This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
But I guess, however this went down, it seemed everyone from that whole department then just shunned me like I had stabbed that officer in the back. I don't know what happened with that and I think he got sent home back to his department.
That was an interesting thing. It seemed like everyone else just kind of
either minimized it or acted like they didn't see anything, or maybe they didn't see anything or they sided with the cadet, that he was confused and the instructor was being unclear and the instructor was out of line or whatever.
It was very interesting to see how so many of us witness the same thing and there were such different opinions and realities that came out of it, and then to see how that impacted our relationships with each other.
The department that officer was from, basically everyone who had been talking to me, hanging out with me and friendly with me, just cut me off after that.
It was crazy.
I'm grateful today no one got hurt and that was scary. That was scary and it was kind of funny too looking back on it.
I'm glad no one got shot that day. I'm amazed that more people don't get injured at police academies with all the kinds of training like that you have got going on today.
I'm grateful I had the courage to just tell the truth even though I realized that officer and everyone in his department might not like what I had to say, but that's what I saw and I was not going to lie to essentially try to cover up or make someone else feel better.
I was going to share my truth and my actual experience, even if people didn't like it. Maybe the instructors at the academy liked it, I don't know.
But it doesn't matter now, does it?
I'm interested to know how that officer’s career went after that. It seemed pretty crazy to me at the time.
So thank you very much for sharing my journey through the Department of Mental Health, sending me to the police academy.
That concludes… Oh, no.
Of course, there is one more little story to tell you.
Another one of the interesting things we did…
"Oh Jerry, you tried to wrap it up twice. My God, I can't listen to anything else, man."
You are free to skip to the next chapter if you want to. This is a good story though.
"It better be."
I remember one of the last weeks at the police academy, as we were doing these kinds of training exercises, another thing they had us do was a virtual reality simulation.
It was basically like an enhanced video game where you had a huge screen with all these various police scenarios on them. You had a very realistic gun, and then I don't know if it was some kind of goggles or something you had.
You had a very realistic virtual reality training experience where you would have an instructor that would play these scenarios out kind of like a video game for you and instruct you what to do.
The most memorable one to me, there was a man, there was a call you got, a man had a knife and was threatening a little girl.
You went through this as if it was real.
So, you showed up like, "Okay, Banfield responding to the call."
I got there and up on the screen popped this guy that had a little girl and a knife to her throat.
The idea is the instructor has control over the video game based on what the officer does.
So, I pointed my gun and I said, "Please, drop the knife," or something like, "Drop that knife right now!"
I said a couple of these things, it was like, "I'm not going to tell you again. Drop the knife or I am going to shoot."
The guy didn't drop the knife, so I shot. I hit him right in the forehead and the instructor was pretty surprised.
He said, "That was lucky. You couldn't do that again."
I guess a lot of people had struggled with those scenarios, but I had so much confidence in my ability to shoot that I thought, "Well, there's an easy solution to this one. Pow!"
The instructor loaded up several more scenarios like that where people were coming up and if you were not willing to just shoot right away the scenario was difficult.
But for me, I thought, "All right. Bang!"
I shot someone else in the head on another scenario.
Then, he loaded up another one that got like crazy. There were all these people and I shot the hell out of all of them too.
He was surprised again, "Wow!"
I said, "It wasn't a fluke. I meant to shoot him in the head. I shot him in the head."
He said, "Well, alright, I guess not."
Then, there were some just kind of crazy scenarios like you were behind a car and four people got out of a car and you had to shoot them. I shot the hell out all the scenarios.
My experience playing video games and natural ability with firearms, I tore those scenarios up, which was kind of funny because I had heard a lot of people had struggled and had a hard time. If you weren't willing in a scenario to just shoot, I guess there was a lot of long talking and stuff that could go on.
"Stop talking, don't talk. I don't want to talk anymore."
I thought, "Pow! That'll fix it." That was my philosophy too. Evil shenanigans.
I love "Super Troopers" too.
I tried to reenact as many "Super Troopers" things as possible in my policing career.
So, there we go.
That is another interesting story.
I thought it was interesting, at least, how the instructor tried to challenge
me on the video-game scenario and I absolutely went to work on it.
He actually gave me the same scenario again to finish it off with the exact same thing, or almost the exact same thing, and I shot the guy in the head in that one too.
That was when he said, "Oh, well, I guess that wasn't a fluke, was it?"
I said, "Nope, I can shoot."
There we go.
But now here I am.
I sold all my guns today and I figure if I need a gun that bad for something, one will show up. I practice nonviolence today and I don't think we need to be going around shooting people.
I think it's a lot better if we can talk to each other and prevent the need to get to a point where someone has got a knife to someone's throat and they need to be shot.
So, thank you very much.
All right, I'm actually ending this now.
I appreciate you doing it in this format with me. I know I love listening to something in this kind of honest down to earth format, not perfectly edited, just straight from the heart.
I've narrated this whole thing just straight through. Technically, I think I messed something up about three or four minutes in and had to delete something real quick.
But I've gone almost all the way straight through this now for over an
hour and a half and I appreciate you.
No, that's not even true. It says an hour and 22 minutes. I just rounded up. It has been an hour and 23 minutes now if you are listening to the audio.
Thank you very much. I love you.
You are awesome.
I hope you have enjoyed my experience in the police academy, the
South Carolina police academy.
You know what?
I already said all this.
I'm just going to wrap this up now. Thank you.
This is Jerry Banfield and we are done with this chapter.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.