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.
"As soon as I graduate college I just have a job waiting for me. All that networking from college would really pay off, right?" and I would just have the life I wanted to.
Graduating college was one of the most depressing times of my entire life.
I was drinking really hard and this was the first time I started to make a serious effort at staying sober. After going to Alcoholics Anonymous once in college as a result of another resident advisor telling my boss that I was trying to drunk drive the freshman over to Sonic.
I lied my ass off and said that I wasn't when I absolutely was. I very clearly remember drunk offering to drive people over to Sonic right now to
this day.
And so what?
Why not lie if you had to keep your job, right?
Another one of those little wrongs like "Hey, it's easier just to lie right now and I will keep my job and go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and then keep my alcohol selling and my drunk behavior on the down low. Why not just lie a little bit, minimize, and then we will be able to keep doing what we're doing? Only an idiot would confess up to the full nature of all the dumb shit they're doing, right?"
A year of being crazy in senior year in college left me where I didn't have anything more than an internship lined up from the summer. Unfortunately, I also had just smoked marijuana for the first time junior year, and then the last time senior year. As a guy in the criminal justice field who wanted to be a police officer, most departments were not looking for a drunk who had just tried marijuana fairly recently to become a deputy or a police officer.
I really screwed myself over not trying marijuana freshman year because most of the departments had anywhere from a one to a three-year requirement that you not have done any drugs before becoming a police officer, which seems really sensible and even pretty lenient, looking back on it, like you can smoke weed three years ago, and then you can be a police officer on the streets today.
Well, I can tell you with just a few months since I smoked my last joint, there were not a lot of departments looking to hire me. I remember filling out long applications and unlike high school having to sit there and check that I did a bunch of shit on it, even though I had never been arrested or got caught doing all the dumb stuff I had done.
These police departments had these undetected crime sections, where I definitely had to check things like vandalism, and all these other little-undetected crimes.
Now, I had to put these things down like, when was the last time you smoke marijuana?
Well, October 2015, no, 2005. I added 10 years to that. I've been clean and sober since 2014.
I put on the application October 2005, and then I was applying to be a police officer less than a year later. Not even a call back from any of the departments I applied to on the applications.
I called the Department of Corrections in South Carolina because I heard that if you became a correction officer it would be easier to become a police officer after that. The police departments, I guess, figured that if you could handle working in prison you might make a good police officer. Not definitely, but you might.
I called the Department of Corrections and the recruiter told me and I quote, "Why don't you go be a police officer?"
I don't know if he said white boy or not, but it felt like he did.
"Why don't you go be a police officer?" and he hung up on me.
I told him I was interested in applying at the Department of Corrections. I had my bachelor's from college and that's what he said, "Why don't you go be a police officer," and hung up.
I guess he didn't want to hear about my little marijuana smoking experience and why I couldn't be a police officer at the time. I figured after that, that I should better take whatever job I could because my little life on
my own was starting to fall apart.
I was running out of money, I was running into debt. I had a federal court internship just after college that convinced me under no circumstances would I ever want an office job.
An office job was worse than dying. At least dying might be exciting and you could go do something else. An office job was like rotting away in the refrigerator.
You know, those strawberries you buy and you intend to eat, and then they just mold and rot away until you finally throw them away, and you just figure you won't buy any more fruit because it just goes bad.
That's what I felt like sitting around taking inventory at a federal courthouse. I was acting out in all kinds of compulsive, shameful ways back then, the kind of stuff I'm not proud of and don't do anymore. It's funny to look back, because today I live such a clean life that the version of me from 10 years ago would have called me boring.
At the federal courthouse, the one thing I was sure of is that I never wanted an office job again.
Out of desperation, I tried a week at a call center after which I quit after failing the test because I paid so little attention. I then tried a little door-to-door sales.
Fortunately, after two and a half days, they put me out with the heavy hitter, the guy who was making really good money, and I quickly saw his strategy.
His strategy was to lie, which ironically you would think I wouldn't have a problem with, but for some reason, the morality I had at the time dictated it was only okay to lie to cover your own ass. It was not okay to go out and lie to make money.
Strange little twist there.
It is funny how many of us have these high morality, and then these convenient exceptions to them like, I would lie right to your face if it meant I wouldn't go to jail, but I was not going to go lie to your face to try to make
$100.
The sales leader they sent me out with lied right to this lady's face, then lied to my face about it. He told her when she was on a $15 a month phone plan and he signed her up for an $85 a month plan, he told her that her bill would not go up.
I looked at the sheet, I can read. I asked, "Did you sign her up for this plan?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Whoa, this plan says it's $85 a month. She had a $15 a month plan. You told her that her bill was not going to go up. How did that happen?"
He said, "You're not reading the sheet correctly."
I said, "I'm not reading the sheet correctly? That's fine. Then where's the correct sheet and show me how to read it."
He didn't have one for some reason because I was looking at the correct sheet and after that, I said, "You know what, take me home. This isn't for me."
I felt all offended because here they are lying to people to make money.
"How awful? How do you just lie to someone to make money?"
I couldn't compromise my integrity just to make money or later I would find out that I could.
Yeah, don't buy any cryptocurrency I recommend buying. I'm just saying.
That's why I'm getting out of the cryptocurrency game.
All right.
After going home and drinking immediately, a bottle of gin and juice as a matter of fact, I went straight to the liquor store, then went straight home and got drunk that night.
Shortly after that, I applied to the Department of Juvenile Justice and that's how we get into the very beginning of "Officer Banfield."
And man, if you want to talk about something that sucks, working in the
Department of Juvenile Justice as a correction officer is pretty high up
there.
Alright, I ended up enjoying that job. What did I do?
I thought that if you could work with kids that wouldn't be as bad as working with grown folks, right?
I thought working with kids would be nicer because they are just kids, right?
How bad can they be?
I was way wrong about that.
The Department of Juvenile Justice correction officers were people who had been fired from corrections. They were people who couldn't get a job at corrections. They were people like me who probably should have gone to be a police officer and like me thought, "Well, it's juvenile justice. How bad can it be?"
In November 2006, I started working for the Department of Juvenile Justice and that's where "Officer Banfield" begins as I became a correction officer.
Now, let's give you a setup before we describe my adventures into corrections.
At this time, I had tried to quit drinking a whole bunch of times already. I would stay sober for a few days or a few weeks and feel sorry for myself and go get a six pack, and then say, "Fuck it and go get a handle of vodka," or my roommate would want to paint one night and I would say, "Well, I can't paint without having a few beers," even though I had never painted
before.
I had maybe painted, living with my parents at some point, but I had never painted since moving out of my parents. How did I think that you needed a six pack to paint with?
Then, sure enough, I hadn't bothered to pour the vodka down from the last time I had tried to quit drinking so well. After three beers, "Forget painting, I'm going to go play World War II online and get my bottle of vodka again."
By this point, I had just quit gambling online, which took me to a whole other place because it felt like a worse addiction than alcohol.
Because when you bring the money element up into it, then you really can get crazy. The high from winning a game of poker when you are in college, you put $10 in and you end up winning $1,000 in one night, that was a high that I tried to get back and I did get back a few times.
I won another poker tournament. I had several nights where I won about
$1,000 playing poker starting with much less, and I would feel so good on some of those nights.
The problem was most nights were either kind of boring or you would lose money. Even though I had a 60 something win percentage at 1v1 poker games, which means I could actually make about $3 an hour playing
$5 heads ups sitting there drinking and being a loser on my computer all night.
I had got to a point where I tried to quit gambling online so many times and I was so bad senior year that I would literally tell my friends, "I'm never gambling online again."
Just an hour after that, I would go to Bailo to put a money transfer
through to a country I had never been to, to put money on a poker website that I had intentionally got my payment methods suspended, so I couldn't deposit from my bank account anymore.
This was right before gambling online was made illegal in the US, at least online poker. There is a ton of other stuff you can gamble and you can always bet on a Chinese website, right?
Gambling online was rough and I thought I was free from that. What I had been doing mostly up to this point for the six months before I was a correction officer, I was getting drunk and playing video games. That was kind of my method of operation.
I had wrecked my first car drunk driving senior year, right before I went to AA, and I had just bought my new car in somewhere around August 2006. I swore I would never drink drive again and I did really well on that for at least a month or two.
Going into being a correction officer, I was a mess. I had just been living rough. Thankfully, my girlfriend and I, we were still doing well at the time and I was a total disaster. I had a laundry list of undetected crimes and I felt like a total piece of shit.
At this point, it didn't seem very reasonable to assume I would ever get to be a police officer and going into work at the Department of Juvenile Justice, it felt pretty far away.
The pay was around $20,000 a year. My life was not looking good. I was borrowing money on credit cards. Before that, I had just got some zero percent interest credit cards when I didn't have a job, I would just buy my alcohol and buy new video games, and use my cash to pay things like rent and I just started running my credit cards up.
I came into a really low paying job with thousands of dollars in credit card debt, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, and just a little bit of gratitude that I had a job at all.
The only thing good I had going for me coming into working at the Department of Juvenile Justice is that I appreciated not to have a desk job again. I was grateful to go into something that might actually be interesting because one of the worst things I thought in life at the time was to be bored.
That was one of the things that I dreaded and I worked really hard not to be bored. Alcohol helped me, I thought, not to be bored because after a few liquor drinks anything was possible. We might burn a rug, smash a window, wreck a car, or pay for sex. Who knows what's going to happen?
Yes, I had paid for sex for the first time around my 21st birthday. Add that to my list of undetected crimes. It was another one of those drunken, shame-filled decisions I made back then, treating intimacy as just one more thing to consume.
Yeah, that was another one of those little wrong decisions that you don't
see the long-term impact of making a little decision like that.
All of a sudden, a few years later, you are a police officer caught up in the strip-club scene.
You see what I mean?
Little decisions, they really add up like that.
So, I appreciate you getting through this chapter with me.
I woke up at four in the morning and I kept thinking about recording more of this book.
This book is one of those things lots of times I would just rather keep to myself, but I hope my experience here, which sounds pretty normal to me recounting it, which is funny, because I'm sure somebody listening to it would say, "Holy shit, dude. This is not normal my friend."
I hope this is useful for you to listen to. I hope in sharing this to promote understanding of others because today when I see a crazy college student, or when I see a cop who is having a hard time, when I watch the news and see a police officer did something stupid, I understand.
I understand how the police officer could have done whatever the dumb thing was that they are accused of doing, and when you understand, the world is a pretty nice place.
Although sometimes you need to cry because it is so awful and you understand it.
The world is a pretty nice place when you understand and you get a sense of peace, you get a sense that things don't stay in one way and that there is hope.
I hope this chapter has helped with that and I think you are going to love the ones coming up where we go through my time in the Department of Juvenile Justice as the corrections officer, then the Department of Mental Health as a police officer, and finally, the University of South Carolina as a police officer in full detail without just focusing on the dispatcher story.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.