TRAINING THE TROOPS
or
How The Constabulary
Creates A Blue Brother
This is very long: almost
three thousand words but that is because this is a very complex subject with
many inputs that have to be considered. The creation of a cop takes about 5
years and during that time he is exposed to a carefully planned training
program that is designed to wipe out his personality as a member of normal
society and fill his mind in “Cop Think”. Read it carefully and stop along the
way and wonder how you would cope with the regimen. Also think about what can
be done to restore the system because the product it is producing stinks.
The first thing a Canadian
citizen should understand is that the Blue Brotherhood is not the creation of
our Canadian Cops but is international and applies to Constabularies everywhere.
Our Canadian version has become an aberration and exceeds the norm as will be
explained later. At this point we have come to the point where there is a knock
on your door and there is a Cop, a member of the Blue Brotherhood, who wants to
ask some questions. To continue:
You stand in your doorway
and you look at this Brother in Blue wanting to talk:
Ask yourself:
1. Who is this guy?
2. Where’s he coming from?
3. What kind of a person am I dealing
with?
The answer to those
questions was fairly well volunteered by an older Police Officer speaking as a
member of the Brotherhood when asked about the effects of a career in law
enforcement on officers in general:
“One of the
only things that is universal about almost all cops, is the fact that we age
too quickly, see too much pain and suffering, lose our trust for almost anyone because
EVERYONE lies to the police, and we lose our social grounding. It is very hard
to believe that the world is basically good when you spend year after year
seeing only the worst parts of it.
That is
where it gets really hard, because sometimes we think out friends and families
are trying to 'get over' on us, just like the shitbags we deal with at work.
That hurts even the strongest relationships. Our ability to see beauty and
innocence gets pretty heavily trampled on, and that really hurts when you are
raising kids. Thankfully, most police officers learn to live compartmentalized
lives: Those who don't die from alcoholism, heart disease, or suicide at an
early age.”
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This
personal assessment of the damage to self by a career in law enforcement is
supported and borne out by the work of Professor Jerome Skolnick, the currently
accepted authority who describes the police working personality: what
many people, and police themselves, often describe as the police personality.
The working personality is characterized as:
1.
distrustful
of outsiders
2.
cynical
3.
conservative
(not necessarily politically, but resistant to change)
4.
suspicious
5.
pessimistic
6.
pragmatic
7.
prejudicial
8.
and
holding other widely-shared attitudes about and beyond the mainstream view.
What the
hell happened here? What: in the course of about ten years on the job, turned
the top 2% of the ideal recruit crop into a collection of miserable
curmudgeons? What happens in the course of this career to render such
psychological damage?
What follows is a vivid
portrayal of career in law enforcement that I freely plagiarized from the work
of Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith of the Chicago Police Department. She is a
nationally recognized authority on training and the working personality and I have simply transformed one of her papers
into a wake-up call lecture that should be given to every new class of recruits
before their training begins
The Road to Remorse and Regret
Good morning Recruits:
My name is Sgt. XXX and today I am here to give you an
orientation into what the course of your life will be if you do join the Force
with the intention of a life time career. The first thing I want you to
understand is that your entire life will change in the course of your training
and so will your personality and outlook on life. Much of that change will be
due to defensive reactions to unpleasant pressures to conform to the system and
avoid discipline for failure to do so. Following I am going to chronologically
outline what you can expect to encounter in the course of your career and some
good advice on how to react and assess each development as it occurs.
Most of us start the
academy with a servant’s heart. Remember the old LAPD
motto “To Serve and Protect?” That’s all of us, that is supposed to be what
cops are all about, but pretty quickly into your law enforcement career, it
becomes less about “them” and more about “us.” We separate ourselves from the
rest of society, even from our family and friends. But it doesn’t have to be
that way, if you learn why this common police pitfall occurs and how to avoid
it.
Remember, less than two out
of every one hundred police applicants ever become cops, so as soon as you get
hired, you start to feel like you’re a member of an elite group. And you are!
There are few professions where we are expected to potentially lay down our
lives as part of the employment agreement. However, that elitist feeling you
have in the academy can be just the beginning of your “us v. them” mentality.
Your first couple of years
are consumed with learning the job. You spend a considerable amount of time
around veteran officers, trainers, and supervisors trying to learn the
profession and earn the trust of your peers. As Dr. Kevin Gilmartin, PhD. talks
about in his book Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement, a new officer begins
to rely on the friendship and support of other officers, usually to the
detriment of their “non-cop” relationships. Because there is so much to do and
learn, and so little time to devote to your personal life, new officers find
themselves socializing only with their co-workers. Old friendships may begin to
fade way, not intentionally, but after all, are any of your “old” friends
willing to meet you for a beer at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning when you get
off work? Not likely.
There
are no grey areas. The
law enforcement officer works in a fact-based world with everything compared to
written law. Right and wrong is determined by a standard. They have a set way
of going about gathering the proper evidence for the law and can justify their
actions because they represent the "good and right side." In the real
world, clear rights and wrongs are not as likely to occur. The newspapers are
an opinion-based system, the court system is an opinion-based system and,
needless to say, relationship decisions and proper parenting techniques are
opinion-based systems.
Adjusting from right and wrong, a black-and-white
system, to opinion-based systems is very difficult and requires a complete
change in mental attitude.
“The average cop will see
more human tragedy in the first three years than most people will see in a lifetime”
according to Dr. Ellen Kirschman, author of I Love a Cop. As we become a
competent veteran officer, we develop a macabre sense of humour and are forced
to control our emotions at all times. We view the world as a violent place full
of idiots, con artists, and liars. We become sceptical, paranoid, and hyper
vigilant, and we look down on those who do not share our cynical and alarmist
view of the society. Not only do we cease most of our “pre-cop” friendships,
but our family relationships may begin to deteriorate as well. We become
distant and dark-spirited, even when we’re at home. We complain that “my family
doesn’t understand,” and we may become overly strict with our kids, not wanting
them to be exposed to the outside world that we know is violent, dangerous and
unpredictable. Eventually, your family may grow weary of your “us v. them”
attitude and decide they’d rather be with “them” rather than being a part of
“us.”
You need to be in constant emotional
control. Law enforcement officers have a job that requires extreme restraint
under highly emotional circumstances. They are told when they are extremely
excited, they have to act calm. They are told when they are nervous; they have
to be in charge. They are taught to be stoic when emotional. They are to
interact with the world in a role. The emotional constraint of the role takes
tremendous mental energy, much more energy than expressing true emotions. When
the energy drain is very strong, it may make the officer more prone to
exhaustion outside of work, such as not wanting to participate in social or
family life. This energy drain can also create a sense of job and social
burnout.
It’s no secret that cops
have a 75% divorce rate, a high rate of alcoholism, and we die twice as often
by our own hand as we do by felonious assaults. After all, if you go from a
fun-loving, idealistic, service-oriented rookie to a dark-hearted, cynical
veteran, you’re not going to be much fun to be around, and eventually you won’t
like yourself anymore than anyone else does. So don’t let it happen!
Your FTO
may know everything there is to know about impaired drivers, but why has he
been married and divorced) three times? Your favourite sergeant is a
wonderfully supportive mentor to you, but why does she end every shift sitting
at the bar of the local gin joint? Sometimes the most qualified cops on your
agency are also the least successful when it comes to their personal lives. As
delicately as you can, try to find out why. Ask them if they could do anything
different, what would it be? And then listen to what they have to say.
This can be tough to do.
Your “normal” friends are either going to be “weirded out” by your new
profession or they may become distant, intimidated, even hostile about you
becoming a cop. However, don’t give up on all of them. Your true friends are
going to accept you, for who you are, just make sure to touch base with them
and occasionally get together; and when you do socialize with them, don’t spend
all your time together telling cop “war stories.” Ask about their job, their
life, their problems, concerns, and successes, and then really listen. Don’t
make it all about you, even if they try to. In other words, don’t get mired in
your own self-importance.
Be
proactive about your emotional well being. Make sure that physical activity is
part of your regular routine. There are two kinds of stress, “distress” and
“eustress”. Develop positive addictions, like running, basketball, hunting, and
photography, anything that makes you feel good and is good for you. Also make
sure you spend time around good, positive people. Go to church, do volunteer
work, coach a kids soccer team, do charity work. Get involved in activities
that remind you that not everyone is a drug dealing, child molesting criminal,
and that in general, life is pretty good. Remember, you took this job to help
the community, not isolate yourself from them. One of the great things about
policing in a free society is the tradition of being “of the people,” not “over
the people.”
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We’re Back Where We Started
Unfortunately
Canadians are not living in a free society and the Constabulary successfully
biased the Access to Information Act of 1985 with a series of exemptions
regarding Investigations. The majority of officers have adopted a tradition of
being “over the people” and responsible to no one for anything they do, on or off the Job
So here we are with you, in
your doorway, facing a cop who wants entry and to talk to you about something.
You stood in your doorway and
you looked at this Brother in Blue and asked yourself:
·
Who
is this guy?
·
Where’s
he coming from?
·
What
kind of a person am I dealing with?
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At this
point you have answered the first two of your questions:
Who is this
guy?
He’s a kid
who has been ripped out of normal society and forced into another by the
Constabulary. He will robotically obey orders, not question his superiors’
judgement, and he will most certainly report his obedience to those orders in
meticulous detail. He will never depart from those details regardless of
consequence.
Where does
he come from?
He comes
from on the job training in how to relate to the public: all civilians are
suspect criminals in his mind. He’s been trained to lie and is a skilled
interrogator in command of any interview with a civilian suspect. He can
present himself as a member of any class or occupation to elicit an admission
of some fault and is skilled in the use of leading questions to confuse his
victim. Any request for information by a cop is prompted by a desire to
establish guilt. He doesn’t care whose and he is fishing for information that
can move the subject of his questioning into the suspect category if he even
admits a connection to another individual suspected or caught in a criminal
activity.
Knowing
just this about the officer should be enough to deter any cooperation from a
witness but the biggest deterrence of all is his belief that he can violate the
law and your rights in his attempts to establish your guilt and he is immune
from prosecution by doing so.
That belief combined with the support of his
brotherhood is validated by the exemptions of criminal investigation from the
normal channels per the Access to Information Act, The
Brotherhood has the power to control the whole Justice system, and that will be
the subject of my next post
Until then
Blaine Barrett
