Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight I return to a familiar topic on this channel: my police training. If this is your first time on the channel, welcome welcome, I’m so glad to have you, and you should probably know that I was a police officer in Southern California for nearly a decade.
Since getting out and being exposed to left-wing theory and personal testimony from a variety of people, I’ve become a police and prison abolitionist. I believe the entire institution cannot be reformed and I am interested in building new systems and new organizations that can take its place, providing things like free and robust medical care, free housing, free food, and things of that nature.
So, as you can imagine, I have often criticized my police training on this channel. My first breakout video was explaining how law enforcement taught me to dehumanize the community I served. I’ve discussed how police training broke my brain and made me anxious, paranoid, and angry. I’ve detailed numerous ways in which my time in law enforcement taught me all the wrong lessons about being in community with people.
But tonight, I want to do something a little unusual. I want to talk about a few lessons from my law enforcement training that I think were helpful or useful. While I don’t look back on my time as a cop fondly, I can’t deny that I took away some lessons from it that I find beneficial.
And if you find yourself listening to me talk about these lessons and thinking “Wait… are you SURE that’s a good skill to have?” don’t worry, I’ll have some mixed feelings of my own to bring up too at the end.
Anyway, let’s get to it!
PUSHING YOURSELF
The first half of my police academy was designed to, as they would put it, “weed out the weak”. Lots of yelling in your face about tiny mistakes, lots of punishment pushups, and lots and lots of physical training, or PT. Think of any bootcamp scene from pretty much any military movie and you get the picture.
Now, I had never played sports in high school. Why would I do that when I could play Quake deathmatch levels against bots while listening to Korn?? As someone who struggled with body image issues and internalized fatphobia, I did join a local gym at one point and did make some gestures at physical fitness, but I was a pretty lackadaisical exerciser. When it got hard, when I got tired, I would usually just stop. I was not intrinsically motivated to go harder than I needed to.
Well, that kind of vibe was ground out of me in the police academy. I was always in the bottom 10% of the class when it came to physical fitness and I even got put in a special squad for “piggies” where they would inspect my lunch and weigh me every day until I could consistently meet target goals. I got punished and punished and punished for being lazy until something finally clicked in me and I learned something about myself:
I could keep going. In fact, I could go harder.
Yes, everything about what I’m describing is fatphobic and ableist but I have to admit: I didn’t know what I was capable of until I had two very intimidating gentleman screaming at me not to give up on myself. I learned that I could push past exhaustion and tap into some deep reserves I didn’t know I had. I learned that I could let pain ignite me and fuel me to fight harder rather than giving up to go lick my wounds.
I learned this about myself on a day I will never forget, my proudest day in the academy. Like I said, I was always one of the least physically capable people in the academy class. And one day for PT, we did a kind of kidnapping exercise. In teams of four, one person was the victim and three people were kidnappers. It was the kidnappers job to bring the victim from one side of the gym to the other, maybe… 300 feet? And it was the victim’s job to last as long as possible without crossing the finish line.
When it was my turn to be the victim, I put up a good fight but inevitably found myself being drug closer and closer to the finish line. And I remember that in my mind, I could hear myself thinking “We’re wiped out, we’re in pain, thank god, this will all be over in 10 seconds.” And then I remember having this flash like “Buuuut… I could keep fighting… make em work for it a litte” And suddenly in this burst of confidence? Spite? I shook loose and sprinted back to the starting line. And my kidnappers came rushing back, pissed off and just as tired as I was, and we wrestled again and they got me close to the end again. And again, I could feel that choice well up in me: give up or keep fighting. And I shimmied out again and sprinted back to the start.
I made it back to the starting line FOUR times before my body quit on my mind, the first time that had ever happened. I literally could not stand, could not move a muscle. They had to essentially kill me to beat me.
That was maybe the first time in my life that I truly, at a fundamental level, believed in myself. Believed that I was capable of impressive things, believed that I had any mental fortitude to speak of.
I know fighting kidnappers in a police academy gym doesn’t translate to everyday life but that moment I learned how far I could push myself stays with me as a reminder that we can surprise ourselves sometimes, that sometimes, in some situations, we can do amazing things if we don’t give up.
ACTING DECISIVELY
The next lesson I learned from the police academy is one that has served me well in ways both obvious and counter-intuitive.
In my police academy, during PT, during hand to hand combat, during simulated crimes in progress we called “scenarios”, instructors would often force us to make quick decisions. Sometimes it was rapidly switching between different exercises, say going from push ups to crunches to squats super fast forcing us to change body positions quickly. Sometimes it was introducing multiple attackers or handing one a weapon unexpectedly. And sometimes it was getting the scenario actors to bombard us with yelling and arguments before we could even get our bearings on scene.
In my police academy, the worst decision you could make was no decision. If you hesitated, if you paused too long, if you looked confused, they would instantly be in your face screaming at you: “WHATCHA GONNA DO, HUH? DO SOMETHING! MAKE A DECISION! FUCKING DO SOMETHING YOU FUCKING PUSSY!”
And yes, sometimes you make a wrong choice. But in their minds, a correct choice could be rewarded and a wrong choice could be coached against, but no choice at all meant no learning was occurring. So in order to survive, you had to show up, evaluate the scene, and form a plan of action fast. Do SOMETHING, control the scene, restore peace, and then reevaluate.
We’ll talk about the negatives of this later but I do feel like this lesson has served me well outside of law enforcement. Sometimes you just have to make a choice and see what happens. Sometimes you just have to act.
Interestingly, one way this lesson helped me was that it taught me to take ownership of my actions. If you act decisively and it was the wrong choice, you had to (as we used to phrase it) “stand tall before the man” and take your lumps. If you tried to make a bunch of excuses, if you tried to say “Oh but I didn’t mean to!”, you’d only get yelled at worse. So, you stood there, you told them what you’d done, and if it turned out to be a bad decision, you accepted that feedback and said “Yessir, thank you sir, won’t happen again.” Rightly or wrongly, that posture can get you pretty far in civilian life with certain kinds of supervisors. And a little secret from me to you? You don’t even have to mean it. A lot of times just owning up to a mistake without excuses wins back the trust you lost making the mistake in the first place.
But beyond that, here at the tender age of 41, it has been my experience (limited as that is) that most of the time, you have all the information you’re gonna have to make a decision pretty early. Pondering and wondering and hmmming and what-if-ing can sometimes shed light in dark corners, but by and large, most decisions you’re called to make are ones that aren’t going to get easier with time. Most of the time, you cannot predict and certainly cannot control the outcome.
So sometimes, you just gotta pick something. “But what if-” you gotta choose. “But how can I-” you gotta choose, my friend. You choose, you roll with it, and you pivot if you need to.
Am I saying you should just initiate that divorce or join that Anarchist commune in Taiwan on a whim with no consideration? Of course not. Think it through, collect what information you can, but just understand, you will never have perfect foreknowledge. You’ll never “solve it”. Every single decision you make is, at some level, a leap of faith.
For me, I’ve been able to go places and do things that benefitted me greatly because I was comfortable making decisions with imperfect foreknowledge. I have a spouse and an amazing kid because one day I decided to move away from my hometown and try something new thousands of miles away. I have this awesome channel and pals like you out there because one day I decided “fuck it, I’m just going to make some videos and see what happens.”
I bet there’s a lot of you out there waffling back and forth on something… should I write that book, should I start that channel, should I pick up guitar again, should I tell my crush how I feel, should I take that job, should I sign up for that open mic?
Decide. In fact, just fucking do it. Make a decision. If it was the wrong one, lesson learned, you won’t do it again. And if it was the right one? You’re welcome. 🙂
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Many of you are going to have some mixed emotions about the beneficialness of that last lesson but don’t worry, I have some mixed feelings about this final one. And yet, I can’t help but feel like this is one of the most important things I’ve ever learned.
So, like I said, my academy had what we called “scenarios” in the last half of the year. It was where people from the community, parents and friends of academy students, anyone really, would come and be actors in “real life” police situations to try to give the students a little more hands-on experience dealing with calls for service. Sometimes people from the local university theater program would even come and do gore effects and injury make up.
One night, on one of my scenarios, I was dispatched to a report of someone peeking into cars in a parking lot. Possible attempted burglary in progress. When I arrived “on scene” I saw three young women standing underneath a street light chatting calmly. Assuming they were witnesses, I walked up all officer friendly and asked if they’d seen anything. They gave a description of a suspicious person, last direction of travel, normal stuff.
After jotting down their statements, I swept my flashlight around the nearby cars, didn’t see any broken glass or evidence of a crime. I turned to the instructor and told him I didn’t see any burglarized cars so I was just going to take an incident report. And my instructor said “So these girls can leave?”
And it was then that I knew I’d fucked up. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know where, but I knew that letting the girls go was wrong because the instructor was pushing me to do it. But, I had nothing, no evidence, no legal reason to detain them, so I had to be decisive. And I said, yessir, I have nothing else, they can go. So he sent them away. And right as they disappeared around a corner into the night, my instructor said “Turn around.” So I did.
And right behind me, literally ten feet behind me, was a bloody handprint on a wall and a pool of blood beneath it, with bloody footprints going in the opposite direction the girls had told me. And I spun around to call after the girls but they’d vanished. And I turned to my instructor dumbfounded and said “Wait, I was dispatched to a possible car burglary. What is this?” And he said “You’ll never know because you told the person with a bloody knife they could leave.”
That night is burned into my brain for so many reasons, chief among them looking like an absolute dipshit who didn’t notice a big ol’ pool of blood. But beyond the embarrasment, what it taught me was that things were happening all around me that I wasn’t noticing. It taught me that I had been moving through life with blinders on, just looking at a narrow slice of the world in front of me and missing everything else.
Our instructors had a term for this posture, they called it being (and I apologize) “fat, dumb, and happy.” Later, I picked up a less ableist term my Krav Maga instructors which was “being at Code White”, meaning, being completely complacent and unobservant, totally confident that nothing bad could possibly happen. That bloody handprint motivated me to stay out of Code White from then on.
My training in situational awareness not only kept me safe several times on duty, but it’s kept me safe in my personal life too. I’ve noticed car burglars hiding in mall parking lots where I’d parked to do some Christmas shopping, I’ve noticed guys on the street triangulating on me to do god knows what when I was drunk walking around downtown Seattle at midnight a few years back, and I can spot a plainclothes cop a mile away these days.
And believe it or not, this goes beyond sensational crime paranoia. Developing my situational awareness has helped me realize things like people having a shitty day who could use a little grace, times in conversations when I have inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings, drivers getting ready to cause an accident on the road, and even things like unsafe conditions such as slippery floors, loose railings, and precariously stacked boxes.
And look, I don’t have Terminator vision, I’m just as prone to thoughtlessness and inattention as anyone else (ask my wife), but I do feel like my training prepared me to make more of an attempt to see the world around me holistically, with fewer assumptions. I feel like I make safer decisions and pay more attention to the rhythms and vibrations in people and places around me. In a lot of ways, I think training in situational awareness has made me more conscientious and a better team player. And again, that can get you pretty far in life under the right circumstances.
MIXED FEELINGS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
Yeah so let’s just cut to the chase: those three lessons I found beneficial can also be the site of so many atrocities committed by police officers. Cops refusing to back down or give up frequently escalate situations out of control with deadly consequences. Cops making snap judgments about who is a victim and who is a suspect routine murder unarmed people in error, claiming “officer safety”. And, cops who are constantly scanning the environments for threats start to perceive everyone as a potential threat, leading to, again, further escalations and further abuses.
This is, in fact, part of why I believe policing cannot be reformed: so many fundamentals of policework have deadly consequences for the community and break the brains of cops who started with good intentions. The underlying assumptions about what policework is and should be, that cops are the thin blue line between order and chaos, that the public has no right to oppose police actions, that a police officer’s perception of safety outweighs a citizen’s right to be alive, all of these things necessitate the kind of training I received and the kind of brain breakage I underwent.
And even setting aside the horrors of the carceral state, I also recognize that disability and other contexts make the kinds of lessons I talked about earlier difficult or impossible for some people to follow. Many people cannot push themselves any harder, many Black people have their decisiveness perceived as aggression, and not everyone has the energy or cognitive capacity to surgically evaluate any and every situation and interaction. So I want to be clear that I don’t think there is any kind of moral component to this or make it seem like I think I’m better than people who can’t apply these lessons.
So really, the thesis of this video isn’t about whether I learned “good” lessons so much as it is about whether I’ve been able to harvest anything useful from the ashes of my former career, I guess.
This uncertainty, this ambiguity is part of why I wanted to make this video. I’ve spent years now denouncing my police training and denouncing law enforcement as an entity, but I also feel like parts of it have equipped me with skills or abilities or tendencies that I feel benefitted me, be that in my civilian career, personal relationships, or just my ability to navigate the world around me with confidence.
In short, I was a part of something really bad that messed my brain up in some bad ways, and yet I also came away from it with things that I do like about myself, things I found helpful. I wonder how many of you out there have had a similar experience you feel a little weird about “benefitting” from, especially if it involves being a part of something that hurt other people. Does it cheapen your remorse if you think you gained something out of it?
This may be self-serving reasoning but I don’t think it does. We’re all just trying to figure out life moment to moment, some of us end up going pretty far astray for a while, but hell, why NOT learn a useful lesson from your time in the wilderness? Why not pick up a skill or two? As long as you take those skills or lessons and use them to help others and rebuild what’s been broken in the world, I think that’s a reasonable response.
We can’t go back in time and undo the harms we caused. We can’t remove the traumas that happened to us. And I don’t think we ever really get the chance to redeem events of the past. I think the best we can hope for is just to live the redemption we want to see out in the world and make life better for others. And sometimes the rotten stuff we were a part of in the past can equip us to clean up some of the rot around us in the present.
Anyway, thanks for your time tonight, I hope you got something out of it beyond mere autobiography. Like, subscribe, share, whatever, just thanks for hanging out. Hope to catch you on the next one, have a good night!