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.
In the summer of 2007, I was extremely grateful to leave the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice as a correction officer to accept a position with the South Carolina Department of Mental Health Public Safety, as a law enforcement officer one, or in plain language, a police officer with statewide jurisdiction responsible for transporting patients, who have been basically incarcerated to a mental health facility, from one place to another.
For example, one day I took a young man from a mental health facility in Charleston up to an appointment with his attorney in Columbia, South Carolina, and then drove him back. He was such a good boy that I managed to even buy him some McDonald's for lunch out of my own pocket.
I know I made that sound ridiculous, but it is also pretty ridiculous to have people locked up and be driving them around from place to place to do ordinary things.
That was my job.
I'm very grateful for that job, which made it easy to get started as a police officer. I had been applying to lots of other departments and the South Carolina Department of Mental Health was the first one that actually offered me a job.
The South Carolina Department of Mental Health Public Safety did not even do a polygraph, which today I'm grateful for, because that got me in the door with law enforcement and set me up to make it easier for me to
get hired at another police department.
The expense that a lot of departments struggle with is sending officers to the police academy because in this way, the department has to spend a lot of money before they actually get anything out of the officer.
In this case, the South Carolina Department of Mental Health or I could just abbreviate that to Mental Health for short, or as we abbreviated it at work, DMH.
So, we will call it DMH to keep this thing short.
DMH footed the bill for me for months to send me to the police academy, get me certified and get me trained before actually I was even able to start doing the work they hired me for.
You can see why it is very attractive once you have gotten certified for another department to then just hire you because they don't have to spend all that time and money just to get you up to speed. When South Carolina hired me over at the University of South Carolina Police Department, all they needed to do is put me through a month or two of field training during which I was already a certified police officer.
Therefore, they essentially had the Department of Mental Health foot the bill to get me certified.
In this way, it is tough for a lot of police departments because the ones that are the easiest to get hired at tend to foot the bill for a lot of officers to go to the academy, and then the most desirable departments tend to get already certified officers that just walk in the door because they are so competitive.
I am very grateful for the South Carolina Department of Mental Health Public Safety or DMH for hiring me as a police officer, which I had so
wanted to do for years.
The first two months or so at DMH consisted primarily just of training where they were getting me up to speed on policies and waiting to get me a slot at the academy, which in South Carolina at the time was only nine weeks long of in-house training.
I hear it is 12 weeks now.
The hiring process at DMH was really simple compared to the University of South Carolina Police Department, which required a polygraph and a lot more forms to be filled out and some of the hiring processes I heard about from other departments.
At DMH all they had me do was to fill out a few pieces of paperwork, verify that I didn't have any criminal record or any arrest or even any traffic tickets. I filled all the paperwork out and they hired me.
I remember walking into the building the very first time from the interview. I got a sense of feeling like home, feeling like this was right where I wanted to be and I see that as no coincidence that I got hired there and had a great year or so at DMH.
Once I started there, I got this great academy uniform I went to work in each day. I remember as soon as I knew I was getting hired at DMH, I went out and ran three miles because I realized I was in probably the worst shape of my adult life at the time after having just gotten over mono and mostly sat around as a corrections officer.
I started lifting some weights and running, trying to take better care of myself because at the time I was 5'11'' tall and I weighed 240 pounds or so, which is about 70 pounds more than I weigh today.
I had the incredible ability after not doing hardly anything for a year or so
in physical fitness to just suddenly run three miles in the middle of the day in the South Carolina heat, which in Columbia meant it was 90 to 100 Fahrenheit degrees. I just all of a sudden, as soon as I knew I was hired, I went and ran three miles to get in better shape and my thighs rubbed together so much and the muscles were so sore, that it took me about a week to recover from that run.
I'm grateful today that you can see the passion I unlocked to start taking better care of myself with getting that job. Then again, I could have had that passion just outside of something external giving it to me, you could say.
I also started to lose my motivation to stay sober because I had been very strongly motivated to stay sober to get out of that DJJ hell with an honorable exit. It has happened so many times in my life, but having got what I wanted, I suddenly lost some of the motivation to do better and take better care of myself, and keep learning.
I thought, "Okay, I got this job I wanted. Life is good. I can probably go back to drinking." It probably wasn't anything that wasn't fixed by getting hired at DJJ.
Therefore, it was not long at the South Carolina Department of Mental Health before I went out with my friends again and was drinking. I had about three or so months sober from around March 2007 to maybe June 2007 or so, which was a little bit before I went to the police academy.
I remember making the decision sober one day that life was good and I could afford to drink again. I think that the best way to put it is that at the time I did not believe I deserved to have a good life and I did not know how to truly enjoy my life without having to essentially take myself down a peg or two with alcohol.
I'm grateful today that I'm very comfortable having a wonderful life and I
look back and see that it is funny how right when I got my life going well, I picked up the pieces, then there was almost this compulsion where I had to drink, and then kind of soon take things down.
Very soon things already did start to go down from the drinking as we will see coming up. The first few months were smooth at the South Carolina Department of Mental Health with my girlfriend at the time. She was happy that I was off night shift and able to hang out with her more.
The time at Corrections, while I did need her a lot, we struggled with the night shift because I was working so much and she was a student. She had classes during the day. The Mental Health hiring gave us a chance to hang out a lot more and unfortunately for me not to need her as much. I felt so bad about myself at DJJ, I really needed her love and support. However, as soon as I got my police officer job at DMH, I started feeling a lot better about myself, getting a sense of confidence back, and then starting to be so self-sufficient I didn't think I needed a partner in my life that much anymore.
I was starting to act like that too with my mindset and my selfishness, and not thinking about her, and this is where our relationship started to go downhill.
One day, we were watching a movie, "Superbad." We were at the theater, and I was in such a mood that she wanted to watch the credits and I said, "No."
I expected her to do whatever I told her to because she was a nice girl. She generally just went along with whatever I wanted to do or if she voiced her objections, if I argued and got loud about it, then she would just go along with it.
In this particular instance, she said, "No. I want to stay and watch the
credits."
So I said, "Fine."
I got up and left her in the movie theater. I went all the way back out to the car. This was right before I went to the police academy. She then came out of the theater after all the credits had rolled. She was crying and very upset. She tried to start packing her stuff up at my place and take it, and of course, I begged her for this not to be the end of things, and said that I would try to do better.
"Stop talking. Blah, blah, blah."
That's about what I did.
I wasn't ready for her to break up yet.
Although at the time, that would have been a very graceful way for her to exit. I gave her a very appropriate cue that I wasn't the kind of boyfriend or partner she deserved in her life. That would have been the perfect time to break up with me looking back at it.
She ended up bringing her stuff back in from the car and staying and we ended up making up that night, but looking at it now, I see that we never got past that last incident, which was just a typical normal example of what it was like to be with me, like in the Taylor Swift song about feeling twenty-two and believing everything would be alright as long as she kept me next to her.
No, it won't.
That was pretty normal me at 22 or 23 years old, which she had got the full experience on.
Then, I went to the police academy, which was an amazing adventure. The police academy was just down the road from where I lived. I lived next
to the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice facility where I worked, which is why I had moved there and the police academy was just next to that.
In fact, I remember seeing it and wanting to go there so much when I worked for DJJ and now I was so excited I was finally getting to go there.
The first big thing at the police academy was the physical fitness test. Knowing that I had to do that physical fitness test, I had been running and doing pushups and preparing for that a little bit, at least for four months.
The physical fitness test was something unlike I had done before where you simply had to do all these things and pass it or you would fail.
While I had passed the PT test in the Army ROTC program back in 2004, it had been three fat lazy years since then and I had put on 40 pounds since I had passed that PT test for ROTC. I had not been running or exercising at a regular basis, and I had a lot of fear that I would fail that PT test, that physical training or physical aptitude test, that the police academy did right when you got there.
That was one of the first things you had to do and the police academy was set up for some reason that if you failed pretty much anything, you got sent straight home, and then your department had to pay to send you back on a future rotation in the academy.
Therefore, if you failed that physical aptitude test, how embarrassing would that be to get sent home right away when you didn't even hardly get a week in the academy?
Then, you would have to wait at least three more weeks, sometimes six or nine weeks to go back to the police academy from there, and of course, you could risk losing your job as the department might get the idea that you
were not going to pass the academy.
"We're just going to fire you now and hire someone else who can go through the academy."
I remember a lot of fear and anxiety over that physical fitness test. The test involved a gym set of equipment basically where you have also got some custom-made things like windows and sets of stairs and a couple of hurdles to jump over.
The test took place in the police academy gym, which was about the size of a basketball court or so. You needed to run around the outside two or three times first, which was pretty fast and only took maybe 30 seconds to a minute.
Then, what you needed to do is come in while you were running and run straight in through all the obstacles, and get back out of the course having finished all the obstacles within a total time of about two minutes. As you can see with my fat ass at 240 pounds I was sweating this test, literally. I went running around in it and I tried to take my time through each of the obstacles.
I was watching one guy who came so fired up into the obstacle course, he ran full blast into it. He jumped up the flight of stairs that you had to go over. There was a wooden staircase, maybe three or four stairs up, a flat platform on it, then three or four stairs down. He came running into that so fast he basically vaulted up the stairs and instead of going straight down the stairs he kind of went off to the side and just jumped essentially straight off the platform and broke something when he landed.
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