked me.” He apologized for being so rattled. He was embarrassed by his own distress, but at the same time, he told us, he was frightened of losing the part of himself that could be shocked and saddened by someone else’s tragedy. “I’m worried about getting cynical,” he said. “I don’t want to turn into the kind of cop who just shrugs when someone gets shot.”
There was Akintayo, who had emigrated to the United States from Nigeria. He was short, skinny, and earnest. He wanted to help people, he said, and believed that arresting people was rarely good for anyone; he wanted to know how to persuade his fellow officers that there were better ways to respond to most calls.
There was Ricardo, who had emigrated from Nicaragua as a boy, went to art school before becoming a cop, and was thinking about becoming a social worker; and Salah, who was half-Palestinian and half-Hungarian, had lived and worked in Chile, Israel, and Jordan, and had founded his own international nonprofit. There was Emma, who wanted to work on anti-human-trafficking initiatives, and Qasim, who hoped to join MPD’s Emergency Response Team.
There was Ashley, a victim support specialist, and Assante, who spent a year at a sub sandwich shop after college and swore he’d never work in fast food again, and Gentry and Daniel, who were crime analysts at headquarters. There was Shayne, who wanted to be a detective, and Renae, who worked as an investigator in MPD’s equal opportunity office, and Sean, who said he hoped to be chief of police someday. There was Shania, and Zack, and Tatiana, and Paris. Our final fellow was the reserve corps sergeant who had been my physical training and defensive tactics instructor at the police academy. We debated whether to accept him as a fellow—our focus was on new MPD employees, and he satisfied the eligibility criteria only in a technical sense, since he had been a reserve officer for years but had just recently taken a full-time civilian job at MPD. In the end, we decided that his role teaching scores of recruits each year made him a valuable participant; he understood both officer culture and recruit culture, and he had the ability to influence far more people in his role as an instructor than we could hope to reach in the Police for Tomorrow program’s first year.
The Police for Tomorrow program exceeded all our expectations. (Interested readers can learn more about it in Appendix B.) Our fellows were eager—sometimes even desperate—to have a forum in which they could talk about their own hopes and frustrations with policing, and the group soon grew close. After they visited a nearby homeless shelter and spent an hour with a formerly homeless man who spoke about how terrifying his first nights on the streets had been, almost everyone ended up in tears. We brought in innovative police chiefs from other cities to speak to our fellows. We took our fellows to the Anacostia Community Museum for an exhibit on the impact of gentrification on DC’s minority communities, and to the U Street corridor for a walking tour of DC’s old “black Broadway.” We met with scholars, activists, and DC high school kids. We talked about alternative ways to handle minor crimes without arresting people, and about the best way to intervene when a partner was doing something risky or inappropriate. We discussed the value of slowing down and focusing on prevention and de-escalation, instead of rushing heedlessly into fraught situations. We talked about how even the most junior officers could become effective change advocates within MPD.
Chief Newsham met with the fellows, listened to their stories and proposals, and told them to keep asking questions. “If each of you talks about this kind of thing with ten other officers, our department will be a hundred times better,” he said. When we celebrated the first cohort of fellows’ “graduation” from the program in October 2018, almost the whole MPD command staff came to the ceremony at the law school. “I want you to be an infection,” Newsham told the fellows. “An infection that spreads through this department from the bottom to the top.” It wasn’t the metaphor I would have chosen, but it worked well enough.
I invited my mother to one of the Police for Tomorrow workshops. She sat through it quietly and left a few minutes before the session ended, before I had a chance to ask her what she thought. But she called me the next day.
“That was wonderful. Thank you for inviting me to sit in. You know, when you started this police thing, I was very concerned about it. I just didn’t understand it at all.”
“Really?” I asked dryly. “I’d never have guessed.”
“But you did something good with it. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
I had doubted myself much of the time, so I couldn’t entirely blame her.
The next year, we expanded the program at MPD’s request, launching a second cohort of fellows and bringing a series of guest lecturers to the police academy to speak to all the recruits. Christy Lopez and I developed and co-taught a practicum course on innovative policing at the law school, and we trained our law students to serve as discussion facilitators at the police academy. MPD asked us to help rethink the entire academy curriculum, and a team of law students worked with academy staff to develop proposals for change. We put other student teams to work helping MPD rethink its performance evaluation system, develop new approaches to recruiting, and analyze the data on police stops to identify and address racial disparities. We expanded beyond MPD as well, helping a community activist in New Orleans launch a Police for Tomorrow–like program with the New Orleans Police Department and working with other innovative departments on similar programs. We applied for grants, and hired a program director to help us manage the growing range of activities.
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In the spring of 2019, Scott Ginsburg, a Georgetown Law graduate, made a large gift to the law school. The gift included funding for several en
dowed professorships, including my own, and as part of the deal, the dean asked me to give a formal lecture on a topic of my choosing. At first, I wasn’t sure what to talk about—my 2016 book on war and the military? My earlier work on law and violence? In the end, I decided it was finally time to talk to my colleagues and students about some of the issues swirling around in my mind after my time as a police officer.
In keeping with university tradition, everyone on the faculty wore their academic robes to my lecture, and we filed into the law school auditorium to the strains of classical music played by a chamber ensemble. The atmosphere was as unlike that of the 7D station as possible.
Walking to the podium, I looked out at the audience. Paul Butler, Kris Henning, Shon Hopwood, and Christy Lopez, my Innovative Policing Program partners, were there, along with dozens of my faculty colleagues. Some of the students from my criminal justice class and the Innovative Policing Practicum I taught with Christy were there as well. And to my amazement and delight, many of our Police for Tomorrow fellows were in the audience too, some sitting stiff and uncomfortable in their patrol uniforms, but smiling back at me. Ben Haiman was there, sitting next to Commander Ralph Ennis, the head of the police academy. Friends and colleagues from around Washington were in the audience too, and in the front row, my husband and children sat with my brother, my sister-in-law, my mother-in-law, and my mother.
I told the audience about my lifelong preoccupation with the complex and paradoxical relationship between violence and law, and how it had led me to human rights work, to studying the military, and eventually to becoming a reserve police officer. I talked about my previous writing on war and the military, and the ways in which our tendency to view more and more global threats through the lens of war had undermined the rule of law even as it expanded the role of the military. When it came to domestic, US issues, I said, we were seeing a strikingly similar phenomenon: we were categorizing more and more behaviors as crimes, with devastating consequences for the most vulnerable Americans, and we were steadily expanding the role of police.
In recent decades, I told my audience, we’ve seen an explosion of over-criminalization, at both the state and the federal levels. Minor civil infractions have been legislatively redefined as criminal misdemeanors, offenses once considered misdemeanors have been redefined as felonies, and violations of complex regulatory codes have increasingly been criminalized, often creating brand-new and obscure crimes that lack a mens rea (criminal intent) requirement.
These shifts in how we think about crime have contributed to mass incarceration—and our proliferating criminal laws have mainly been enforced against people of color and the poor. At the same time, over-criminalization has expanded the role of the police. When you have more crimes, you need more cops—and when you have more cops, you find more ways to use them. (In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. It’s the equivalent of routinely sending armed police to enforce IRS regulations or municipal building code regulations. It makes little sense, and increases the number of police-citizen encounters with the potential to go badly wrong.)
As a reserve police officer in Washington, DC, I said, I had seen firsthand the pressure on police officers to be all things to all people, playing multiple and often contradictory roles. American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it’s very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it’s almost impossible to be good at them all.
We’re caught in a vicious spiral: as American cities and states slash funds for education, health care, rehabilitation programs, and other social services, the resulting poverty and hopelessness fuel more crime and dysfunction, which leads to calls for more police and higher law enforcement budgets—but the more we spend on enforcement, the less we have available to spend on the vital social services that, in the long run, help reduce crime. The budget disparities are striking. In 2017, for instance, the city of Oakland, California, spent 41 percent of the city’s general fund on policing—and for every dollar spent on policing, human services received less than 30 cents. The city of Baltimore spent $480 million each year on a police department with about 3,300 officers, and only $265 million on a school system with more than 80,000 students.
In a world that is increasingly obsessed with security issues, both international and domestic, we can expect the push toward more enforcement to increase, despite intermittent calls to “defund” or even abolish the police. I had written a book called How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything; now, it seemed to me, we might also say that everything was becoming a crime, and the police were becoming everything.
The connections between these two stories—one about war and the military, the other about crime and policing—go even deeper, I told the audience. One aspect of the blurring and expansion of our concept of war is that war and war fighting increasingly blur into criminal law enforcement and policing. Everyone has seen the disturbing images of police in American cities riding in tanks and Humvees, wearing military-style uniforms and armed with military-grade assault weapons. The blurring is more subtle too: we’re increasingly seeing the importation of practices associated with national security threats—such as nonpublic proceedings and invocation of the “state secrets” doctrine—into court proceedings related to violations of domestic criminal law, for instance. I think of it as “trickle-down war,” and perhaps it’s inevitable—terrorism and cyberattacks, to give two examples, are seen as both war and crime, so it’s no surprise that our legal and institutional responses have begun increasingly to converge.
The “militarization” of police is a by-product of this convergence. In a nation in which both “homegrown” and foreign-originating terrorism are serious threats—in which sophisticated global drug cartels and organized criminal gangs often make use of military weapons and tactics, and in which mass shootings such as those in Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Parkland have become dismayingly routine—police officers are increasingly trained to respond to threats that resemble war as much as they resemble crime, which has fueled increased police use of military weapons and tactics, as well as high-tech surveillance and analysis tools. Around the nation, police departments are struggling to adapt to the growing sophistication and lethality of many criminal actors, even as they face a crisis of legitimacy relating to the use of force and racially biased enforcement.
My time as a police officer didn’t leave me with any easy answers, but I ended the lecture with a warning, and a challenge.
“Here’s the warning,” I told the audience. “We live in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, everything is becoming crime and the police are becoming everything, and war and policing are becoming ever more intertwined, both on the level of law and the level of institutions. These trends remain invisible to most Americans—but they are having a devastating effect on human rights, democratic accountability, and the rule of law, and are likely to continue to do so.
“And here’s the challenge: It’s up to us—and particularly, up to those of you who are young—to find a better way forward. We need to acknowledge the very real threats we face, but at the same time, we need to develop new legal and institutional safeguards to keep America from becoming a society that’s obsessed with security at the expense of both liberty and justice. I have a few ideas about how to do this—but I know that you will have better ones.”
As I stepped away from the podium, relieved to be done, I looked out at my audience—at the faculty members in their academic robes, the students in their T-shirts and jeans, the police officers in their uniforms, and my family, dressed with uncharacteristic formality for the occasion. My daughters were wearing skirts, and even my mother had dress
ed up. Everyone was beaming up at me, and I felt a sudden surge of joyous vertigo: all my worlds, finally converging.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I still find it strange that the DC Metropolitan Police Department was willing to give a badge and a gun to a writer (aren’t pens and keyboards dangerous enough?). But I’m grateful. MPD isn’t perfect, but it’s a police department that tries hard to do the right thing, and I’m proud to have been part of it.
Special thanks also goes to the instructors at the Metropolitan Police Academy and to my many field training officers and partners in the MPD Reserve Corps and the 7th District: they put up with my questions and helped me when I struggled. My classmates in Reserve Recruit Class 16-01 kindly pretended not to laugh at my snail-like pace on the 1.5 mile run, didn’t complain when my practice handcuffing left bruises on their wrists, and were right there beside me when we all got a face full of OC spray.
Thanks, especially, to Ben Haiman, whose integrity, intelligence, and common sense constantly impress me, and to Ken Mabry, Ralph Ennis, Salah Czapary, Raul Mendez, Booker Griffin, James Meagher, Jessica Bress, Paula Gormley, Matt Bromeland, Gary Miller, Ivan Lawit, Garth Robins, Graham Campbell, Leo Pinson, Dan Billingsley, Nik Isoldi, Chris Dietz, Brian Coleman, Gerard Barretto, Esteban Beamon, Matt Malacaria, Anita Ravishankar, Cody Robinson, Ron Koch, Ryan Sullivan, Jonathan Rosnick, Antoinette Martin, Vimary Serrano, Elijah Lamar, Brad Bennett, Christina Laurie, Elisee Chery, Travis Reed, Linda Daniels, Sylvester Garvin, and James Vandermeer. If I have inadvertently omitted any names, I apologize.