Hey everyone! Welcome to That Dang Dad,
my name is Phil,
and tonight's... gonna be kind of a
rough one...
I think it's time for me to talk
about a time in my life that fills me
with a lot of shame,
a lot of regret,
a lot of self-loathing... normally i'm
content to just
kind of keep quiet about this stuff
but recent events in 2020
make me think that i might have a
responsibility to say something about my
experiences,
to, i don't know,
sway public opinion? or
help stop a brutal machine from ruining
more lives? I don't know, i feel powerless,
I feel helpless, I feel
hopeless, so i guess i'm just trying to
do something, anything,
that feels like it might help.
Tonight I want to talk about the fact that I was a police officer for almost 10 years,
and specifically, I want to talk about
the way that
police work taught me to dehumanize
people.
I could talk for hours about the
profession, about how
complicated but ultimately toxic it is,
but after the BLM protests and the
Kenosha Militia Murders,
I think zeroing in on the slow seductive
process of dehumanization is maybe one of the
more important things i can talk about
tonight.
No true cop can resist telling war
stories, so i'm going to start with one:
 so there i was! 
fresh off a training, I'd just got hired, i
was on patrol with my FTO in our city...
Our city was a dense urban area,
predominantly low income,
first and second generation Hispanic,
and because of that, the city was full of
people who were driving without driver's
licenses
and they were driving cars that had
broken headlights, broken taillights that
kind of thing.
So one day we pulled over just such a
car and it happened to be driven by a single
mother with three children in her car and about 20
bags of groceries.
And because she was driving without a
license, legally
we were allowed to tow her car as punishment.
When my fto told me to call for a tow,
I felt kind of bad about it and
I said "Sir, you know, we're only like five blocks
from her house, she's got her
kids and she's got all these groceries-"
and he cut me off and he said,
"I don't care fuck these people call for the tow."
So we watched as her and her three kids
unloaded the bags of groceries onto the hot sidewalk
and started making phone calls trying to
figure out what they were gonna do to
get these groceries back to their house.
And I gotta be honest with you, that
image of a mom
and her three kids standing on the
sidewalk surrounded by groceries,
it's burned into my brain as deeply as
any murder scene that i was ever on.
I just felt like such a tool doing that
to her
and my TO saw that i was perturbed and
he pulled me aside and he said
"These people think that they
can just break the law and nothing bad
will ever happen to them..."
He said that unlicensed drivers
crash into people, kill people and that
if we were to let this woman go and she
crashed into someone later, we'd be
blamed for it,
and so, he said "I've got no sympathy for
her."
I would hear versions of that a lot...
We were out on a call once where a young
teen gangster was shot at a family party
and he was bleeding to death in front of
his family,
I turned to the officer next to me
and I said "man, that's really
messed up, bleeding to death in front of
your family..."
and the other cop turned to me and he
said "Hey, he's just a gangster, fuck him."
It happened when a
homeless person would overdose in an
alley, they'd be like "That's just a
transient, fuck em."
"Eh, it's just an addict, fuck em." 
Just to really skeeve you out,
one time one of my FTOs put it this way,
he said, "These people come up
here from Mexico and they think they can
just live like they did in their little
villages with no rules. Well i'm not
going to let them turn
our city into Juarez."
So, do you see the subtle (or not so
subtle) ideology at play here?
People who break the law don't deserve
sympathy,
we should make law breaking as painful
as possible
to teach them a lesson, to dissuade them
from committing more crimes, or
to prevent them from turning the city
into...
you know...
I want you to put a pin in this concept,
that breaking the law should be as painful as possible.
I'm gonna come back to it
Because next, we need to talk about using
force. When I was in the police academy I would
say about forty percent of it was
learning
legal codes and procedural stuff and
about sixty percent was
physical toughness, use of force,
and officer safety.  Early in the
academy, they would sit you down to watch
lots of dash cam footage of
police officers being murdered, police
officers being ambushed,
police officers being shot to death on
routine traffic stops, and it would be
drilled into you "There's no such thing
as a routine traffic stop!"
At any moment somebody might run up on
you with a gun and you've got to be ready.
And once your head is full of cop death
that's when they start teaching you the
boxing
and the wrestling and the judo and the
aikido and the firearms training,
that's when you start learning the laws
about when you
Get To use force and how much force you
Get To use... and i'm being precise on that
last part;
I would say most of the use of force
instruction that i received
was on knowing what was the maximum
amount of force
you could get away with.
The court case Graham versus Connor, that was
like our mantra:
what would a Reasonable Officer do in
this situation?
You could also learn a court case like
Tennessee versus Gardner
which says that you Get To shoot a
fleeing suspect
if you have probable cause to believe
that they will present
a deadly threat to other officers or
the public.
So without getting too deep into the weeds
about
Reasonable Officer standards versus Probable Cause,
I want you to imagine this for a second:
You've got a bunch of fresh-faced
rookies who've just spent hours watching
cops murdered by members of the public,
and then they get told that justifiable
use of force revolves around the
officer's perception of how dangerous
members of the public are...
This indoctrination
continued onto the streets when I
finally got hired.
FTOs were relentless about officer
safety,
every traffic stop, every ped check, every
call for service
they were constantly pointing out what
could have happened:
you know, somebody could have popped out of the trunk with an ak-47,
you know, he could have had a gun in the
glove box, she could have stabbed you in
the back when you turned around,
you could have been ambushed when you
went around that blind corner...
And it may sound silly or dramatic to you, but
to be fair, police officers do get shot
they do get
stabbed, they do get ambushed sometimes
and so the training teaches you to be
ready to kill, it teaches you to WANT to kill
so that you don't become a victim.
And so again, if the legal standard for
use of force
relies on what a reasonable officer
would do in that situation,
what is a reasonable response 
to years of
training that says that everyone might
try to kill you.
Let's put a pin in that idea.
And now
let's sprinkle in a landmark essay from
Lt.Col. Dave Grossman,
a law enforcement trainer and combat
researcher,
who is a hero to cops everywhere.
I've seen him speak
live, he's like a rock star to cops.
Grossman divides the world into sheep,
wolves, and sheepdogs. The sheep are
members of the public,
the wolves are the bad guys, and the
sheepdogs are the cops.
The sheepdogs protect the sheep from wolves,
but the sheepdogs are not sheep themselves
and, according to Dave Grossman, the sheep
distrust the sheepdogs because they kind
of resemble
wolves and the sheep don't like being
told what to do.
And i know it's supposed to be a cute
metaphor or whatever,
but think of the messaging at play here:
Cops are not members of their community,
they are above and in charge of that community,
and the community rarely appreciates it.
All the sheepdogs have is each other...
pin it!
Alright so let's review what we have
pinned in the brains of cops:
Cops are fundamentally
separate from members of the public,
members of the public
might try to kill a cop at any time, and
breaking the law should be as painful as
possible
to deter crime.
If you're a regular nice person who
let's say is getting into law
enforcement for
all the right reasons, mentally what must
you do
to hold these three lessons in your head
and still feel like a nice person at the
same time?
You pretty much have to begin
dehumanizing the community in your mind
to be able to do "what's necessary" to be
safe, to prevent crime, and to protect your
fellow officers from being murdered.
And to be clear, this dehumanization
didn't make me, like,
snarl at children or be awful to members
of the public all the time...
I was a nice cop most of the time, I was
the funny cop, i like to make people
laugh, I like to make them smile,
and i worked with a lot of guys that
were very funny, they were
charming, and they were
helpful a lot of the time.
However...
when someone disrespected us,
when someone refused to comply
or did not sufficiently honor
their friendly neighborhood sheepdog,
it was very easy for me to slip into a
mode where
i made life very difficult for people.
The rule and training for dealing with
people was:
"You ask, you tell, you make."
We had a lot of ways to make you do
stuff;
sometimes we could make you do stuff by
beating you up,
sometimes we could make you do stuff by
towing the family car,
sometimes we could make you do stuff by
arresting you and your friends
on flimsy charges because we knew that
even if they didn't stick,
you were the ones stuck in jail all weekend
To be clear,
many times i personally shoved someone
into a cycle of
debt and incarceration
that they might still be dealing with to
this day.
I firmly believe deep in my heart that i
have
personally ruined people's
lives, maybe permanently, because of my
choices,
and choices that were legal for me to make.
And yeah, visiting all manner of
hardships on a community of low-income
immigrants feels pretty bad at first so
you have to harden yourself:
"They're just illegals fuck em."
"They're just addicts, fuck em."
"They're just gangsters, fuck em."
So, when you see Ofcr Tim Loehmann
shoot 12 year old Tamir Rice after one
second on the scene,
when you see Derek Chauvin
grinding George Floyd's neck into the
pavement, when you see Louisville Metro
police department
botch a raid and gun down Breonna
Taylor in her own bed,
when you see Rusten Sheskey shoot
Jacob Blake in the back
seven times in front of his kids, and
when you see Kyle Rittenhouse
take a rifle across state lines to gun
down
BLM protesters 20 miles away from his
community,
i want you to understand what's
happening in their heads:
They have ceased to see some people
(mainly Black people) as humans worthy of
dignity and respect.
They see themselves as separate and
above the public,
and they believe that the only way to
keep order and to prevent the city from
turning into...
you know... is to violently punish people
to convince the rest of us that
deviation from social control
will be painful and maybe deadly.
I mean, you see it in the way that
police across the country are torturing
protesters
and shooting chemical weapons at members
of the press
indiscriminately. Remember the protests
are about police brutality
and the only response from law
enforcement is to up the brutality!
Why would they do this unless they have
completely dehumanized the public
and they believe that only fear and
pain will
dissipate civil unrest?
Now look...  am i saying that all cops are bastards?
Let me start over: am i saying that every
individual
cop is privately waging a racist crusade
against Black people
and that they harbor a deep festering
hatred in their heart of hearts? No i'm
not saying that.
But if you've watched any of my recent videos
you know that i'm not interested
in individual actions, i'm interested
in the ways that structures and systems
and unjust hierarchies
harm people. So it's irrelevant to me
what's in this or that cop's heart
because the system encourages cops
to dehumanize people, the system protects
cops who do it,
and polite (white) society applauds them
for keeping a boot on the neck of...
you know...
So why am i telling you this
because, I think you need to know this
when you read stories of police
violence and watch footage of the
protests.
I think you need to know this so that
YOU don't dehumanize your fellow human.
I don't want you to say, "Yeah they're
just thugs, fuck em."
and avert your gaze when your fellow
human is tortured by the state.
Many of the people murdered by police
are in some kind of crisis;
maybe it's addiction, maybe it's
desperation born from poverty, maybe it's
a mental health episode...
You know, many of the people murdered by
police are disabled,
many are poor, many have been traumatized
by past
experiences with authority.
As someone who did the job
for many years, i'm telling you
that the majority of people killed by
police
deserve help not death.
And if you believe me when I say that,
i want you to ask yourself this:
Are you sure you'll never need help one day?
The people who are killed by police are
people like you,
sometimes they're people who made bad
choices, in the case of Tamir Rice or
Breonna Taylor, some of them are people
who've done nothing wrong.
Is that the kind of world that you want
to live in, one where you could be
killed for one bad decision or simply
because a bunch of cops got the wrong
address?
When you watch the protests,
when you see them get rowdy, when you see it get heated,
i want you to remember something: the
protesters aren't just protesting for
george floyd or jacob blake,
they're protesting for YOU,
for your right to be alive, for your right to need help sometimes,
for your right to be human in the eyes
of the state.
If we can make police stop murdering
Black people,
it makes all of us safer from
unaccountable state terror.
Do i have some ideas about
what should happen to the police as a
state function?
Sure, but I don't want to get into that
right now. We have lots of options and
besides, you should be listening to Black,
indigenous, and people of color
about what they need for their community,
not me.
All i want you to do is to think a
different way about the images that you
see on social media and i want you to
soften your heart.
I promise you, i know this from
experience,
if you dehumanize people long enough
you won't like who you become.
Anyway thanks for watching, thanks for
hearing me out,
please share this video with people that
you think need to hear it,
I appreciate you joining me and maybe
i'll catch you next time.
Have a good night and be safe out there.
