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.
At the University of South Carolina Police Department and many other similar departments, an Officer 1 certified out of the academy begins a period of field training with a field training officer known as an FTO.
I talked about this a little bit in the DMH chapter and with USCPD, even though I was certified I needed another FTO round with USCPD.
This chapter is dedicated to my training, including when I first started at USCPD and the FTO period. One of the most memorable experiences in training at USCPD was getting tased.
I'm not sure why they thought it was necessary to tase us, when they didn't beat us with the baton or shoot us with the gun, and we were allowed to carry those.
I'm grateful they didn't shoot us with the gun or beat us with the baton.
However, what they did do was hit us with the taser and get us with pepper spray. Both of those were not very fun and it felt more like hazing than training.
The taser actually is preferable in the big picture to the pepper spray. What they did with the taser, instead of shooting us with it, for safety they clipped on two prongs, one to the top of our shirt and the other one to the bottom of our shirt, and then hit us with the taser.
We had the choice to either look at the person who was about to tase us or we had the choice to turn our back. Almost everyone turned their back except me. I chose to look right at the guy who was about to tase me and
smile, at which point then he pulled the trigger on the taser and I went down something like this.
"Oh, fuck. Ah. Ah. Ah. God."
Then it was all over.
That was pretty much the whole experience.
As soon as the guy pulled the trigger I felt an electric current rip through my chest, all my muscles tensed and I face planted right down on the mat they had set up for us and squirmed a little bit on the floor at which point they let off the trigger.
It was only about five seconds and that was some of the most intense physical pain I've been in this body's incarnation.
They warned us beforehand to make sure to go to the bathroom so we didn't piss ourselves and everything was good to go for me on that. No pissing of the self, which I was a little afraid of, but I pissed as much as I could beforehand and I wasn't actually that afraid of getting the taser.
What really sucked was the pepper spray. What we did with the pepper spray, they gave us a nice version of it. Instead of spraying us right in the face with it they just sprayed all over on this big kind of like a handkerchief, and then had us wipe it all over our face and eyes.
My God, that was horrible. It was bad at first and it stayed bad. I started to hyperventilate and once they let us take it off, I felt like I had a hangover the whole night even though I didn't drink.
I had planned on going out with my friends to drink, but I felt so bad after the pepper spray that I stayed in, watched a little TV and went to bed early. The skin on my face was screwed up for about a year after the pepper
spray.
This white skin I have at least, with whatever experience I had with it, is not very good with pepper spray. I imagine if you have got Latino or dark skin or some other kind of skin, it is probably not that good with pepper spray either, come to think of it, but just saying, this was miserable.
The pepper spray on the face, my skin did not like that. I was extra sensitive to the sun for like a year afterward. It was ridiculous. I'm glad they spared us from the baton beating and the gun shooting.
Why do we need to be tased and sprayed? I don't know.
I guess for me the one thing that was really helpful with the pepper spray, I decided, "I'm never pulling this shit out."
After feeling how bad it impacted me, I thought as far as I was concerned the pepper spray wasn't an option.
The odds were if there was any chance of it getting on me, which with pepper spray there is a very high chance of it getting on you as the officer, even if you spray someone else correctly with it.
I realized from doing that pepper spray that I was likely to be more sensitive or as sensitive to it as anyone I was likely to spray.
So, I carried it around, but I never had any plans on using it. I always went straight for the taser because I realized as long as you hit them correctly with it, it was completely effective. If you did not hit them correctly with the taser, it was completely ineffective.
The taser scared the shit out of people too.
You whip the taser out, no one wants to get tased. I don't suppose most people want to get pepper spray either, but the taser looks like a gun, especially with the little laser light.
People's butt holes pucker up real good for the taser and they get in line really nice for it.
Today, I'm grateful that I got through that in our training. We had a class of a few of us that were new officers with USCPD. We had an initial training class for about a month or so, and then I went out into field training after that.
One day, I remember finishing up with a day-shift training where they said my credentials needed to transfer or something like that. It took a few weeks or a month or something to get all my paperwork and credentials properly transferred from the Department of Mental Health.
While I was on this, I was just kind of like a new guy. I didn't get to have a gun or anything. I just rode around, got to know the police department, rode around with some of the officers, learned about the basic procedures, it was like a pre-FTO training.
I remember one day from this, it was something like 6:45 or 6:50. We just got off shift, which normally ended at around 7 p.m. I remember racing down to Green's, the liquor store from USCPD, just hauling ass down there to grab my handles of vodka before 7 p.m. because the liquor store closed at that time.
I think this was a Saturday and it did not reopen until Monday morning, and for some reason, I wasn't the kind of guy to go to the liquor store before noon.
So, I was in a panic because I did not want to have to go out to the bar
and depend on drinking out somewhere either.
I remember this very clearly because that's an indication of my alcoholism. It was so important, like a life and death mission to get to the liquor store before it closed at 7 p.m., so I could be stocked up on vodka.
I rarely ran out of liquor, but I think on this occasion, I actually had run out of vodka. I did make it to the liquor store just a few minutes before it closed. I remember feeling immense relief buying several handles, gallons of liquor, and swearing I would never run out again.
I don't think I ran out of liquor again after that for a year or year and a half.
After I completed my initial training at USCPD and got my certification transferred, then I got my gun, my badge, my taser, my pepper spray, my backup gun and my bulletproof vest.
I was really excited about that because at Mental Health, for some reason I feel like we didn't have bulletproof vests for a little while, but then, I think we got some eventually, but they did not stop two types of pistol rounds.
I was really happy to get a nice quality bulletproof vest at USCPD, the thin ones, which I was excited about.
We got ready and got me on field training. I think I did two night shifts in a row for field training because I had done my initial training before I got my credentials and started FTO on day shift. I think they put me through two different night shifts or something like that on field training. I was on a lot of night shifts in the beginning.
One of the most memorable incidences that happened, I was with the
sergeant who was in the passenger seat.
You actually get to drive during FTO, and the sergeant sits in the passenger seat.
It was about 3 a.m. in the morning.
A dark line from an Eminem song popped into my head right then.
Excuse the little rap intervention.
It was about three in the morning and we heard this tremendous crash in the Greek village.
I need to back up for a minute.
About five hours before this there was a politician, a US senator.
We met him earlier in the evening out in the Vista. We went and shook his hand where he was having some big get together. It was 2008, and election season was coming up. I think this was going into the primary or something like that.
We met him, I remember walking up and I shook his hand. He didn't look any different in my mind than any other old guy, as I thought at the time, but this one was a senator.
"Who gives a shit?"
That's how I used to think.
I shook his hand and thought, "So what? We met some senator tonight."
Then, about five hours later, we heard this tremendous crash in the Greek village, which is a collection of a bunch of ultra-fancy fraternity and sorority houses where you have the option of living if you are in a fraternity or sorority at USC.
We heard this massive crash. It sounded like something just getting ripped apart, metal, steel, aluminum, grinding against concrete. We went hauling ass over to see what happened and about three officers were on the scene immediately within a minute or so of this happening.
We found a car that had knocked down a light pole and there was tire treads ripped off the tires and there was at least one of the wheels that was totally ripped off the axle.
The car was just destroyed. It ran over a light pole, went driving over several curbs, and then it came to a stop because it would not move anymore.
It was very similar to my own drunk driving a few years earlier as a matter of fact, except thankfully my car kept going and did not get stuck in one spot. Then again, I didn't hit a light pole and knock it over either.
Fortunately, the light poles in the Greek village were set up where if you hit them they gave and fell down. These were not the wooden poles you see power lines on and you can understand why they wouldn't want power line poles to fall down. These were just street lights and if you hit them, they knocked right over.
We initially started thinking we ought to be getting prepared for a drunk driving arrest since the driver admitted to drinking and also taking Valium. It was a clear driving under the influence case.
Here was a car wreck and an admission of drinking and driving, and
taking prescription medication, probably prescription for the person, but it might not even have been theirs, we didn't get that far into it.
The driver was a young white female and there was a young white male in the passenger seat with her. She had a sign in the back seat for the senator's campaign whom we had just met a few hours before this. I guess that played some kind of a role in what happened next because normally in this situation, from what I figured and later saw, this was the beginning of a drunk driving arrest.
However, what actually happened was the lieutenant who is the highest-ranking officer who was currently on duty came out to the shift, saw the political sign in the back of the car, then the lieutenant called the major up, the major over patrol, who was one of the highest three or four ranking officers at USCPD.
The major over patrol came out in full uniform within a few minutes at two or three in the morning and ordered all of us to go home and give this girl and her friend a ride. We were not to take her to jail and no reason was given for this, although it seems pretty obvious looking back that it was the potential political fallout.
Here was a very clear drunk driving, although technically, I don't think any of us actually saw this car driving.
Therefore, in the hardest of circumstances in a potential jury trial with a good attorney, they could potentially point out that we did not actually see the car driving, although this is certainly not necessary to get a conviction.
From what I've seen, that is one potential angle that could have been worked.
Anyway, the major ordered all of us to go home and get her a ride. The
lieutenant was furious. My sergeant on field training was furious. I was furious also. Here was a very clear case of bias in policing. This was happening just because of this girl's potential.
We didn't even know for sure, she just had a huge sign in the back of her car for this senator. We didn't know if she hadn't just stolen that off the side of the road or anything, and put it in the back of her car. But from what I saw, this was done because of the political implications.
There was fear if we arrested this girl for drunk driving and she was working on this senator's campaign, that this senator had a big influence over the funding the university could potentially receive, and that there might be political fallout if this girl was arrested for drunk driving.
I remember the absolute stench this left in my mouth because up until this happened, I had actually seen a reasonably fair criminal justice system. I had been in corrections and everyone got the same lowdown treatment at the Department of Juvenile Justice in the corrections, at least where I worked.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.