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.
Then at the Department of Mental Health Public Safety, I saw fairness there. People were treated fairly regardless of any characteristic they might have been experiencing.
This was the first time in my policing career I had seen some outright very in your face bias. If this was a person who was not involved with a political campaign, there is no way they would have got out of going to jail in this circumstance.
I see today that this is one of the things if we want to make progress on things like racial bias, we have to see how the huge things like political bias are in the policing system.
Because from what I saw, especially at USCPD, the bias is really in terms of status, and lots of minorities just don't have any status.
It is not as much that there is a bias because of skin color specifically most of the time, it is that there is this huge status bias, and therefore, a lot of minorities don't have any status bias.
In fact, I've seen it work in the other favor where football players have got the same kind of treatment for being a football player.
"Well, this is a football player. You can't arrest him."
Or a football player beats up an officer, and then the officer ends up being on trial even though they got beat up in arresting a football player who was violently resisting.
If you have status, that allows you to experience a completely different version of the law than ordinary people do.
I saw this in another time very overtly, along with many of other times not so overtly. There was a night, someone was pulled over for drunk driving. He turned out to be a cousin of the sheriff. He was not a direct cousin like a first cousin or anything, but it was some kind of distant cousin.
I heard the sergeant say over the phone these exact words.
"You're going to let him go because he is the sheriff's cousin. We don't want a war with the sheriff's department."
These are my words as I remember them. I don't know if that's exactly what he said, but it was very close to that. It was very clearly communicated on the phone to an officer not to arrest this guy because he was the sheriff's cousin.
That is total bullshit, in my opinion, and this hypocrisy planted a seed
that would continue to grow in me and become unbearable through the rest of my time at USCPD watching the blatant unfairness.
Once you see that this is not only rampant, but everywhere, that this is normal, that if you are a certain person of status, you can do damn near anything and it will be overlooked, and for lots of times, this status is reinforced even deeper in the court system.
What we are talking about here is just law enforcement. Then, there are additional levels of bias going through the court system. If you have got multiple levels of bias working in your favor, if you have some status, then it doesn't even work for you when you actually get arrested. You get to hire an attorney, and then your status may get you out of even having to go to court at all.
Then, if you actually do go to a jury trial, your status may help you to get out of the jury trial as well. Therefore, it is almost difficult if you have some kind of status, like you are a friend of a friend, or a politician, or related to someone. A status being you have something that stands you out from the ordinary person, especially as directly related to the police department.
This is why some of the cases get so much attention where the status has eventually been violated, where someone was arrested even though they were a celebrity.
There was a case while I was at USCPD right before I got there, and there was a ton of talk about this when I was an FTO.
Someone at USCPD had arrested a City of Columbia police officer for drunk driving and there was a huge thing going on over this.
The city officers were really upset about it that the blue line had been violated, and as some of them put it, "How dare some little University cop
be arresting a real police officer for drunk driving?"
In my experience, I tried to avoid getting into it with police officers because you could have some really crazy stuff go on. Usually if I stopped someone else who was a cop, I would generally just let them go, because, of course, they had guns in the car, and especially if they had been drinking, you could easily get into some really crazy stuff and it was just like, "Why even bother?"
Therefore, some of this stuff is out of self-interest and self-preservation. I can imagine the major coming out seeing this girl at three in the morning with her senator sign in the back of the car and he was sitting there thinking, "You know what? No, I just don't even want to get in all this stuff. I don't want all this drama. This is really easy. We can just send her home really quietly. There won't be any problem. I don't want some senator calling the police department asking why we did this."
As an officer myself, later I saw when I would pull over guys from the city or sheriff's department, or state law enforcement, whoever it was, I would almost immediately let them go because you knew there were so many things that could go wrong.
You know they know the laws as well as you know the laws. You know that if you try to do anything that you are almost certainly going to be facing an internal review from your own department, a polygraph, you may have to report to the news or something like that or be told not to go anywhere near the news.
You may have all kinds of potential problems and challenges in your life, and therefore, a lot of officers just respect the blue line. If it is another police officer they stop, they just see the badge and depending on the violation, just usually let them go or give a warning.
I was stopped at least three, maybe four or five times while I was a police officer off duty. I showed my badge and was let go every single time even when it was in a different state.
I got pulled over in Virginia one day. I was going 20 or 25 miles an hour over the speed limit on the interstate. I think it was something like a 65 and I was going about 90. The officer that stopped me said, "If you've been going one mile an hour faster, I would have taken you to jail for reckless driving. I don't care if you got a badge or not. So, you slow it down."
I did slow it down until I got out of his state at which point I sped it back up again. The blue line and the bias in policing is real and this killed my whole idealism immediately as soon as I started at USCPD.
As soon as I saw this, this seed of hypocrisy just started growing all over, that it is okay for one person to drunk drive, but it is not okay for another person to drunk drive.
I started to get myself into "I'm a special class citizen here," that I'm one of the people who can drink drive all over town and it is okay for me to do that, but it is not okay for other people to do the same thing.
This hypocrisy, especially in FTO really got to me because I kept going farther and farther over into being the crazy one who expected to have this special status, and within a year, I was drunk driving all over town myself, then I would be arresting people for the same thing.
By the end of my time at USCPD, I could hardly bear to arrest anyone anymore because of the hypocrisy, especially not just in my own life, but all the bias I had seen.
"Well, this kid, yeah, you need to arrest him. He doesn't know anyone. He's just a pathetic freshman smoking pot. This bum who's stealing books
out of the bookstore, yeah, you need to arrest him."
"But no. These guys dealing tons of cocaine over at the Greek village, we could easily go raid their houses. Their parents give a lot of money to the university."
"So, yeah, arrest this guy that's riding through with a little handful bag of weed on a bicycle. But, no, we're not going to go raid the Greek village and get the just pounds and pounds of cocaine that they're dealing out of these houses. We're not going to do that. But yeah, go ahead and arrest this poor guy on a bike."
That stuff bothered me and just really still bothers me to think of it today.
In fact, once you see inside of this level in the criminal justice system, it really takes the whole thing down in my mind.
You see, the whole system is kind of bullshit. It essentially just oppresses and keeps a lot of people in fear and treats a lot of people unfairly while a select few get to do almost whatever is desired.
In other cases, people are treated too fairly and too tolerantly, and they go on to violate the law an absurd number of times while other people get in the most trifling dumb ass situations and end up going to prison.
One person will end up dealing a ton of drugs or sometimes even murdering people, getting away with all kinds of things and never go to prison, and you will have somebody else who gets drunk and pulls the knife out at the wrong time and goes to prison for five years.
It is so arbitrary and bullshit, and unfair, that I'm amazed it actually works, and you might say, this is just me in a little University Police Department. This isn't even getting into all the crazy stuff like federal government, all that good stuff, the things that go on in Washington, DC.
This is just at a University Police Department and seeing the tip of the iceberg of what goes on.
Therefore, I'm grateful for the chance to share this experience with you. I feel very passionately that you may want to ask, "Okay, what's the solution?"
The solution is to not have a criminal justice system. The system is the problem. People who are trusted and loved and connected, and who look out for each other, don't need to have people with guns coming around policing them.
You say, "Well, all right, what happens when people get crazy?"
The people in their community intervene and help them, and work together. I've heard an awesome thing with fire departments, and in fact, it is having a criminal justice system that may be the cause of a lot of the crime we see.
I heard about this story when the fire department was out of commission for a while. There were no fires while the fire department was unavailable. The people made sure to simply be more careful and put out any fires themselves. Once the fire department was back online, fires went back to their normal level.
If we make it up to us and each other to police ourselves and our citizens, if regular people are trusted with guns, I'm not to say there won't be bad things that happen, but in my opinion, the solution is to get rid of the criminal justice system and to stand up to it.
Our criminal justice system is absurd. It's a sham. It is not fair at all. If you have been on the receiving end of it, you know how unfair it is.
I've seen a bunch of people who deserved to get much better treatment
than they got out of the criminal justice system. I've also seen a bunch of people including me who deserved to get some harsher treatment out of the criminal justice system, who always just got away with things like speeding or who just could be assumed that they weren't causing any trouble when talking to the police, like the night I threw the drink in the bar, was screaming and I saw the police officer, started talking nice and a little charisma helped out.
Anyway, this is my little rant on that.
This was one of the messed up things that happened in the beginning of my time at USCPD that broke my idealism and got me into this really ugly practicalism, like hypocrisy and "I can do whatever I want," and we are going to just arrest and enforce the law on everyone except those who do have some special status.
Thank you for getting through field training with me at USCPD. I'm grateful you have read this story today. I hope it is useful for you wherever you are at in your life to hear about this honest retelling of my field training and the most memorable stories from it.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.