Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and founder of Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. From 2016 to 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. She has worked previously at the Defense Department, the State Department, and for several international human rights organizations. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and she spent four years as a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times and another four as a columnist for Foreign Policy. Her most recent book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016; it was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and named one of the five best books of the year by the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Everyone You Meet

Assault with a Dangerous Weapon (knife)—Complainant advised that Suspect came knocking on his door looking for his girlfriend to fight her. Complainant stated that when he did not let Suspect in she pulled out a knife and stated “I’ll cut you.” At which time Suspect cut Complainant on the right side of his chest. Causing a severe laceration. Complainant [was] transported to [the] hospital for treatment. Suspect would not advise [police] what happened she just stated “yall didn’t help me I hate the police.” —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
 
Everyone you meet here would be happy to kill you," Murphy told me.

His eyes were scanning out the window as he drove, and he was punching keys on the patrol car's mobile computer with his right hand while he maneuvered the steering wheel with his left. Cop multitasking. "That's what you have to remember. These people hate you. They would dance around your dead body."

It was my first night as a patrol officer, and Murphy was showing me the ropes. We were driving down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Washington, DC's Seventh Police District. Sandwiched between the Anacostia River to the west and the Maryland state line to the east, "7D" is the poorest, saddest, most crime-ridden part of the nation's capital. Gunshots are a common sound, and 7D regularly produces the lion's share of DC homicides.

Still. "Everyone? You think even the little old ladies here want to kill me?" I asked.

Murphy gave me a tight smile. "All right, almost everyone. But you have to watch out for some of these old ladies. I'm telling you, people here are different from you and me. You and me, we don't want to get in trouble or get hurt or go to jail. Like, it would be a big deal to us. These people? They're so used to it, they just don't care."

We drove past a group of men with hoodies drawn up over their heads, hands in pockets. Murphy gave them a long, hard look, but their expressions remained scrupulously blank as our patrol car cruised by.

"See that guy?" Murphy asked, pointing to a gaunt man in a dirty Redskins sweatshirt. "That guy, I must have picked him up five times for one thing or another. You know, stupid shit. He hits his girlfriend. He steals a candy bar from the 7-Eleven. He's fighting with some other asshole. He's selling K2 in front of the fucking middle school. Then he gets fucking shot, like, a month ago. I'm first on the scene, he's lying there bleeding and I'm saying to him, 'Man, who did this to you? Help me get him.' And he's like, 'Oh, I think it must have just been an accident.' He's lying there bleeding, but he wouldn't fucking tell me anything. He almost died. Now he's back at the same corner with the same assholes. You want to explain that to me?"

He shook his head. "These fucking people."

In my forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor, I decided to become a cop.

I could give you any number of plausible-sounding reasons for this. I'm an academic with a long-standing interest in law's troubled relationship with violence and thought that learning about policing firsthand would lead to new scholarly insights. I had just finished writing a book about the changing role of the US military, and believed that becoming a police officer would allow me to better understand the blurring lines between war fighting and policing. I was dismayed by the statistics on police shootings and by the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and wanted the insider experience that would enable me to become a credible and effective advocate for change. I was a onetime anthropology student, and considered participant observation the best way to understand cultures that might otherwise appear alien and incomprehensible.

All these were perfectly worthy and legitimate reasons for embarking on an otherwise unusual experiment, and they make decent retroactive justifications. But I had other, less noble impulses as well. I was restless, and not quite ready to subside into tenured comfort. I wanted something different and challenging, something nothing at all like a faculty meeting. I had probably read too much crime fiction.

I wasn't completely mad. I didn't quit my day job. Instead, I applied to become a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).

Many cities have unarmed volunteer auxiliary police, but the District of Columbia is one of the few major US cities in which unpaid reserve officers operate as sworn, armed police officers with full arrest powers. As a reserve police officer in Washington, DC, I would go through the same police academy training as the city's thirty-eight hundred full-time career officers, take the same oath, wear the same uniform and badge, carry the same gun, and patrol the same streets-but as a volunteer, I would be required to offer the city only twenty-four hours of patrolling each month.

Twenty-four hours a month didn't seem like much. Nonetheless, no one I knew thought this was a good idea.

"You're insane," my husband told me. When I applied to the Metropolitan Police Reserve Corps, Joe was in the process of winding down his own career as a US Army Special Forces officer. After more than two decades in the military, he said he was sure of just two things: he never wanted to wear a uniform again, and he never wanted to have to call anyone "sir" again. My sudden interest in policing, a profession that required both the wearing of uniforms and the acceptance of a paramilitary command structure, struck him as inexplicable.

My mother was similarly unenthusiastic. A writer and left-wing activist best known for her own forays into immersion journalism, her memories of being tear-gassed by police at 1960s anti-war marches remained fresh. "The police are the enemy," she informed me. "They are not on our side."

She wasn't the only one who felt that way. Then as now, police violence was constantly in the news. When I applied to the DC police reserve corps in 2015, students at Georgetown Law, where I taught courses on international law, human rights, and constitutional law, were coming to class wearing T-shirts that read "Stop Police Terror."

"The police are killing black people," one of my African American faculty colleagues told me. "I can't even talk about it right now. I just can't."

My father listened as I stumbled through my convoluted justifications, then shook his head.

"Well, you sure do come up with interesting ideas."

I Don't Even Live Here

Homicide (gun): MPD received a radio assignment for an unconscious person at [redacted]. Upon officers' arrival, Victim 1 and Victim 2 were located inside the aforementioned location in an unconscious and unresponsive state suffering from apparent gunshot wounds to their heads. [Medics] responded to the location. Death was apparent and no further action was taken. —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

No one tried to kill me during my first patrol shift. For that matter, no one tried to kill anyone that night-at least not on any of my calls. Statistics say that somewhere in the dark streets of the nation's capital, someone was hurting someone else, but they weren't doing it in front of me.

Instead, Murphy and I were dispatched to a series of what seemed like fairly minor problems. There were teenage boys standing on the sidewalk, "talking shit" to girls who walked by; Murphy told them to take a hike. They complained: "Aw, shit, man, the fucking po-lice, why you gotta come mess with us for no reason? What the fuck, man!" But eventually, they took a hike.

We responded to a call for a...