This Explains a Lot

The Video Version 

An essay called, "How Being a Cop Broke My Brain," provides a terrifying insight into the dysfunction that is police training and police culture which explains why policing is so broken.

It turns out that police are broken as human beings.

This jibes with the assessment of a therapist friend of mine who said that after 5 years, pretty much all the cops out there were suffering from PTSD:

Hey there! Welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight I want to return to a topic I haven’t done a video on in awhile: law enforcement. If you’re new to the channel, you should know that I was a police officer for nearly a decade in a pretty rowdy part of California. In the years since then, I have become a police and prison abolitionist, meaning that I believe the entire concept of police forces and prisons is not reformable and must be replaced by a system that is more compassionate, more just, and more committed to dignity and meeting human needs. I’ll put a link in the description if you want to see me do a deeper dive on this topic.

Tonight though, I want to set aside the academic texts and the philosophy and all that nerd sh%$, and I want to get personal about how my time as a cop really fucked my brain up. Tonight we’re going to be talking about state violence and some nasty stuff cops see in the line of duty, so if you’re not in the mood for blood and guts and man’s inhumanity to man, you might wanna skip this one. 

He then relates the story of how he dealt with entering a building in pursuit of an armed suspect, which ends like this:

………

And it’s not because I hated this guy or really wanted to score my first kill on the job. It was because I wasn’t quite sure I could actually do it. I was taking a page out of Dave Grossman’s [Author of "Killology", and a consultant to many police forces on the use of lethal force] training, psyching myself up and convincing myself that yes, I could kill someone else if I had to. After all, he was armed, he was dangerous, he’d already killed… What option did I have?

Among other things, "Killology" training literally tells cops that after they kill someone, they will have the best sex.

It is also a machine for creating PTSD:

………

I tell you this story because it’s emblematic of much of my law enforcement career. When I first started out, I was criticized for being meek, timid, and too slow to show dominance out in the field. I was taught that showing that kind of weakness on calls would make me a target for attack. I was shown hundreds of videos of cops being murdered on routine calls for service, often by assailants who didn’t look like killers. 

………

Over time, I internalized this message: at any given time, someone out there is going to hurt you if you’re not ready to hurt them first. If you let your guard down for even a second, they’ll kill you. In the police business, this is the way we talk about Officer Safety. The most respected veteran officers I worked with were the ones stopping the young guys from running around blind corners, they were the ones asking if we’d searched that dumpster before we turned our back on it. You got the sense these guys had Seen Things and knew how to keep each other safe.

And, you got the sense from listening to their stories that the big thing you can do to protect yourself on the job is to mentally prepare for That Day. And since you never know in what form the attack will take, it’s best to just run scenarios in your head constantly, building those mental pathways so that when it finally does happen, you’ll know exactly what to do. 

………

I was constantly in a state of vigilance. Not concern, just vigilance. My krav instructor used the color code system to talk about emotional states (y’know… white, yellow, orange, black) and he used to say you should never leave the house without being at least at a code yellow, that you should never be in a state of total relaxation in public.  

And I never was! And to this day, I never am!

It’s been a long time since my cop days now, but this hypervigilence has never left me. And what at one time felt like a survival tool I was proud of now just makes me exhausted (and probably exhausting to be around). I hate leaving my house, I don’t like to go out and do things with lots of people. If it’s too loud and crowded somewhere, I feel like I’m not in control, like I’m not safe, sometimes I even dissociate just little bit, as a treat. 

………

That’s why there’s the almost unbridgeable gulf between a normal person who says, like “Why did you punch that guy 37 times for having his hands in his pockets?”, and the cop who replies “Because I didn’t know what was in there, it could have been a knife or a gun or a jar of battery acid he was going to throw in my face and I didn’t want to take the chance.” I guarantee you, that cop was at a seminar one time where some old head told a war story about his partner Bob Sacamano who actually did get battery acid thrown in his face.

There are approximately 900,000 police officers in the United States and I’m willing to bet the vast majority of them were trained like I was and have the same mental pathways I have. That’s a lot of armed, unaccountable people running around fantasizing about being executed in the streets every day.

I don't see a way to fix this except by tearing the whole damn corrupt edifice brick by brick.