I tried to join the police force. It was toxic.
Insight from a former trainee
I taught college for 18 years, until the pandemic and the “Big Quit” changed the way we relate to jobs. I decided to try to join the police force. As a well-trained educator, I saw that the training that officers receive facilitates police violence.
Pervasive state violence against African Americans and other marginalized groups has shaken the trust that many Americans have in our democracy. It seems like every time we turn on the news, we find that another human being has been shot dead by police before the police had even a few seconds to observe the situation to which they had been called. This is contrary to the idea of a democratic social contract, under which citizens should have a right to a fair and speedy trial, and certainly freedom from extrajudicial execution.
While I was in the academy, instructors adamantly insisted that Special Police Officers (SPO) perform rituals about respecting citizens. But at the same time, there were ways in which instructors were deeply disrespectful of their constituents, trainees, and each other. Superficial rituals of respect, or accountability theatre, provided cover for abusive attitudes and behaviors.
Accountability Theater
At the academy, we were taught verbal rituals that were meant to show respect for the public, but they were superficial. Our instructors told us:
“If you're dealing with anybody, it doesn't matter if they're a wealthy businessman downtown or a homeless woman. You're always going to call them Sir or Ma’am and give them their respect… We respect the citizens of [the city].”
But then, over and over again, I saw the same instructors turn around and negate that by making fun of homeless people and folks that occupy the fringes of society, people who are very much a part of our city. While officers are trained to express respect in public, what happens behind their constituents’ backs is another matter entirely. It was as though we were being trained to perform a kind of accountability theater that disguises a culture of dehumanizing people.
The Rest of the Iceberg
The training environment remained mired in identity-based disrespect. The classroom environment was rife with sexism, homophobic jokes, and bullying.
Trying to see it from the Academy faculty and administration’s perspective, there may be several reasons for training SPOs in this kind of atmosphere. First, I think they thought that we were learning to deal with stress, and the experience of having people scream in our faces. This is a useful skill. Too, they seemed to buy into the idea that hazing bonds teams together. Most significantly, if one sees the goal of one’s job as revolving around maintaining order, domination is normalized.
The rituals of domination and subordination were varied and intricate. These began with a retraining of the body and progressed to a normalization of punishment.
Rituals of submission even impacted the perception of eye contact. While mainstream culture treats eye contact as an indication of respect, the police academy trained SPO’s to experience eye contact as a violation. Students were not allowed to look at instructors directly in the eye. I had always been taught that it is respectful to look someone in the eye(s) when they're speaking to you. But the instructors would yell at us for making eye contact. Like drill sergeants, they would get in our faces and scream: “Why are you fucking looking at me? Don't look at me! Look straight ahead! What the fuck?!?” How one shows respect as a normal person on the street and how one shows respect as an officer are drastically different, even mutually exclusive. This can lead to obvious problems.
Another disturbing “teaching technique” was “jacking,” or punishing recruits by distracting them with an intense workout, throwing their possessions, and then making the recruits clean up the mess. “Jacking” and other punishments were not necessarily a reaction to the SPOs actually getting things wrong. It was more about normalizing the doling out and receiving punishment.
Solving It
If we want to reduce police violence in America, we should change the way officers are trained. If we want the police to stop executing constituents, their training needs to stop normalizing punishment and start emphasizing de-escalation.
Find alternatives to policing + accountability groups in Detroit here — email us at info.solutionaries@gmail.com if we’re missing vital groups
The police and their constituents are not on the same page. Taxpayers want institutions that can be called to help out with disasters. But police officers seem to think that they have been tasked with executing people. This misunderstanding is a logical outcome of a faulty educational paradigm.
We currently train officers to control and dominate. As a result, police violence against disenfranchised communities is not just a coincidence; rather, it is a logical and predictable outcome of how officers are trained.
Alison Stankrauff is a City Carrier for the United States Postal Service in Detroit, Michigan. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science with a Concentration on Archival Administration from Wayne State University (2002). She has a Bachelors in History from Antioch College (1996). Previously she served as the University Archivist at Wayne State University from 2017 to 2020. Prior to that she served as the University Archivist and an Associate Librarian at Indiana University South Bend from 2004 to 2017. Prior to that she served as Reference Archivist at American Jewish Archives from 2002 to 2004. You can contact her at alison.stankrauff.1974@gmail.com
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