The Cult of Policing, Part 1

A former cop explains how police training and the overall culture of policing mirrors cult dynamics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's it's could happen here? That's the podcast that this is.
It's about things crumbling and uh, how to maybe uncrumble
some of the things that are crumbling. And today when
we think about the crumbles, when you start thinking about
the hell world that that we're all increasingly inhabiting, the

(00:25):
scary ship that is getting scarier day by day. Number
one on a lot of people's list is gonna be
the cops. Um real cause of anxiety for a significant
chunk of people listening to this podcast right now, including
its hosts Um Alexander, you and I have chatted before
on the air. Our guest today, Alexander Williams, Um, you

(00:46):
were a police officer in the past and you are
not currently and you want to chat about Um. The
topic kind of the way you pitched it to us
is there's a lot of aspects of police training that
are very similar to what colts do to indoctrinate people,
and you kind of wanted to speak on that. Yeah,
there's a lot of there's a lot of cross sections. UM. So, yeah,

(01:10):
I used to be a cop. I was in law
enforcement for just shot a fifteen years until I woke
up and got out luckily, and all the stuff that's
been going on over the last couple of years, and
the craziness and really ingesting a lot of stuff around,
you know, cults, And I've started going down that the

(01:31):
little checklist that you go down of like are you
in a high control group? And man, they all just
look just deemed in my head every single time of like, oh,
this is exactly what it was like being a cop. Oh,
this is exactly what it was like being a cop.
And I'm curious, kind of before we get more into it,
do you want to walk us through a little bit
more kind of what was your process of Um. I

(01:53):
don't de radicalization isn't exactly the right term, but I
think you know what I'm getting. It's it's in the
it's in the it's in the neighborhood Shore. Yeah. Mine.
So I was raising a cop family. My dad was
a copy, went the whole nine yards, retirement, the whole thing.
And when I got into it, just shy of twenty

(02:15):
two years old, which that's young to be making those
kinds of choices looking back on it. Um. We had
talked on the last podcast of your season one, UM
about when my brother got arrested and got beat by
my own team. My my own crew, and the jail
that I worked with, which is the jails is where

(02:36):
I primarily spent most of my time. And I think
that that was ah item number one kind of on
my shelf, like people call it, that's that's that's a
big one to right on the shelf. Um. And during
my training, I've always been an obstinate little bastard and
I've always had that kind of like authority defiance. And

(02:59):
in training they say start telling you really early, like hey,
you know what you know where your family? We understand you,
We're gonna get you. And then like the language even
then kind of flared red flags wrong for me. And
whenever a group of people says we're your family, and
so right, like that's what you like, we're your family

(03:19):
and you can talk to us anytime. Fine, where your family?
And I got your back. Fine, we're your family, and
that's why you need to do this. Things have gone
to ride. It's it's it usually is where your family?
Comma now? Yeah? Yeah, and yes, So that that was
like literally day one, it was where your family? Now,

(03:39):
where you're you know, they use all that language. The
familiar language where your brothers, your sisters. Yeah, And the
one that kicked for me and my brain was they said,
within a year, you're not gonna have any friends that
aren't cops. Like all of your friends are going to
be gone because they're not going to understand you and

(04:00):
they're not going to be able to be around you
and handle you. So within a year, you know, we're
going to be everything you've got. And for me, that
was like that was a line in the sand, and
like part of my brain was screaming like, nope, never
letting that happen. I will not let my uh myself
not have any non cop friends. Yeah, that's probably good
because that's I mean, you have like when it it

(04:22):
gets to it's the same thing that happens to anybody, right,
like some people got like last year in Portland and
activist Brain, where there was this all the people were
spending time with other people were out protesting, and so
we have this really intense bond and we also are
kind of separated, increasingly separated from the people around us
because we just can't communicate with anybody else. And that
kind of going on for years and years because this

(04:43):
is your career for twenty something years, and it's like, yeah,
that would you'd be, you'd be after a couple of
years of that you were inhabiting a different planet. They
really are. And it's the how you said that, like,
you know, this is usually twenty to thirty years, you know,
because you want to get that sweet retire a minut
at the end after you've abused your mind and your
body for three decades um. It was it keyed off

(05:07):
something that you and Garrison talked about in a previous
episode of The Hiring Practices where the Washington Stay guys
and they were they got busted because the therapist was
showing tons of bias, and that brought up for me
the hiring process because those psych exams are the only
time as a cop that you get a psych exam.

(05:29):
That's the only time you ever talked to a therapist mandatorially. Yeah. Yeah,
it's a really bad move. And there's a joke in
cop culture of like, well, yeah, you gotta pass it
before you get hired, because after you get hired, you're
never going to pass that test. M because you know,
being a cop is is micro dosing PTSD in your

(05:50):
system the entire time. See I guess one thing I'm
wondering because you you were in it for fifteen years,
so that's that's not an insignificant band of time. Has
it gotten to be more that way? Because I knew
about fifteen something years ago when I was like eighteen nineteen,
just like I lived in the shitty little apartment complex,

(06:11):
and like the dude who live below above me, and
then like the dude who lived two doors down. We're
both Dallas cops um, and I don't know, like I
you know, I was not particularly political at that point,
but I didn't They didn't seem to have trouble relating,
Like they would hang out and ship after work, like
just like not like like we would be like barbecuing

(06:31):
outside and they would drop by and stuff, and it
was never I never got the sense that they were
living in a separate planet. But this is like fifteen
years ago, and I'm wondering, what to what extent do
you think this is kind of increased in recent memory,
Like this the kind of you don't really socialize with
people outside of the family, so to speak. It is

(06:53):
kind of like that. So, yeah, a lot of the
language you're using is perfect because so what you're describing
and what I remember from being a kid in the
eighties and the nineties and stuff was um community policing,
Like it's it's a literal style of policing, going back
to more of like the professional police style before it
went military, and in areas where people actively live in

(07:16):
their community and engage with their community, there's a striking
difference in the level of police violence that happens. But nowadays, uh,
it's not the same thing because a lot of especially
in bigger metropolitan areas, you're a cop there, you can't
afford to live there. You're you're definitely not getting paid
enough to live most of the time in the cities

(07:38):
that you're supposed to be, you know, a part of.
And it's gotten to the point where they actually teach
this like method up methodically in academies. They'll be like, hey,
if you want to be a cop in a big town,
you need to start shopping around in the smaller cities
around it to find a place to live, maybe like
an hour away. Um. And then they also pitch it

(07:58):
as a safety thing because it's all about you know,
the cheology grossman, we're all under attack, So they'll teach
people you know what, it's it's safest to not live
in the town where you're a cop now m So
it's become intentional and it's one of those things where
because I don't want to breeze past. This is not
the episode world talk about community policing. There's very good

(08:20):
criticisms of community policing, and there's a lot of things
that doesn't solve. But I think it's yeah, yeah, absolutely,
we're not trying to say, like the solution is just
to get cops, you know, to be members of their communities.
But it it is worse when they're driving in from
an hour out of town and see it as like
I'm occupying almost this area like it does. Yeah, that
language fits perfectly, especially with Grossman and all that. Yes,

(08:44):
and we've got a two partner on David Grossman up
behind the Bastards if you want to check it out.
But he's kind of the one of the big one
of the big individuals who's who's done the most to
like really push um. I don't even like it's usually
framed as militarized thinking, but I don't know a lot
of soldiers who have been who were trained to think
that way about ship like most of the people I

(09:05):
know who were getting shot at every day for years overseas,
we're not thinking the way Grossman does. No, that's probably
because he never actually wouldn't did anything. I think maybe

(09:26):
we should probably Alexander, have you go start going through
this um this document you put together, kind of walking
through UM and I wonder if you might start when
you kind of started thinking about police training in the
mindset inculcated inside police departments from like a cultic perspective.
When did that really start to come together for you? Uh?

(09:46):
It probably really started to come together. Um uh when
actually when I got involved, I used to be an instructor,
when I got you know, behind that part of the curtain,
and I got involved in those things. UM and I
started going to teaching, and I started teaching other departments
that would come to us, and it was it was
a joke in my head at first, was like, oh,
we all speak the same language. And then that got

(10:08):
my brain rolling on linguistics and how linguistics work and
how that you know, the words we use change how
we perceive reality. And then I clicked and I was like, oh,
we're like a we're a subculture. We're we're like, no
matter where you go in the country, we are a
little subculture. We are a little group. And uh, that's
what started to kind of push me towards like it's

(10:31):
like being in a cult, because you know, you grow
up around Central California and there's a lot of really
religious people and you start seeing the intersectionality of it
really fast. Yeah, and that's interesting because we've talked a
few times on various shows I've done about how any
good subculture, any really good party, has elements of like
a cult. Right, There's there's little bits of that. There's

(10:53):
bits of that in friendship and Whatnotah. Yeah, Yeah, it's
just a thing like cults are taking advance nage, like
pulling a bunch of things that people do together in
order to manipulate human beings. Um, I'm wondering kind of
where where you think where are some of the areas
you think it kind of crosses the line with police
from like this is you know a degree of like

(11:15):
I'm sure firefighters have a degree with this, you know. Um,
these are people that like I hang around with all
the time and we wipe up in some intense situations
together that causes there are culti aspects. That's always going
to cause Um, I'm wondering, kind of where where are
the first areas you started to realize this, this is
crossing that line of Probably the first area is in

(11:37):
how much the department like and this was universal and
lots of departments that I had contact with, is how
much the department owns you? And I mean like they
use that language. They they'll tell you like, we own you.
Like anything you do in your personal life, your first
thought needs to be how does this affect my department
and my my sheriff, my chief, my whatever. Like every

(11:58):
single thing you do is supposed to be potentially pr
for the department. So they tell you flat out in
the forefront of your mind every waking moment you're on duty,
you're you're you're here, we own you. Um. And that
that was the first one that was just like, oh, man,
like no, I punch out at the end of my

(12:18):
shift and I go home. This isn't like, this isn't
this is a job. It's not supposed to be a life,
it's it's And that that was the first one that
started going it. Um. Probably the second one that I
really noticed was that you can tell anyone's a cop,
because they'll tell you within about five seconds of meeting them,
but their cop. If you're at a bar, you're at

(12:39):
a party or at whatever, they'll be like, Hi, my name,
my MI name's Alexander. I work for the christ part
Like it's it's gonna come out of their mouth in
two seconds, because it is. It's their identity, it's their
entire sense of self. Yeah, I wonder because one of
the things we've seen in the last couple of years
in particular, is aspects of that bleed out, like the
thin blue lion flags and stuff. And some of that's

(13:01):
some of that's just you know, signpost. Some of that's
just I know people who were in uh certain jobs
where they transported things that were sketchy and had those flags.
Is like, well, maybe the cop won't search marr, you know,
but like there and there's elements that they're just you know,
I don't want the cops to stop me from you know,
fucking with these people or whatever. But I I think

(13:22):
there's also elements of that um and I think probably
television is to blame for aspects of this, but of
kind of that sheep dog culture as as a as
Grossman calls that are starting to bleed over into chunks
of the civilian world. Um, And I guess I'm wondering
kind of like, yeah, what that looks like as a

(13:42):
as someone on like the the deep inside of that
as a police officer, Like what is it? I'm wondering,
like to what extent where you kind of conscious of
that aspect of society like filling out around you, like
some of these like the cult of the of the
heroic police officer kind of spreading to be um something new,

(14:02):
which which it really started doing from like two thousand
and eighteen up to the present moment is when a
lot of that shift seems to have happened based on
kind of what I've saw. No, that timeline fits perfectly
because I remember when I first got hired, the thin
blue line. It existed. It was a thing, but it
was just it was just a matte black with a
blue line and that was it. Uh. And I you

(14:24):
didn't really even in cop culture, like I didn't grow
up seeing that thing in the eighties and the nineties
met much, not at all. And then when I was
in the department in the in the in the two thousand's,
you kind of saw it. Every now and again, someone
might have a pelpin like in the department, but out
in public, nobody had that stuff. No nobody, nobody had
any of that rocking stuff. And it didn't It never

(14:46):
really bothered me until it showed up on an American
flag and then that was that was a big red
flag of like, oh this this is bad. I was like,
this is this is nationalism, guys, this isn't good. And
like my whole crew looks me and go what's nationalism?
And I'm just like, fuck, is there this like sense
that people are totying or is it this sense that

(15:07):
like this is kind of the silent majority that backs
us in doing whatever hard work we need to do.
I think it's started out as tody, it really did,
and it's but it's now shifted into um this whole like,
you know, you get those guys that are like, oh,
if I see a cop getting in a fight, I'm
gonna get out of my car and I'm gonna jump
in there and I'm gonna back them up because they're

(15:29):
like they're playing top They really want that authority or
that whatever, but for whatever reason they don't go do it. Um. Yeah,
but this has been a way of like kind of
they get to see themselves as being like a posse
kind of a thing, like I'm in the I'm in
the club. I'm not in the club, but like they're
my buddies and is there. I don't know, does that

(15:51):
make being in the club cooler? The fact that there's
these kind of posses forming around it, the people kind
of work worshiping, the culture associated with it. Mean, there
probably is now, but honestly, when I was in there
freaked me the hell out. It really really creeped me out.
I didn't like it at all. Yeah, I mean, you
have to think about, if you're if you're a reasonable person,
how weird it would be to see your job turned

(16:13):
into a cult like Garrison. You know that feeling um
or you're you're going to learn when we when we
make the coult. Yeah, okay, so I wanted to. I
guess let's let's let's get back to this kind of
list you put together, because you were sort of going
through different hallmarks of what makes something a cult. One
of them is the group displays and excessively zealous and

(16:33):
unquestioning commitment to its leader and whether he is alive
or dead, regards his belief system, ideology in practices as
the truth as law. Um, and I'll remind you we
were not talking about my podcast. We're talking about cults here.
Uh that's right. Um, yes, stay quiet, garrisons. They're just smiling,

(16:55):
silently staring at us through zoom. I see you, okay,
And you've written under this the law is the higher power.
They grant control of their actions. Blind faith in the
system frees them from having to consider their role in
the system. It's my job to arrest in charge high
let the court figure out the rest. It sounds a
lot like kill them all, let and let God sort
of out. In this case, the criminal justice system is

(17:16):
a direct replacement for God. I think, I think this
is this is a really good point. This is even
This is the thing even when I was like a
dumb kid and thought cops were fine, This was the
one thing that even like just even still freaked me
out about cops because every once in a while you
would see a video of like the cot was randomly
like assaulting somebody, and then other cops nearby just mindlessly

(17:38):
join in, and I'm like, whoa, that's so such a
weird kind of group dynamic of they see someone doing
something and they just don't question it at all and
immediately back it up, no matter what actually was happening,
because like I always tried to think things through more
like logically, and that type of like mindlessness really freaked
me out. And I think was maybe one of the
first things that was like huh, maybe it was. It

(17:59):
was one of the first cracks and like maybe cops
actually aren't good. Um, I think, yeah, I think this
is a really great point in terms of how this
ties into like, yeah, it's my job to it's my
job to arrest and charge. I don't sort out what
happens afterwards, so it doesn't actually matter. Like it's like
I'm not I'm not actually hurting these people because if
if they did something wrong, it's going to get figured

(18:21):
out in the court system. I'm just doing this like
preliminary task. It's it plays into a whole bunch of
like weird psychological things that make you feel better about
horrible actions you're doing because you have so much backing
that's going to make sure what you do actually isn't bad. Yeah,
this is like this, you know, this arrest, which may
be physical and ugly even if they're innocent later. It's

(18:44):
just part of what you have to do to get
to the point where you determine whether or not they're innocence.
So I'm not doing anything bad. Yeah. Yeah, And actually, Garrison,
I it's it's what you said. It's perfect because in
the bottom of the thing where I was just spewing
notes to myself, I literally put down here it's not
a job to them. It's a central component of their
sense of self. This is why they will do terrible
things to validate their perceived reality and how they things. Yeah,

(19:10):
they it's you might say, like, imagine how like think
about how hard it is to get people to admit
they're wrong about a political belief on Twitter, especially when
their name is attached to their account. Now imagine you
have like imagine that's the thing being argued, is like
the central thing around which you organize your life. And
also you get to shoot people who make you angry.

(19:32):
Oh yeah, it's it's a rough situation to be in.
It is, it is. It's crazy. And the part that
I wrote of it's my job to arrest and charge
high I think that's that's a part of the mentality
of it is like, yeah, I don't want to say
it's like a game, but it almost is like a game.
It's almost like they're trying to get points, like score

(19:54):
high and talk to me about talk to me a
little when you say a rest and charge high kind
of what is that? What does that sort of look
like on the ground before we get into kind of
why people do that. So when when you're using your
your powers of arrest, you're you're you're supposed to adhere
to a penal code, but there is code and I'm
always speaking to California because that's where I got my trainer. Um.

(20:15):
They don't expect cops to remember every single element of
every single PC code because that's ridiculous. No one's going
to be able to do that. Um. So there's there's
wigow room, there's play where I know you did this
thing and I know it's what they call a wobbler,
Like I can go felony and go misdemeanor. They'll teach
you in the academy. They're like, if it's a wabbler,
you always charge felony every single time, even if you

(20:37):
don't think it's gonna work, charge it felony, kick it
to the d A and let the d A c
if they can make it stick. And if they don't, whatever,
who cares. That's not part of our job anymore. Wow.
And yeah, And that's one of those things where a
lot of people I've had friends who got charged with
felonies that got dropped, but like, you're still living under
your You essentially have to live as like the diet

(20:58):
version of a felon while that's hanging over your head um,
which is not fun. No, And it's a big part
of the whole criminal justice. I'm sure you guys are
aware that d a's love to crack deals. They love
to make their big make little backroom deals. And facilitating
that is cops charging high. You're you're in the room,
you're facing felony charges and the d A is gonna

(21:21):
be like, oh man, I can knock that down to
him is demeanor. But that's because he knows he doesn't
have a case. But he didn't get that opportunity without
a cop charging the higher charge. Now you know who
isn't going to charge high because their prices are incredibly low,
very reasonable, very fair. The products and services that support

(21:42):
our podcast. Uh, we're back. So the next thing you've
got on here is kind of talking about cult carrot juristics.
Questioning doubt and dissent are discouraged or even punished. And

(22:03):
you've written academies are commonly paramilitary. They're working to break
down and build up cadets. As discussed last season on
my show, the FDO program is where fresh cadets meet
salty veterans in the cycle of abuse starts. The paramilitary
environment is usually casual and unnoticeable until somebody questions orders
or tradition. Questioning order gets the that's an order threat,
while questioning tradition and suggesting improvements gets that's how it's

(22:25):
always been done. There is no forum for change or progress.
Some places have these forums, but they're just for public relations.
And this is the thing that I think people who
are trying to engage with from a perspective of like
reform or whatever, trying to change law enforcement, as a
lot of people were last year, where things get jammed

(22:45):
up a lot is the there's this attitude among civilians,
so to speak, among most of us that like, well,
anything the government does should be subject to like what
we should watch out, We should look at it, we
should see if it works. If it doesn't work, we
should change it to it could work better. And that's
how kind of everything should work. And that's what you're
getting it here. Is interesting because it's the reticence to

(23:08):
actual change among police as legendary. But I don't think
there's a lot of discussion of the psychology behind it. Yeah,
I mean it's that it goes back to that whole
will do anything to reinforce our perception of reality thing. Um,
Like I said earlier, grew up in a cop family,
and it's specifically in the department that I worked at,
so you know, we were called like blue bloods or

(23:29):
legacy kids, and no matter what was going on, like
anything that you questioned, it was always so, well, that's
always it's that's the way it's always been done. That's
the way it's always been done. And I grew to
hate that answer, like with a passion in my personal
life everywhere. I refused to give that as an answer

(23:51):
when I became a sergeant. Eventually, Um, and yeah, they'll
do anything. I mean they will, they will bend laws,
they'll break laws because was going to charge them. M Yeah,
because it's what they've always done. Always. My department famously
had um our union got all of our union news
embezzled by people in our brass, and they got caught

(24:14):
dead to rights. But that case never went anywhere. Nobody
would touch it with a ten foot poll. Uh. And
even if you go and google it and you try
to look at archives from the local newspaper, it's gone.
It never happened. And Yeah, that's interesting to me because
that's like cops getting screwed over by cops. Why how
is that? How is that? How is it? Like? What? What?

(24:36):
What is the impulse to defend the hat Well, because
so there's a division in in cop culture of like
like ranks and a cult. Once you get to what
they call brass, your your lieutenant, captain or higher, they
don't look at us the same way they don't look
at the grunts, the line workers, the guys doing the
twelve hour shifts were all that family talk goes out

(24:58):
the window and it's like, well we're and dad now,
and they change their role in that world, and again
to maintain that power and authority, they'll do whatever they
have to do. Yeah, that's um. I mean it also
kind of feeds into this this idea that like there

(25:20):
used to be less restrictions. There used to be like
we used to really be able to like do this
and do that, Like we like a lot of violence
get justified that way. But it also it provides an
opportunity I think for like police who are trying to
engage with reformers to do some sneaky ship because often
this like community policing, is referred to like, yeah, we
need to go back to the old methods of policing.

(25:41):
It's like, well, but there were problem Do you remember
the fire houses being used to black people during the
Civil rights movement? Like there were issues back before we
got militarized. It's it's yeah, and I mean, and that
was the stuff they were doing outside. Um, the jail
I worked in, because you bring up fire hoses, this
is where I'm going. Um, they we had big cotton

(26:02):
fire hoses up on the floors in this jail and
it was actually built out of old parts of the
Texas prison. And you know, everyone talks about the good
old days when we could really do stuff, And the
story that always went around was that when the inmates
were getting rowdy, they would just walk down the tier
with the hose and just nail them, and then Jesus
Christ put it back because again, who who's gonna who's

(26:23):
gonna tell on me? Who's gonna believe these guys? Yeah,
and that was back in like seventies era, you know,
it's the that's the big fish story that guys used
to always tell. But I'm like, I have no reason
to not believe that story. It sounds yeah, very I mean,
worre stuff happens in prisons today. Yeah, I'm not surprised.
All right, Moving on down your list. This one's really

(26:44):
interesting to me, and I'm curious from some detail on this,
because this is not something I ever really thought about. Um.
Mind altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues,
denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines are used in excess
and served to suppress outs about the group and its leaders.
And you've written cop talk briefings, evails are always negative,
and the work routine is abusive, it is paired with

(27:06):
hyper vigilance. Um, I'm I'm extremely interested in that and
kind of like how it how it sounds like the
kind of language that you're talking about people using among
each other when they're doing this. So I you know almost.
I mean I'm not even almost in kind of a
PTSD response, I've blocked out like a lot of my

(27:27):
memories from those years, Like I'll talk to that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'll talk to X cops and they're like, hey, remember
blah blah blah, and I'm like no, Um, So cop
talk is mostly slang. It's like it's the ten code stuff. Um.
But it gets stuck in your head and you start
and it's it's one of those things where they talk
about how you're not gonna have friends outside of work

(27:47):
because you're gonna start talking in this language. You will say,
you know, what's your twenty you know on code for
if you see someone who's acting a certain way, like
out of the ordinary, maybe a mentally ill person, you'll
say like, oh, that's a jay cat. Like you'll use
this jailhouse slang and it just it permeates your brain
and like we said before, your words manipulate how you

(28:09):
perceive reality and you just start seeing everything that way. Um.
The big one is the hyper vigilance cycle is the
is the abusive part. That's that's the part that really
got me thinking of cults of how though you know,
deny you food, sleep, make you work crazy hours and

(28:30):
do all these things. Um. And that's that's that's the
one that really keep the whole called aspect for me
was the hyper vigilant cycle. The studies that have gone
into it. Um. I learned about it from a book
this little guy right here. It's called Emotional Survival for
Law Enforcement. It's by Kevin M. Gil Martin, PhD. He's
an X cop who kind of PhD in neuroscience and

(28:53):
studies studied cops brains and got to see how they function.
And he's the one that kind of coined this whole
hyper vigilant cycle of you're always edging at this parasympathetic
fight flight or freeze response time when you're on duty. Yeah,
it just stays up there the entire time. I'm sure
soldiers about the same thing, funk. I'm sure you had

(29:13):
the same thing, Robert when you were doing your war
journalism stuff man, or fuck just being in Portland last year. Yeah. Yeah,
it keeps you at that edge, that cresting peak, and
then you crash and you get back up and boom,
you peek up again and then you crash and it's
almost like a drug your brain becomes addicted to that

(29:34):
peeked out feeling that you get from the hyper vigilance
because you do here a little better, you see a
little burn better, your brains moving a little faster because
there's that heightened amount of adrenaline just constantly dripping into
your system. And then you crash. And when you crash
is when you're not at work. So you start associating
not being at work with feeling bad and being at

(29:56):
work feels good. Yeah, I mean the same thing happened.
I'm sure Garrison. It happened like during the riots, where
you would feel shitty when you weren't out there. Um, yes,
some days I would go out, not even to just
to cover it, just to kind of just stand there
like a block away because there was nothing else to do.

(30:17):
Like it was, there's like I could sit at home
and rest, but I'll just be watching whatever is happening,
not doing anything else. You just it. It feels it
would feel more relaxing just to stand on a street
corner and watch people throws stuff over events, because that
that that's just that's more relaxing than laying down. It
was like, it's that a very a very weird disassociate

(30:38):
of like feeling that. Yeah, Like my my brain is
it's accustomed to this environment. Now, so this is the
environment I'm gonna be in. And look how fast your
brain got into that groove now, you know, imagine doing
it for thirty years, yeah, instead of like six months
or even though it's it's it's started only after like

(30:59):
two months or right, and or even even in some
cases like a month. Yeah, it sets in fast. Yeah. Um,
all right, so I wanted to get into the kind
of the next thing here. Um. The leadership dictates, sometimes
in great detail, how members should think, act and feel.
E g. Members must get permission to date, change jobs,

(31:20):
are married or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live,
whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth. Um.
Very classic cult ship, right, like the nut really of
what it had. We had all all that stuff when
I was a kid. Yeah, I would guess that, like
the time, if you ask someone for a quick definition
of a cult, this is what they're gonna say something
or there. This this is the kind of ship they're

(31:40):
going to highlight. Um, and I'm interested in Yeah, just
talk because you already chatted a bit about about this.
Just the fact that, like the way in which police
policy works kind of restructures how you function off duty,
which I think is something that people everyone understands elements
of it, right Like if you're a fucking dishwasher for

(32:01):
a living, you will wash dishes differently forever, right Like
if you if you bag your like bagshit at a
grocery store, Like that's something that you'll always kind of
know how to do. Like these bits and pieces of this,
but it's not quite the same as what you're talking about,
and I want to get kind of into why. Yeah,
it's kind of like when you're when you're as an adult,

(32:22):
you do something that you're like, oh, I used to
do that at my first job and I was like fifteen.
But yeah, it does stick with the muscle. The muscle
memory sticks in those narrow pathways that your brain gets
carved unless you get the right kinds of mushrooms to
fix that. So and then you just throw ship in
the bad it smooth out those curves. Um. But yeah,

(32:43):
the leadership really does dictate. I mean some of them
are some of them you can foy and some of
the republic you can you can pull up policies and procedures,
standard operating procedures, and you can look at like there's
a ton of policies that literally dictate what you are
and are not allowed to do in your personal life.
Things you're allowed to post on social media places, you're
allowed to go in uniform, and it all just starts

(33:06):
like tinking away at your armor. That that sense of identity,
that sense of self, and that's how the job becomes
your identity. Again, it permeates every corner of your life
if you let it. Um, if you don't have like
the I don't know the mental strength to kind of

(33:27):
resist that, it washes over your real fast. Because while
that's all going on, especially as a young cop, you
feel great, You're you're special. Now, you're you're in this,
you're in the magic club. You you have the the
symbol on your chest and the gun on your hip,
and it's really easy to let that slip and just
become everything about you. Um. Yeah, remember permissions like so

(33:52):
permission to date and things like that might sound a
little weird, but there are times where like my wife
and don't dress like the typical conservative Central Valley person, uh,
and at out of work functions, I would get I
would get comments from people being like hey, maybe, yeah,
your your wife has a lot of really colorful hair,

(34:12):
like maybe she should tone that down Jesus for again.
That was another one where I'm like, what, No, that's
my wife. She can do whatever she damn well wants. Yeah,
I mean, that's that's that's the kind of talking that
should get somebody slapped upside the head. Yeah. Um the uh.

(34:35):
The next thing you have here is the group is
elitist claiming a special exalted status for itself, it's leader
and it's members. The leader is and I'm interested in
kind of because you you have you have elements of
this right um with it, like the sheep dog thing.
We're kind of like the cop is the center of
the cult for people who are not cop colts. I
don't know, like does this exist, Like I don't see

(34:57):
like cult a cult leader sort of within this this thing.
I think it's it's almost more nebulous than that, where
this idea of the agent of the law is kind
of the center of the cult that the people who
are agents of the law buy into as well as
folks outside of it. You know, I don't know, this
is probably deserve any I mean I'm interested in your
thoughts on this. This probably deserves significantly more analysis then

(35:20):
we're going to give it today. But I think it's
a fascinating thing to think about. Right. It's kind of
like how I where I put earlier that the criminal
justice system is the direct substitute for God. It is God,
the law is God. I mean, how many times have
you gotten into a debate with someone where they'll be like, well,
it's ethically fine because it's legal, and you're like, well, no,
legality does not equal you know, ethical or moral and there.

(35:43):
But there's these people in America who are just like, no,
if it's legal, it's legal, that means it's okay. Yeah.
And the elitism, yeah, it's obvious. I mean, if you've
met it is kind of a religious belief though that like, yeah,
it's illegal, so it's bad. She there were a criminal,
so they deserved at sea making making a homebrewed cleric

(36:04):
that believed in the law for D and D was
pretty easy, uh, to be like, yeah, this is a church,
this is a religion. Um, yeah it is. It is
the sheep dog hum on im on sheep and the
you know, it's us against the wolves and blah blah blah.
And then we have a guy's name in here that
I won't say for anonymity. But we had we had
a braska, a lieutenant that would give us these prepared

(36:26):
speeches whenever he thought someone's morale was getting low, uh,
where he would talk about how and he was wrong
that the word sheriff comes from um like Sanskrit or
Arabic sharif, which is not true. It comes from shire reef.
It's old English, just squished because English is a hideous language. Um.

(36:46):
But he had to. I mean, I can't count how
many times he told me that exact same speech to
my face, over and over again, as if it was
the first time I was hearing the story. And it's
to me, that was another thing that clicked. I'm like, God,
it's like talking. It's like a call in response when
you're in church sometimes. Yeah, anytime you confront a religious person,

(37:08):
they just have that that that that dogmatic skeew that
regurgitates and just like, well, here's my opinion that I
was told by someone who told me. Okay, so Alexander, Um,
we've got more to say. You've got a lot more
that you've written here. Um, we're gonna We've gone kind
of a little over the time we had here, so
I want to have you back on tomorrow for part
two of this before we roll out, Do you have

(37:30):
anything you'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington State Patrol? No, um, no,
I don't really have anything to plug. I'm I'm never
say die where all the easier threes because I'm that
elder nerd from the nineties. Yeah, and uh saw hackers
in the theater. I it's claimed to fame, So yeah

(37:51):
on Twitter if you want to come see me. How
are your hips doing about that? It's okay, Garrison's never
seen Wayne's World. Oh I know that's true. That's true,
too young. I tried to show Wayne's World to my brother,
who's still like five years older than Garrison, and did

(38:14):
not take. Didn't take. It's it's a it's a time thing.
My oldest is about four years younger than Garrison, and
they've seen Wayne's World. I'm just saying, wow, okay, Uh,
it could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

(38:35):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zone media dot com, or check us out on
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listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could
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