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.
I practiced and prepared mentally for this polygraph an unbelievable amount. I was grateful for the interview with the other police department because I knew what kind of hard questions to expect. I knew the key thing was that I needed to present a feeling that I was a good person and I was okay with everything that I did, and that I was basically a good person who had been curious and done some stupid things, and who was reformed. It was not like that anymore.
That sure wasn't the truth looking back, but that's what I decided would be my truth. That's what I realized would get me through the polygraph, I imagined, I visualized and I also watched this TV show four weeks beforehand. I watched this TV show and I prepared because they gave me a polygraph date, I knew it was coming, and I got ready for that motherfucker.
I watched this TV show where they polygraphed people, and then it was some kind of not "Truth or Dare," but it was some kind of truth show like, "Have you cheated on your spouse?"
And the guy would get up there, sit down and try to lie. He would be like
"No," and then they would show that he failed the polygraph, and it was a
big dramatic show. I used to watch that and I would get nervous, and I would imagine I was going to pass that polygraph at USCPD.
I knew once I passed that polygraph that I would get hired. That was the last step and all I needed to do was pass that and I would get hired. That was the final hurdle I needed to jump over.
They gave me a massive packet asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions. The worst part was the undetected crime section. There was a half-page with three columns of undetected crimes, anything from homicide to vandalism, all kinds of other offenses besides that, rape, burglary, arson, all the good stuff on there.
I checked anywhere from a third to half of the undetected crimes on there. Fortunately, no murder, no rape, and I don't think I checked arson, but looking back, I did try to set someone's car on fire before.
I'm not sure if that counts or not, and actually, I did get the trash burning at a building, which everyone had to get cleared out of at three in the morning. I didn't intend to start a fire, but I'm not sure if that counts as arson or not.
This was what made that really hard because of all those little things. I had done so many things drunk over the years, often not intending to cause any trouble like throwing a burning bag down a trash chute. I did not intend to start the trash on fire, and then have the fire department called and the entire building fill up with smoke and scare the shit out of a whole bunch of people at three in the morning.
My intention was not to do that. I just was screwing around lighting fires and "Whoops, this one got a little bit out of control."
I didn't intend to start a big fire. I just didn't put out the one I started very
well.
This appears to be how a lot of fires are started actually. Forest fires, just kids screwing around not thinking and not even paying attention to maybe a little tiny fire they started and all of a sudden it becomes a big ass wildfire.
Funny how that works, isn't it?
I heard a story actually that when a fire department is not available, the number of fires will actually go down as people collectively try harder to make sure they don't start a fire, and then as soon as the fire department is back online, the number of fires go back to normal.
Weird how that works.
As you can see, this polygraph was a miserable process for me and I kept visualizing, I put all of my mental energy into passing this polygraph and I spent hours and hours agonizing over every single detail, every single checkmark on the packet.
I even came up with a nice little strategy if I was very unsure how to answer something, especially if it made me look bad, I would just leave it unchecked and I would ask a question about it.
For example, there was a question in there that said, "Have you ever been in a car accident?"
Now, here is the truth as I remember it. I was drunk driving one night going to Waffle House at about 6 or 7 in the morning when I was a senior in college. I got my car up to 40 miles an hour on a turn, which is mildly difficult to go around at about 20 to 25 miles an hour sober. I hit the curb and went off into the grass drunk driving. The airbags went off. I knocked
my tire out of alignment. I totaled the car drunk driving.
Fortunately, the car was still balling like Tupac till the day I died, or the car's dead and he's dead. Anyway, the car was still balling. The car made it all the way back home. Probably about three miles back home. It was going up and down and up and down. It was barely driving, but I got it back home and parked it without getting a DUI.
Then the next day I called up, I took it to a Ford dealer or something like that, and they said the car was totaled, so I junked it.
Now, when you are at the polygraph trying to answer, "Have you ever been in a car accident?"
Well, legally, "No."
No one hardly knew about my drunk driving car wreck. Did I total a car?
"Yes."
I just left that one unchecked and I figured I would ask a question about it when we got into the interview because if I put, "Yes, I had had a car accident," but the captain doing the polygraph looked it up and found I had no car accident on record, then his little nosy curiosity was bound to want to know all about what happened.
It was better if I just asked him the question and minimize and that's exactly what I did. The packet was several pages long and I brought the packet in. The idea being that you talk about the packet first, then you sit down and answer a very specific set of questions on the polygraph.
The day I went in to do the polygraph, I don't know what came over me.
Normally, when I was sober, whether a day and especially if I went for a
few months without drinking, my normal state was just restless, irritable and discontented, just on edge, ready to blow at something.
On this day I woke up with a remarkable peace about me. I was a Zen master on the day of that polygraph. I had this aura of like deathlike relaxation about me. I knew everything was going to be okay, which normally I did not have that feeling.
I went in for the polygraph something like 9 or 10, or maybe it was 11 or 12, I don't know. It wasn't like in the late afternoon. It might have been at like one o'clock even.
"Jerry, no one cares. Let's just move on."
Alright.
We got into the polygraph, I sat down with my little packet and I waited a while, and finally, the captain called me in to do the polygraph.
The first thing we did, we sat down and talked about the packet. The first thing came up.
I asked, "Hey, now captain, I wasn't sure on how to answer this question about the car accident. You see, I had this car before and I bumped it over a curb a little bit, but no one was hurt and there was no police report or anything. Would you count that as a car accident?"
He said, "No."
I said, "Good. We're going to put 'no' on the car accident one then."
See, nice little strategy there to avoid my little drunk car wreck where I would have had to explain what an alcoholic I was.
Then we got into the undetected crime section. After the other police
interview, I remembered to minimize.
He asked about vandalism and I said, "Well, I was drunk and I'd run around and I'd smash things sometimes. I felt really bad about it and I didn't do it and I'm not doing that anymore."
He said, "Give me an example."
Of course, I gave him a sober example of like the best kind.
I said, "One night there's this place that's got a lock on the lights, the lights are usually open so we just kind of smashed the lock open a little bit and turned the lights on."
I gave him the nicest absolute example, not like the one where I smashed a window or where I smashed exit signs worth thousands of dollars.
No, I gave him one of the nice ones where I was sober and it didn't sound so bad.
So I gave him that for the vandalism one.
Then, he started getting into something like the porn and illegal stuff because one thing I had done a whole lot of in my life was copyright infringement. If you look at the laws I violated, speeding and copyright infringement were the two top laws in terms of the number of violations that I had probably violated.
I had downloaded just thousands of songs, a bunch of movies and a bunch of porno illegally, and we somehow got into that one. He ended up asking about my porn watching habits, which was an absolute worst case scenario for me.
I realize there is a lot of kinds of porn. I probably haven't seen absolutely
all of it because there are so many different kinds, but I had especially a drunken curiosity and I've watched a whole lot of different kinds of porn.
I watched awful things that you just can't unsee. I was usually just searching for regular pornos, but on the illegal download programs you would get a whole list of titles, some of them disturbing.
When I would get drunk, I would start clicking on riskier and riskier titles, and the more I did that, the more I felt like a filthy piece of shit. Some of what I stumbled onto was genuinely disturbing and stayed with me, and I hate that I have that to share, yet at the same time, we have got to talk about this shit or it doesn't get better.
All of these things grow in shame and secrecy. That's why all these things happen because any of us that have engaged in things like this will not talk about it for fear of what other people will think.
And damn, this was the worst subject for the captain to be bringing up on a polygraph because while I had stopped downloading porno after so many nights of watching shameful pornos that made me feel like shit and realizing that with all this blatant copyright infringement, whether it was the pornos or the music or the movies, the thousands of repeat copyright infringements were likely to get me in trouble.
I finally stopped downloading altogether using illegal download programs. Unfortunately, I managed to save a collection of the very worst of the pornos I downloaded, while also keeping all of my music and all of my movies I downloaded, which then wasn't a big deal in my mind as much for the music and movies, but then I had this collection of the worst pornos that I've seen. The ones that you are not going to get on a free website.
It was a collection I was totally ashamed of, and yet, I wouldn't get rid of it until I had a girlfriend in 2010 who I knew was the nosy
type.
She would go through all my shit when I wasn't there. She was not trying to find anything, she was just curious, looking around, nosy.
Thankfully, before I knew that she was going to be staying at my place a bunch, I got rid of that CD because I could just picture her finding all my worst pornos and fucking showing them and telling everyone about them, or blackmailing me and holding them over my head, and making me stay with her.
So thankfully, I finally got rid of that CD, my shame CD, which turned into a USB, and then I finally got rid of that in 2010. Thank God, I'm relieved of the compulsion to watch any porno at all today or to download anything illegally, even a book.
I see friends they routinely download books or crack software, and I don't do that because that's how I got started. I didn't get started trying to make a massive collection of shameful porno.
I say massive, there were a few hundred videos of all different kinds of porno and I didn't set out to make that collection when I went to college.
That's something you do one little illegal activity at a time. One little music download, one little movie download, one little regular porno download, a whole lot of liquor drinks and some more bad decisions and repeatedly.
That's how that stuff happens.
So when the captain asked about the porn I thought, "Oh, God."
Thankfully, I remembered from that police interview I did before, I came out with, "I'm a good boy who made some bad decisions and I don't do that anymore."
I said something like this and it was true.
Now, it was only one part of the truth when I said, "Yes, when I got drunk in college I accidentally downloaded some pornos that made me feel really bad watching them. I felt disgusting having seen them, and then that's what led me to stop downloading porn and movies and music illegally altogether. I don't do that anymore."
Now that part was accurate. That was the truth.
However, never mind that I still had and still watched a bunch of the same porno I was talking about.
Never mind that.
Thankfully we got through that part of the polygraph.
That to me was the most artful part that I got through because on the polygraph there was a question that said, "Did you lie to me about anything we talked about today?"
Therefore, I didn't know that question was coming, but I knew I had to feel I was absolutely honest with the captain about every single thing we talked about and I felt like that.
Looking back at it today though, doesn't honesty include more than one version of the truth?
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.