I’m going to tell you a story. A story that was told to me first hand by someone who experienced it. This story explains what is wrong with today’s police brutality and cops with murderous tendencies.
Many years ago, I used to know this woman who wanted to be a cop. She left her job and joined the police academy; I’ll call her Ana to protect her identity. Every time we spoke, she would speak about the new lessons she had learned and shared her experience with our group of friends.
One day, she detailed the lesson about tear gas. She and her fellow cadets were placed into a dark and ominous enclosure. If I remember correctly, they wore no protective gear. They knew the gas was going to be pumped. They were told what to expect. It was part of their training, so they had to do it if they wanted to be cops. No one held their breath. They couldn’t because for better or worse, they had to breathe. The tear gas not only brought tears to their eyes, but it made their eyes burn hot so that they could barely keep them open. Their noses, their sinuses were so irritated that it felt like their face was ablaze, their lungs became red ambers that were fanned with every breath they took. “Discomfort” is a very mild euphemism to describe the horrors that they felt in that chamber. None left, and thus, they all passed their tear gas training.
On a different occasion, Ana brought handcuffs to show us what she had learned about them. She opened them, and did a slow demonstration on how to put them on a person. According to her, the trick was to aim the junction of the half circles that form the handcuff to the bone on the forearm that connects to the wrist. She then did it on herself. One of the halves of the cuff swung around her wrist and locked in perfectly with the other half. Finally, she ended the demonstration by tightening the handcuff around her wrist. I can’t remember who asked if it would hurt the person when the handcuff hit the bone. “It’s supposed to hurt!” Ana said with a big smile on her face. Her enthusiasm was contagious and all of us giggled. We were young and not so wise back then. The glamorization of violence on TV was deeply imbued in our beings so we glamorized that too. Now that I’m older, and hopefully a little wiser, I wonder why is it supposed to hurt in the first place? Why is physical harm a must? I’m now fearful of having handcuffs put on me.
On a different occasion Ana shared something incredibly disturbing. She began talking about a classmate of hers. My friend said that this other cadet had told people that she wanted to be a police officer because she wanted to carry a gun. I’ll call her Alicia; I never knew her name. Ana proceeded to give a number of examples of how this woman was scary at many levels. How she behaved at the shooting range. What she said when conducting exercises. How her eyes looked when she held her gun. My cop-to-be friend was scared of her classmate. If a cop was afraid of Alicia, we were terrified of her. Ana later said that a lot of this behavior happened only in front of other cadets, and not the trainers and officers.
I asked Ana if anyone was ratting her out. She said that no, no one was. I asked her “Why don’t you?” She looked at me puzzled as in she never considered doing it, wouldn’t know how to do it, and that I was crazy to suggest that she did that. That was the answer she had for me. A shoulder shrug followed. And thus, the famous blue wall of silence went up.
Ever since I’ve been puzzled as to why the police force tolerate people like this in their ranks. Why on Earth would anyone think that a person who wants to be a cop so that they can carry a gun should be a cop in the first place? It was clear to Ana that the woman didn’t just want to carry a gun, but that she was more than eager to use it during her patrols. It was clear that the idea of “to serve and protect” was completely lost on Alicia. This woman had no business whatsoever in law enforcement, and I would bet that she had no business having guns either.
But she was not the problem here. The problem was those around her who did nothing. They saw how she behaved, and they heard the things she said. Did the trainers also pick up on that? It’s possible. The fact is that all those who knew she was no good news for the force allow her to move forward. The flags were raised, but people chose to ignore them. And trust me, the news has taught us that there are many reprehensible people out there who should have never been a cop from the start.
In order to be admitted in to the police academy, a candidate has to take several tests. One of these is the psychological evaluation. It’s clear that this evaluation is insufficient to root out violent people who are likely to harm the public they are allegedly supposed to protect. After all, Alicia got through. Her behavior was ignored from the beginning, and history shows that this emboldens bad actors. I don’t know where Alicia landed but I do fear for the safety on the people around her.
The story our friend told us highlights that many of the use of excessive power at the hands of police starts even before a cadet becomes an officer. The story also points to a system that fails society by not rooting out potentially dangerous people. And how the blue wall of silence, the culture of cop protects cop, starts at the academy level.
I don’t really know much about Alicia other than what our friend Ana told us. I can certainly imagine that she excelled as a cadet. Alicia was likely eager, a great shot, and was calm under pressure. These are all great qualities to have as a police officer. When I was first writing this article, I decided to list the names of the officers accused of killing unarmed black and brown people. I wanted to put an actual name and face to those who have killed in our name. I started the list of the police officers who unjustifiably killed in the line of duty. Alas, the list was SO long that it became overwhelming to include in this piece. We need to keep in mind that many of the deaths happened at the hands of several officers, so the list of their names is much larger than that of their victims. This means that there are plenty more officers out there that should not be cops than those we already know about. Wouldn’t it have been great if all these people were identified as problematic since the get go and removed from the force? The lack of proper screening of potentially dangerous officers at the academy level may be a first step into making the list I intended to publish much shorter, and hopefully non-existent at all.
This week, once again, the country burned, and it was not the first time. The excuses from the police establishment is that they are just a “few bad apples.” It appears that by calling these cops “a few bad apples” is a way of separating good cops from bad cops. The thought of good cops distancing from bad cops is simply ridiculous. The who saying indicates that it only takes ONE bad apple to spoil the entire barrel. ONE! “A few” accelerate the spoilage of the entire police force. It makes absolutely no sense to me why the police establishment thinks that it’s OK to have any bad apples in their ranks at all. The purge of these officers needs to start now. And the first line of defense are police academies. It behooves all of society that our police officers truly live by the “serve and protect” slogan by protecting us from the evil element in their ranks.
