"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.”
So begins Tangled Up in Blue.. Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University. From 2016 until 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. She decided to participate in an unusual program in our nation’s capital that gave highly trained civilian volunteers the opportunity to work closely with sworn officers. After undergoing a rigorous training program, including learning how to shoot accurately and to restrain resisting perps, these volunteers became important resources for the DC police.
Brooks became a cop for several reasons. One of her areas of academic interests was violence and how it plays out in American cities. She also wanted to learn what it was like to be an urban police officer so she could perhaps help improve policing. Finally, she was a bit bored being a tenured law professor, so doing something different was appealing to her.
Since she wanted to keep her day job, Rosa applied to become a reserve police officer. DC is one of the few major cities in which unpaid reserve officers operate as sworn, armed police men and women. They go through the same academy training, take the same oath, and wear the same uniform as regular officers. The reservists work for twenty-four hours a month.
Rosa’s family at first wasn’t too supportive. “You’re insane,” her husband told her. Her mother, Barbara Ehrenreich is a well-known social critic and author who was very left-wing before woke was with us. Her reaction was simple: “The police are the enemy.” Among the favorite tee shirts worn by her Georgetown students was the one that had a simple message: Stop Police Terror.
Early in the book, she recounts her first few days on duty. Most nights, her and her patrol partner’s work involved keeping the peace in situations that might have gotten out of control. They moved teenage boys away from harassing teenage girls and stepped into incipient domestic violence situations to defuse them. One time they were called to a shooting scene with two injured young males and a witness. As it turned out, “Nobody knew nothin’”, even when the detective pushed the witness to describe what happened. The victims also were not about to identify the people who shot them.
Many of the people they went to help had overdosed on drugs. The author was amazed that people who collapsed on the street could be revived. Often the police officers responding to a call act like emergency medical technicians and save lives. The DC police have a reputation in the community of being very good at providing effective medical services in emergencies. Many of the regular EMT’s are amazed at how the same people continue to do the same things that put their lives at risk.
The book then jumps back to Rosa’s training in the police academy. She learned how to shoot, arrest a suspect, run fast, and how to respond to just about any situation that she encountered. She began her training in early 2018 and finished in 2020.
“Police officers have an impossible job: we expect them to be warriors, disciplinarians, protectors, mediators, social workers, educators, medics, and mentors all at once, and we blame them for enforcing laws they didn’t make in a social context they have little power to alter.”
Domestic crises take up a lot of time for DC cops, and often it’s not a domestic partner situation. Family dysfunction, often between a mother and a daughter, are a staple of the DC police officer’s day. One situation involved a 16-year old girl who pushed back against what she considered to be her mother’s interference in her life. Because of the constant tension, the courts ordered that the daughter live with her aunt. Once the order came through that liberating the young lady from her awful, controlling mother, the kid decided that she wants to stay with her mom, whom the 16-year old continues to try to beat up. Rosa and her streetwise partner, Auguste, bring the young lady to her new home with auntie.
Woke before woke Rosa Brooks grew up in a home of left-wing activists. Her mother was an activist socialist and her parents rarely missed a political demonstration. Rosa joined them and continued her political activism throughout her college and law school years. Before becoming a professor, Brooks was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and for Foreign Policy, a respected journal of international affairs. She spent time in trouble spots all over the world - Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Indonesia, Russia, Kenya, Palestine, and many other countries. Becoming a police officer was not an obvious next step in her career.
Rosa’s mother, Barbara Ehrenreich, was a dominant personality who gained fame as a critic of her country’s government. As a mom, she was controlling to the point that Rosa became a truant as an act of rebellion. She did straighten out and ended up at Harvard where she planned on becoming a doctor. Her mother informed her that “doctors are dumb” and that Rosa could do grander things with her life. Rosa dropped the pre-med thing. <br> Mom was really down on police officers which she considered to be one step above thugs. Rosa sort of liked the police. Several times in high school, she and her friends were caught drinking and such, and the cops gave them a break. Several of her uncles were in law enforcement and they were good people. She also liked TV police shows like Columbo, and CHIPs, about the California Highway Patrol.
While Rosa Brooks was not reflexively anti-police, she had done a lot of work on police violence in this country. Adjusting for population, American cops kill sixty-four times as often as police in the UK. The left sees police as inherently racist and the right sees officers as heroes who have to work hard to keep savage crooks at bay.
Rosa makes the point that violence is part of American history. Often guns cleared the way for territorial acquisition. We fought a bloody civil war to keep the country together. The Second Amendment does give people the right to own guns.
Her mother was against her daughter becoming part of the police. Rosa explained to her that the best way to learn about why we have so much violence around law enforcement was to become a cop, even a volunteer cop.
In 2015, Rosa applied to become a reserve officer. She attended orientation at a scruffy brick building right next to the K-9 corps kennels, complete with barking dogs. She saw a good PowerPoint presentation on the police department, which included information about the fact that the DC cops have to provide protection to the millions of tourists who show up each year.
Rosa passed a very thorough background check, survived a battery of psychological tests, and successfully navigated an obstacle course. One of the items on the psych test was “I enjoy watching other people suffer.” She wisely answered in the negative. She also had to pass a rigorous physical, which she did. She was accepted to the April 2016 academy class for reservists. She could look forward to attending 16 hours of classes each week for 50 weeks to earn her badge.
There were 16 people in her class, many of whom were ex-military. There was one other woman in the group. Training was challenging. There were constant tests and quizzes, all of which had to be passed. There was tight discipline which added an air of seriousness to the work. Things loosened up as time went on. The recruits learned about the history of policing going back to the ancient Code of Hammurabi that set out the first laws around 1700 BCE. They also learned how to drill, shine their boots, and write police reports, which Rosa tended to overwrite.
The Washington legal code has 13 pages of misdemeanors, some of which are silly. (Walking an unleashed dog is a crime.) Besides learning the laws, the recruits spent a lot of time learning police procedures and policies which were myriad and intricate, but seemed to make sense. The teachers emphasized good decision making as the key to success and there was a lot of training around that. The key point in these classes was that police officers were always at risk of being killed and that there was no such thing as a routine call. There were dozens of lessons focused on how to do the job safely, with weapons training being an essential element.
There is a science to conducting an effective, safe and legal search. “Don’t forget the crotch” was an important bit of advice. DC police also had to be aware of all of the complications of having thousands of foreign diplomats in the city, people who generally had diplomatic immunity for most things.
The class also learned interview techniques and how to respond if a person being questioned went on the attack. Rosa points out that, well before George Floyd’s death, the martial arts instructor warned the students to be very careful with chokeholds and with putting someone on the ground under your foot or knee. These should not be used outside of a life-and-death situation. The recruits also were reminded that anything you did to a suspect would probably be recorded on a dozen iPhones – so, be careful out there.
They did learn hand-to-hand combat techniques including how to use the baton to disable an attacker. There was a lot of physical education, including having to run a course at a certain speed, which Rosa found challenging; but, after a lot of training on her own, she got through it.
The trainees learned that they would often be in danger but that they always had to strictly adhere to police department protocols – no free-lancing ever. This admonition was more about avoiding having to fill out long reports if you violated policy than it was about protecting the public.
Firearms training almost did her in. She was a terrible shot. Her Glock pistol weighed two pounds and she found it hard to hold. She did OK at first when she could use two hands, but when it came to the one-handed quick shot she was a disaster. She and the other woman, Smith (last names only), were given extra instruction, but the trainer working with Smith gave her such a hard time verbally demeaning her that he was removed from teaching. Both of them passed the weapons course. Rosa had to bring her gun home every night and put it in a gun safe that she had to buy. This was getting serious.
Rosa was intrigued by how much stuff was in a cop’s patrol bag - bug spray, first-aid materials, protein bars and water, numerous notebooks and pens, sunglasses, a manly flashlight, and lots of forms. You also had to wear a Sam Brown belt with handcuffs, your weapon, mace, a baton, and other goodies.
Many states are obsessed with passing new laws that increase the number of activities that are illegal. Some states add 40 to 50 new crimes to the statutes each year. At the federal level, there are 300,000 laws whose violation can lead to prison. Most laws cover relatively low-level offenses. In DC, 19 out of 20 arrests are for non-violent crimes.
One area that wasn’t covered was the racial disparity in arrests. Washington, like all cities, has a wide assortment of neighborhoods ranging from the prosperous Northwest District to Seventh District which was home to many disadvantaged people who lived in a high-crime neighborhood.
While Rosa was at the academy, several high-profile police shootings of Black men occurred but there was never any discussion of those. Even the half of the class that was Black seemed hesitant to bring up any issues around race and policing. From the cop’s perspective the perp could have been reaching for a handgun, not an iPhone, so the instinct was often to assume the worst. To provide officer safety, the paramount goal, you often had to be decisive and act quickly. But the training did stress the importance of making the right decision that wouldn't result in the death or injury of a suspect. It would be awful to take a life because of a bad decision. And there would be a lot of paperwork to fill out.
Rosa was troubled by the fact that the police training rarely acknowledged that there are a lot of racially fraught situations that might require taking a second look before acting, that there might be some subtle bias involved in apprehending a Black man and assuming that he was a bad man. There also was the reality that cops did not speak ill of other cops; the Blue Wall of Silence is real.
She knew that the Washington Metropolitan Police Department was highly educated and received good training. She believed that the curriculum could be expanded to having honest considerations about how race affected policing. Rosa, always the professor, had an idea for a program to bring police officers and the community together to talk about such issues and to try to figure out how to improve things. She did an outline and ran it by the chief academy trainer. He was noncommittal. DC was doing a search for a police commissioner and the time wasn’t right for a new, ambitious program.
In October of 2016, Rosa graduated and was sworn in as a reserve police officer. She was committed to not leading with violence to quell a tough situation but she knew that she might have to sometimes. She was worried that she would be a lousy cop and screw up the basics. She spent many hours driving around with a patrol supervisor, analogous to doing a medical residency. This was a challenge because many patrol supervisors did not want to be bothered hanging around with reservists, but she did manage to convince officers to let her work with them.
Getting in and out of the uniform with all of the gear was a project and the gear was not made for women, which added to the degree of difficulty in suiting up. Officer Murphy was her first mentor. He was white and in his mid-thirties and was a pretty good guy. He warned her about the lieutenant who is a sullen woman who was out to get everybody. Over time Rosa found out that Murphy was right about her.
Rosa started her Saturday night shift at roll call where the sergeant gave updates on the evening’s activities and assigned patrol cars to areas. Rosa got some good-natured ribbing from her fellow officers for being a rookie but nothing too bad. She was assigned to the rough Seventh District where the police station was decrepit. Her first action involved assisting officers who were called in by another officer who was having trouble with a traffic stop. The “trouble” was that the driver, a well-dressed Black man, stepped out of his car instead of staying inside. Murphy told Brooks that the particular officer overreacts to everything and calls in help several times a night when it’s not needed.
The next call was a report of child abuse. The mother would not let the police into the apartment without a warrant so they had to leave since there was no evidence of any abuse that they could see or hear. A lot of abuse claims are bogus, with the kid trying to get back at mom or dad for some perceived slight. Finally, they had a real situation to deal with - a mentally ill son who was threatening his mother with a knife. She wanted the police to take her kid to the mental hospital which they did. The last call was to return to the station to drive a woman to the hospital. She had been arrested for attacking her boyfriend and was dressed in a spandex bathing suit of sorts and she was in distress due to a severe headache. They took her to the hospital and put her in a room where she was handcuffed to the bed. Rosa didn't like that, but it was policy and if the prisoner got away and caused damage there would be all sorts of forms to fill out.
One of Rosa’s later assignments was to work on “the wagon” which was the vehicle that transported prisoners from the police station to the jail where they would be held. Many cops considered this baby-sitting and didn’t like it. Rosa found out that she had to perfect her handcuffing skills to make sure that the prisoner was secure without having the cuffs hurt him or her. Her partner, Yusef, was the strong, surly type who said and did very little. Rosa did all of the heavy lifting, cuffing and uncuffing and re-cuffing people as the night went on. She perfected her technique.
During the shift, a man jumped in front of the wagon and pointed to a building on fire. The cops called it in and Rosa started to get out of the van to see if any people were in the building. Yusef thought she was crazy - extra work - but he let her go. She went to adjacent buildings, warning people about the fire. Many folks thought it was no big deal - it was a rough neighborhood so there were lots of fires - but some people actually vacated their apartments. Others just gave her dirty looks because she was a cop. Seven fire trucks showed up and put out the flames. Rosa found Yusef who accused her of having a hero complex. “What the f?” thought Brooks.
Rosa quickly found out that there were big differences between patrol officers and detectives. Patrol people walk and ride the streets. They never know what they’ll find out there. Detectives go in after the fact to figure out what happened. That’s why the good books and movies and TV shows about police are about detectives. Bosch and Blue Bloods come to mind. Detectives have a much more glamorous job.
Every patrol shift starts from scratch. You can be dispatched by the sergeant or you can be flagged down on the street to respond to a situation. Frequently rookie officers would be unsure about how to handle a situation and call for back-up which often led to a scene with several patrol cars responding to a low-key, harmless event. At times a call would come in about a disturbance, the officers would respond, and it turned out to be teenagers playing music that the caller didn’t like. Often, the officers would respond to a call to find nobody was home at the location. Many nights, nothing much happened. You just drove around.
Some white Americans may be quick to call the police when they see a minority doing something that they think is suspicious that usually isn’t nefarious. There is certainly implicit bias here. On the other hand, minority neighborhoods tend to be over-policed, which can be seen as racist in itself. Brooks points out that the police respond to calls from residents; they don’t just show up. People in tough neighborhoods call for a lot of police services.
Rosa liked some of the silly things they responded to. One lady called for police help. Rosa and her partner, Ben, showed up and found a woman in her car, screaming loudly. She told them that there was a spider on the seat. Officer Ben removed the spider, doffed his cap, and she was on her way. That was one of the strangest calls that both to which Ben and Rosa ever responded.
Many of the calls involved reports of missing children. Usually these were short-term runaways, either leaving a bad home situation or just being teenagers who wanted to rebel against their parents and hang around with their friends. Mothers and daughters often had issues to which the police responded. Rosa never had a case of a real runaway or kidnapped kid.
Domestic violence cases regularly turned up on the patrol docket. One time, Rosa and her partner responded to a call of a woman bleeding. Her young son and daughter called it in. Sure enough, the police officers found a very impaired lady who had been beaten up by someone named Ken with whom she was hanging around as well as drinking and drugging. The police had no last name or address for the perpetrator and never could find him. They left, which is all they could do. Sometimes a victim will call the police in a panic but, by the time the cops arrive, she is not inclined to press charges even though her boyfriend hit her. There’s only so much you can do.
Being an officer is wearying. One time you’ll be helping a victim. The next day, the same person will be a perpetrator when he beats up his girlfriend. It’s not usually fun but there are times when it is. There are neighborhood and holiday celebrations where the police are invited to participate in games and eat with the residents. Those help create positive bonds as well as giving the officers a bit of a break.
Rosa was on duty for Donald Trump’s inauguration in January of 2017. The DC police force teamed up with other law enforcement agencies to work the event. There was a lot of conversation, coordination and cooperation that went into the preparation for any major event in DC. For the inaugural, authorities anticipated protests by Antifa activists as well as counter demonstrations by Trump loyalists, so there was a good chance for violence. There was a lot of smart, focused planning before the event to prepare law enforcement for any eventuality. As it turned out, the crowds were relatively small and the action never got violent, but Rosa and her colleagues had been trained to deal with whatever happened. I can’t help but compare her description of the well-orchestrated security for the inaugural with the seemingly inept preparation for the January 6 riot that stormed the US Capitol.
Because she was a reserve officer, Rosa Brooks had no home police district. She bounced all over the city. The few crimes committed in the elite Northwest District often involved car theft or burglary. In the poorer sections of the District, of which there are many, crimes often involve theft from a person (stealing expensive sneakers still happens), assault and battery (fighting), disorderly conduct, drug sales, and shootings and stabbings.
One of Brooks main points is that we have as much of a mental illness problem as we have a crime problem. Many people in the city have serious problems that can affect their behavior. In DC, officially 13% of the homeless have severe mental illness and another 15% have chronic substance abuse issues. Since these numbers only reflect people who have been actually diagnosed, the real numbers are much higher.
In one incident when responding to an assault call, officers were confronted with a crazed lady who was brandishing a snapping turtle at her boyfriend. She was arrested for domestic violence and assault with a dangerous weapon, a turtle. She probably should have been taken to a mental treatment facility but there is a shortage of those. One repeat customer was a man who called himself Dracula and really believed that he was the Prince of Darkness. He also demanded that the police tap his phone and that they put him in touch with the president. His neighbors said that he was probably off his meds. Another situation involved a complaint about an illegal alien in the neighborhood. Rosa and her partner responded. It turns out that the complaint was about an outer space illegal alien, not an undocumented immigrant. The complainant was probably off his meds that day.
Many cases are sad. A young man who had fathered a child with a young woman got into a fight with her parents and hit them. He was arrested and was crying as he was taken away. He wanted to be a good dad, but her parents wouldn’t let him near their daughter or the child. He probably had some underlying mental issues and was very young. If he ended up with a criminal record because of this situation, he would be damaged for the rest of his life. On the other hand, he shouldn't have attacked the parents.
Rosa was still teaching at Georgetown while she was doing her weekend gigs with the police. She was struck by the contrast between the two worlds, academia and the street. They couldn't have been further apart. She found herself sometimes reflexively using street language - the F-word - at faculty meetings.That woke them up.
There are many interesting anecdotes in the book. Traffic stops are considered beneath the dignity of most cops, but she described some memorable ones. Being a cop means that you can go anywhere in the city and not be questioned about why you’re there. She found out that some of the toughest neighborhoods have the best views of the monuments. She saw a lot of dead bodies, some from overdoses, some from gunshots, and some from natural causes.
She found that the overwhelming majority of her colleagues were decent people who had become cops out of positive motivations. There were some jerks who enjoyed arresting a single mother for driving to work on an expired license, but they were rare.
DC does not keep people who can’t afford bail in jail for petty offenses, but often the person is convicted and ends up with a criminal record that may haunt the rest of his or her life. Compared to most cities, DC has a big police force and a high arrest rate which means a lot of people end up incarcerated. These prisoners are disproportionately Black. Some say that this is the New Jim Crow, keeping Blacks in their place. Others push back and point out that residents of minority neighborhoods want to be safe and call the police to keep them safe. That means arresting perpetrators.
DC has a high crime rate, but it is a city that has been run by Black people for decades, many of whom over the years called for crackdowns on neighborhood crime. It’s a lot easier to arrest someone than it is to address the grinding poverty that fuels DC’s high crime rate, poverty that was hard-wired into the social fabric by decades of racially discriminatory laws and practices. Brooks also points out aspects of the District’s regulatory and transit systems that have historically favored development and accessible transit to wealthier parts of the city.
Rosa has no easy solutions. She observes that even the best, racially blind police practice will give officers no good choices. If you let the kid off who beat up the old lady and stole her purse off, she gets no justice. If you arrest him, he could be damaged for life. The goal is to create conditions where the kid doesn’t rob the old lady. He has better, more productive things to do.
Policy and procedures often handcuff the police. If a merchant catches a shoplifter and calls the police, often they will let her go with a warning. If she has an outstanding warrant, you have to arrest her. That narrows the pillars of justice.
Rosa’s thoughts on moving forward The belief that cops face constant mortal danger is part of most police officer’s sense of professional identity. It's just not true. Deep sea fishing, logging, and truck driving are more dangerous professions. Cops face about the same danger as a construction worker. Police officers do have a higher rate of death than many jobs, but it’s not as high as taxi and limo drivers, who are twice as likely to be killed on the job as cops. Police officers die of heart attacks and civilian auto accidents. DC is much safer for cops than most cities.
If you think that you're in constant danger, which is what your training tells you, you respond to many situations as if they’re life-threatening. Brooks points out that because police recruits are trained to expect danger from every quarter, they aggressively respond to a situation and then figure things out. That’s the paramilitary model.
There is an emerging consensus that the old approach has problems. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department had been criticized in the past for being too aggressive with people, especially Black men. As a result, they brought in a new commissioner who revamped officer training. Things have gotten a lot better, although there is still more to do. You really do need to think differently, as cops do in Europe, where there's very little negative contact with officers.
Rosa saw first-hand that cops do a lot of good every day. They do CPR, save the lives of people who overdose on drugs, administer first aid, get help for the mentally ill, and point people with substance use issues in a positive direction. She noticed that almost all of her arrests were for minor, non-violent offenses which might be taken care of differently. Many times the district attorney drops the charges which makes you wonder why the person was arrested in the first place.
As was mentioned earlier, Professor Brooks wrote a memo on setting up a program to bring police officers and community people together to work on problems and change practice and policy as needed. It did get passed on to the new police commissioner who liked it and moved to implement it. The Police for Tomorrow initiative was the result. The program looks at changing demographics, shifts in societal opinions about crime and punishment, and comes up with new ideas about law enforcement. Georgetown University hosts the initiative which has been productive in knocking down silos between the police and the community.
Bob’s Take
This was a fascinating book that looked behind the blue wall of law enforcement. Rosa is an urban progressive who had little sympathy for cops before she became one. The book reveals lots of warts on law enforcement in DC, but it also shows us what a huge challenge it is to be an urban police officer.
Rosa is not a very good cop. She never mastered the equipment or the procedures. She is not observant, a big problem if you're in law enforcement. She often forgot to turn on her body camera, not because she was trying to hide what she was doing but because she just forgot. She was overwhelmed by all of the things a cop has to do. It was too much to keep track of.
She points out that most of the people in the community who are involved with the police, either as victims or perpetrators, are trauma survivors. Those people act differently than a non-traumatized individual would. They don’t usually make good choices which often leads to problems.
Police officers are also much more likely to experience trauma as they go to work each day. The bad things they see take a toll on them. Police are five times more likely to have trauma issues than the community at large. Suicide, substance abuse, divorce, and depression are much more prevalent in people in law enforcement than for the rest of us.
“Half a mile from the White House and the offices of the high-priced lawyers and lobbyists, there’s a guy passed out on the sidewalk, almost dead from fentanyl-laced heroin. On the next block over, there’s a woman screaming, running away from the man trying to slam her head into the wall. Across the street, there are four kids in a one-bedroom apartment, their mother too high to remember to buy food. The kids get by on a mix of school-provided lunches and petty shoplifting - a bag of chips here, a can of soda there.”
That’s a pretty depressing but accurate summary of life in DC. The police are society's last resort, but by the time the police get involved, the only choices are bad ones.
Even before the Black Lives Matter movement, many cities were beginning to reconsider policing. Some districts have mental health clinicians accompany police in patrol cars. In some departments, police officers themselves are trained to evaluate a person’s mental health status and call in for help before any arrest is made. Many districts are changing their training procedures so that the next crop of recruits will have a lot more tools than a gun and a baton.
Professor Brook’s Police for Tomorrow program is in place in DC and is having a positive impact on policing. It would make sense for our leaders to set up similar efforts in other cities. That would open the door to constructive change.
