"what you feel and what you fear are real"

[chase_acow]

thisfinecrew has a lot of good information and resources for actions.



I'm a dispatcher at a small university police department. I've struggled with the ethics of working for an institution that nationwide encourages and entrenches systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and for-profit prison sentencing. In 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered, half the officers I worked with stopped speaking to me because of their knee jerk defensive posturing. These were guys I liked, I could talk to about screaming goats, video games, and the appropriate way to cook a steak.

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was.

We've had less than a handful of Black officers come through, and despite the Chief also being Black, I saw the way they were treated with understood throw-away racism. You can't make jokes about the foreign students on campus without some of that spilling over. The female officers, didn't fare much better. The last one was completely thrown under the bus when she reported being stalked and harassed by another well liked guy who'd been here years ago and was going through training to come back.

Implicit Bias Training/Mental health training: is a joke. Is a freaking unfunny joke.

My department uses a company called Police One. From their website -> "Built specifically for law enforcement, it allows departments to deliver, track and assign policies and training online, in person and at roll call and is used by more than 1,500 departments of all sizes, including the NYPD, Indianapolis Metro, and the entire state of Colorado as well as companies like TASER."

It is old, outdated, every single officer on staff thinks it's a waste of time, and it is very easy to pass their tests without reading/listening to a single word of their laughable classes. It's the same class every year with few updates that meets the criteria of continuing education. What is needed is a mental health requirement THAT IS ABOUT THE OFFICER'S MENTAL HEALTH. There's plenty of officers who would benefit from a structured class to give them tools about their stress, how to be a better parent, a better partner, a better human being. We can all be better human beings.

There's this mentality thanks to Lt. Col Dave Grossman/American Sniper ->'oh, we're the sheepdogs protecting the flock from the wolves'. Believe me, I've tried to explain how condescending and how dangerous such a mindset is. THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR THAT WORKS IN ANY WAY. And yet it's everywhere in the police bubble of social media memes, t shirts, fucking tattoos, and it makes me so angry. The police work for their communities, they are beholden to us, not the other way around.

I have helped people. I have seen cops do good things, even going out of their way and job description to help someone. Yet there's this dissonance that I can't escape. I know my cops. I work with forty of them. I basically like about half of them. There is only one I would trust without reservation to stand up against his shift mates if they through whatever circumstances took things too far.

How can things change when no one wants to work with these assholes? When it's so hard to see any change? When it's the same excuses over and over again? That Black police chief I mentioned up there? So far totally silent on current events.