Trained By Cops

I was trained by cops.

About ten years ago, I took up MMA as a hobby. There were two schools in my rural hometown of Greencastle, Pennsylvania: A taekwondo studio, like what you see everywhere, and a place called “Tactical Combat Academy of Mixed Martial Arts” that was owned and operated by a SWAT team leader.\Yeah, that sounds promising!

So I go in and I meet this guy, Josh. Josh and I hit it off right away, and I do some video work for him in exchange for his time. We had a good deal.

Now Josh, as I mentioned, was on a SWAT team. He was the guy who would bust down the door with the battering ram. Most of his work was drug busts which seemed to me at the time the dangerous, necessary moral work of law enforcement.

But that’s not a full-time job. Josh spent most of his work hours as a prison guard, and he had some stories. I remember this one time I noticed a scar on his wrist and I asked him where it came from. He looked at it and smiled. An inmate stabbed him from behind with a shiv. He stared at it for a while before saying, “after that, my foot was literally up his ass.”

I trained with Josh for about a year. After that, Josh got in some hot water. There was an incident at his prison where an inmate assaulted one of the guards, and that night, 4 or 5 other guards opened the inmate’s cell and beat the guy within an inch of his life. Josh stepped in and stopped them.

The guards, including Josh, got together to get their story right. They didn’t break into the guy’s cell, he was agitating them, he was assaulting another inmate- I don’t remember the details anymore but they crafted a lie about their retaliation and my friend Josh was a part of this cover-up. Some time later, everybody was convicted, and Josh got sentenced to a year in prison for obstruction of justice.

When I say that all cops are bastards, I keep Josh in mind. Josh was my friend. Josh only ever did right by me. But the fact of the matter is, when he was given the opportunity to do the right thing, he chose the “brotherhood” of his fellow law enforcement officers over justice.

Not every cop will break into your house and murder you in your sleep like they did Breonna Taylor. Not every cop will kneel on your neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds like they did George Floyd. Not every cop will shoot you in the street like they did Walter Wallace after his mother called for an ambulance.

But every cop will carry out an eviction. Every cop will march out onto the streets and brutalize protesters, or help their coworkers brutalize protesters. Every cop will issue fines to the poor. The law is immoral. And when the law is immoral, those who enforce it are equally immoral. And that’s assuming racial equality! Factor in the oppression of people of color and everything just gets worse.

I was trained by cops. I’ve known cops. I’ve hugged cops. I’ve loved cops. It is with this experience and authority that I say with certainty that every single cop- the one you like, the one you don’t, your friend, and mine- is a bastard.