Words&Dirt

“Here was church.  An hour in the café, the slake of a tall cup of coffee, and stillness, and wearing shoes, a clean tile floor, time off for good behavior.  A reminder that she could belong to something the size of this congregation, if they would have her.  She was not outside the believer realm entirely.  She’d had her phases.  Back when her daddy lost everything at once––his furniture-making business, his health, his inner light––she’d prayed for Jesus to bring it back.  When he died, her mother resigned from religion and left Dellarobia working a double shift.  By the time her mother got sick, the whole enterprise was tainted with doubt.  Cub had persuaded her to give prayer another shot during the years when they were trying and failing to get pregnant, and finally that one had been answered times two, Preston and Cordie, sufficient for the time being.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.  Unlike all those who called on Jesus daily, rain or shine, to discuss their day and feel the love.  Once upon a time she’d had her mother for that.  Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer.  No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend.  But if the chemistry wasn’t there, what could you do?  Dellarobia scrutinized life too hard, she knew that.  For a year she’d gone with Cub to Wednesday Bible group and loved the sense of being back in school, but her many questions did not make her the teacher’s pet.  Right out of the gate, in Genesis, she identified two completely different versions of how it all got started.  The verses could be a listen-and-feel kind of thing, like music, she’d suggested, not like the instruction booklet that comes with a darn appliance.  A standpoint that won no favors with the permanent discussion leader, Blanchie Bise, cheerleader for taking the Word on faith.  For crap’s sake, the first rule of believable was to get your story straight.  Hester let Dellarobia stop coming to Wednesday Bible.”

––Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, pg. 60-1

“As had been happening throughout the drug war, this mass militarization brought with it a new wave of dehumanization.  In one follow-up interview to his survey, a SWAT commander told Kraska, referring to the use of his team for routine patrols, ‘When the soldiers ride in, you should see those blacks scatter.’  Former San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara told National Journal in 2000 that at a recent SWAT conference he had attended, ‘officers…were wearing these very disturbing shirts.  On the front, there were pictures of SWAT officers dressed in dark uniforms, wearing helmets, and holding submachine guns.  Below was written: “We don’t do drive-by shootings.”  On the back, there was a picture of a demolished house.  Below was written: “We stop.”‘

Kraska found more evidence of the mind-set problem in a separate ethnography study he conducted.  As part of the study, he had been invited to sit in on an informal (and probably illegal) training session for police officers.  The session was taught by two members of an elite military unit with whom he had become friendly and who worked with several police departments that were developing or in the process of developing SWAT-like units.  The actual ‘training’ turned out to be little more than a group of cops and soldiers gathering in a remote area to shoot big guns.  But before the police officers arrived, Kraska talked to the trainers about the proliferation of SWAT teams.  ‘This shit is going on all over,’ one of them said.  ‘Why serve an arrest warrant to some crack dealer with a .38?  With full armor, the right shit, and training, you can kick ass and have fun.’  The other trainer jumped in.  ‘Most of these guys just like to play war; they get a rush out of search-and-destroy missions instead of the bullshit they do normally.’

When the ‘trainees’ arrived––all active-duty cops either on a SWAT team or soon to be––Kraska described what he saw:

Several had lightweight retractable combat knives strapped to their belts; three wore authentic army fatigue pants with T-shirts; one wore a T-shirt that carried a picture of a burning city with gunship helicopters flying overhead and the caption ‘Operation Ghetto Storm’; another wore a tight, black T-shirt with the initials ‘NTOA’ (for National Tactical Officers Association).  A few of the younger officers wore Oakley wraparound sunglasses on heads that sported either flattops or military-style crew cuts.

The Oakleys and crew cuts were part of a muscle-bound, mechanistic look popular with younger police officers.  The look was usually accessorized with sensory-enhancement gear like night-vision goggles to achieve what Kraska calls a ‘techno-warrior’ image.  He notes that one purveyor of SWAT gear and clothing calls its line ‘Cyborg 21st.’

Later, Kraska wrote, a guy who had served as a sniper both in the military and on a SWAT team put on a demonstration for the group.  The rest of the officers sat in awe as he popped off ‘head-sized’ jugs of water sitting behind plates of glass.  The sniper, Kraska observed, was held in especially high esteem in the paramilitary subculture because he embodied ‘the skill, discipline, endurance, and mind-set necessary to execute people from long distances in a variety of situations.’

Most interesting are Kraska’s observations about his own state of mind during the training session.  There’s a point in his narrative where one of the trainers asks him if he wants to take a turn with an MP5.  Kraska is reluctant, but after some prodding, gives the weapon a try.  ‘I fired at a body-sized target, and, just as this officer surely anticipated, I made all the mistakes of someone who had never fired an automatic.’  He took some ribbing, and then was surprised to hear himself defending his masculinity to the group of virtual strangers by pointing out that he had grown up hunting with shotguns.  Presented with a shotgun, he then redeemed himself with what he calls ‘a personally satisfying demonstration.’  Kraska found himself working hard to fit in and win the approval of the officers, even though he was there as an observer and likely would never see them again.  He also felt a rush of power.

I had an intense sense of operating on the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate behavior.  Clearly much of the activity itself was illegal, although reporting it would never have resulted in it being defined as ‘criminal.’…I felt at ease and in some ways defiant.  I’ve had this experience in the past when field-researching police officers, and I realize that in a sense I am basking in the security of my temporary status as a beneficiary of state-sanctioned use of force.  This is likely the same intoxicating feeling autonomy from the law that is experienced by an abusive police officer….

On a personal level, what disturbed me most was how I, as a person who had so thoroughly thought out militarism, could have so easily enjoyed experiencing it.  This study illustrates the expansive and seductive powers…of a deeply embedded ideology of violence.

The officers with SWAT and dynamic-entry experience interviewed for this book say raids are orders of magnitude more intoxicating than anything else in police work.  Ironically, many cops describe them with language usually used to describe the drugs the raids are conducted to confiscate.  ‘Oh, it’s a huge rush,’ Franklin says.  ‘Those times when you do have to kick down a door, it’s just a big shot of adrenaline.’  Downing agrees.  ‘It’s a rush.  And you have to be careful, because the raids themselves can be habit-forming.’  Jamie Haase, a former special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement who went on multiple narcotics, money laundering, and human trafficking raids, says the thrill of the raid may factor into why narcotics cops just don’t consider less volatile means of serving search warrants.  ‘The thing is, it’s so much safer to wait the suspect out,’ he says.  ‘Waiting people out is just so much better.  You’ve done your investigation, so you know their routine.  So you wait until the guy leaves, and you do a routine traffic stop and you arrest him.  That’s the safest way to do it.  But you have to understand that a lot of these cops are meatheads.  They think this stuff is cool.  And they get hooked on that jolt of energy they get during a raid.'”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 212-4