It Could Happen Here - The Cult of Policing, Part 1

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

A former cop explains how police training and the overall culture of policing mirrors cult dynamics. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. That's the podcast that this is.

It's about things crumbling and how to maybe uncrumble some of the's about things crumbling and 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 we're all increasingly inhabiting, the scary shit that is getting scarier day by

day, number one on a lot of people's list is going to be the cops. Real cause of anxiety for a significant chunk of people listening to this podcast right now, including its hosts. Alexander, you and I have chatted before on the air.

Our guest today, Alexander Williams. You were a police officer in the past and you are not currently. And you want to chat about 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 cults 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 i yeah i used to be a cop i was in law enforcement for just shy of 15 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 cults.

And I started going down the little checklist that you go down of like, are you in a high control group? And man, they all just dinged 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, I don't know, de-radicalization isn't exactly the right term, but I think you know what I'm getting at. It's in the neighborhood, sure. Yeah. Mine, so I was raised in a cop family.

My dad was a cop. He went the whole nine yards, retirement, the whole thing. And when I got into it, just shy of 22 years old, which that's young to be making those kinds of choices, looking back on it. We had talked on the last podcast of your season one about when my brother got arrested and got beat by my own team, my my own crew in the jail that I worked with, which is the jails is where I primarily spent most of my time. And I think that that was, uh, item number one, kind of on my shelf. Like people call it, that's, that's, that's a big one that went 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 in training, they start telling you really early like, hey, you know what?

We're your family. We understand you. We're going to get you. And then like the language even then kind of flared red flags wrong for me. Whenever a group of people says we're your family and so right like it's what are you like we're your family and you can talk to us anytime fine we're your family and i got your back fine we're your family and that's why you need to do this right things have gone awry it's it usually is we're your family comma now yeah Yeah. Yeah. And yes.

So that, that was like literally day one. It was, we're your family now where you're, you know, they use all that language, the familial language where your brothers, your sisters. Yeah.

And the one that kinked for me in my brain was they said within a year, you're not going to have any friends that aren't cops. Like all of your civilian friends are going to be gone because they're not going to understand you. And 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 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 myself not have any non-cop friends.

Yeah, that's probably good because that's – I mean you have – like when it gets to – it's the same thing that happens to anybody, right? Like some people got like last year in Portland an activist brain where there was this – all the people we're spending time with are the people we're out protesting. And so we have this really intense bond. 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 is your career for 20 something years. And it's like, yeah, that would you'd be you'd be after a couple of years of that you're inhabiting a different planet. You really are. And it's the way how you said that, like, you know, this is usually 20 to 30 years, you know,

because you want to get that sweet retirement at the end after you've abused your mind and your body for three decades. It was it keyed off something that you and Garrison talked about in a previous episode of the hiring practices where the Washington state guys and they were they got busted because the therapist was showing tons of bias and that brought up for me the hiring process uh because those psych exams are the only time as a cop that you get a psych exam that's the only time you ever talk to a therapist mandatorily yeah that's not great yeah it's a really bad move and there's a joke in cop culture of like well yeah you got to pass it before you get hired because after you

get hired you're never going to pass that test because you know being a cop is is micro dosing ptsd in your system the entire time see i i guess one thing I'm wondering, because you were in it for 15 years, so that's not an insignificant span of time. Has it gotten to be more that way? Because I knew about 15-something years ago, when I was like 18, 19, just like I lived in this shitty little apartment complex, and the dude who lived above me and the dude who lived two doors down were 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 shit after work. Like,

uh, just like not like, like we would be like barbecuing 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 15 years ago. Right. And I'm wondering to what extent do you think this has kind of increased in recent memory?

Like the kind of – you don't really socialize with people outside of the family, so to speak. It is 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 80s and the 90s and stuff was community policing. 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 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 you're a cop there you can't't afford to live there. You're definitely not getting paid enough to live most of the time in the cities that you're supposed to be, you know, a part of. And it's gotten to the point where they actually teach this like 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.

And then they also pitch it as a safety thing because it's all about the killology grossmen. We're all under attack 24-7. So they'll teach people, you know what? It's safest to not live in the town where you're a cop now. 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 where we'll talk about community policing there's very good criticisms of community policing and there's a lot of things it doesn't solve oh man 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. It's exact. It does. Yeah. Yeah. That language fits perfectly, especially with Grossman and all that. Yeah.

Yes. And we've got a two-parter on David Grossman on Behind the Bastards if you want to check it out. But he's kind of the – one of the big individuals who's done the most to like really push. 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 yeah about shit like most of the people i know who were getting shot at every day for years overseas were not thinking the way grossman does no and that's probably because he never actually went and did anything. Mm-hmm.

Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura

podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think maybe we should probably, Alexander, have you go start going through this document you put together, kind of walking through. this document you put together, kind of walking through. And I wonder if you might start when you kind of started thinking about police training and the mindset inculcated inside police departments from like a cultic perspective, when did that really start to come together for you? It probably really started to come together. 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 a, it was a joke in my head at first was like, oh, we all speak the same language. And then that got 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 like no matter where you go in the country we are a little subculture we are a little yeah group and uh that's what started to kind of push me towards like it's like being in a cult because uh 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 little bits of that. There's bits of that in friendship and whatnot the tribalism of it all yeah yeah yeah it's just a thing like cults are taking advantage 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 I'm sure firefighters have a degree of this, you know. These are people that like I hang around with all the time and we wind up in some intense situations together that causes – there are culty aspects that's always going to cause. I'm wondering kind of where are the first areas you started to realize this is crossing that line?

Where are the first areas you started to realize this is crossing that line? Probably the first area is in how much the department, like, and this was universal in lots of departments that I had contact with, is how much the department owns you. And I mean, like, they use that language. 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 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 shift and I go home. This isn't like, this isn't, this is a job. It's not supposed to be a life. Uh, 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 that they're a cop if you're at a

bar you're at a party you're at whatever they'll be like hi my name my name my name's Alexander I work for the search department 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 line flags and stuff. And some of that's some of that's just, you know, signpost. Some of that's just I know people who were in certain jobs where they transported things that were sketchy and had those flags is like, well, maybe the cop won't search me or, you know know but like there and there's elements that are 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 there's also elements of that um and i think probably television is to blame for aspects of this but of kind of that

sheepdog culture as as uh as grossman it, 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, 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 were you kind of conscious of that aspect of society, like filling out around you, like some of these, like the cult of the heroic police officer kind of spreading to be something new, which it really started doing from like 2018 up to the present moment is when a lot of that shift seems to have happened based on kind of what I've seen.

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 a matte black with a blue line and that was it. And you didn't really, even in cop culture, I didn't grow up seeing that thing in the 80s and the 90s much. Not at all.

And then when I was in the department in the 2000s, you kind of saw it every now and again. Someone might have a lapel was in the department in the 2000s, you kind of saw it every now and again. Someone might have a lapel pin, like, in the department. But out in public, nobody had that stuff. Nobody had any of that rocking stuff. And it never really bothered me until it showed up on an American flag. And then that was a big red flag of, like, oh, this is bad. I was like, this is nationalism, guys.

This isn't good. And my whole crew looked at me and go, what's nationalism? And I'm just like, fuck. Is there this sense that people are toadying? Or is it this sense that this is kind of the silent majority that backs us in doing whatever hard work we need to do? I think it started out as toadying. It really did. And it's,

but it's now shifted into this whole, like, you know, you get those guys that are like, Oh, if I see a cop getting in a fight, I'm going to get out of my car and I'm going to jump in there and I'm going to back him up because they're like,

they're playing tough. 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 make being in the club cooler the fact that there's these kind of posses forming around it, there's people kind of worshiping the culture associated with it?

I mean, there probably is now, but honestly, when I was in there, it freaked me the hell out. It really creeped me out. I didn't like it at all. Yeah, I mean, you have to think about, if you're a reasonable person, how weird it would be to see your job turned into a cult. Like Garrison, you know that feeling. reasonable person how weird it would be to see your job turned into a cult like garrison you know that feeling um or you're you're going to learn when we when we make the cult ah yes yeah okay so i wanted to i guess 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 an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and whether he is alive or dead regards his belief system ideology and practices as the truth as law um and i'll remind you we're not talking about my podcast we're talking about um cults here uh that's right um yeah stay quiet garrison Wyatt Garrison. They're just smiling 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 and charge high.

Let the court figure out the rest. It sounds a lot like kill them all and let God sort them out. In this case, the criminal justice system is a direct replacement for god i i think think this is a really good point this is even yeah this is the thing even when i was like a 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 a cop just randomly like assaulting somebody and then other cops nearby just mindlessly join in and i'm like whoa that's 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 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 my i 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 they did something wrong it's going to get figured 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 is just part of what you have to do to get to the point where you determine whether or not they're innocent so i'm not doing anything bad yeah yeah and actually garrison i like it's what you said is perfect because in the bottom of the thing where i was just spewing notes to myself i literally put 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 see things. 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. Oh, yeah. It's a rough situation to be in. is it is it's crazy and um the 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 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 high and talk to me about talk to me a little when you say arrest 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 powers of arrest you're you're you're supposed to adhere to a penal code but there is code and i'm only speaking to california because that's where i got my train

sure yeah um they don't expect cops to remember every single element of every single pc code and I'm only speaking to California because that's where I got my training. 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. So there's wiggle 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, I can go misdemeanor. They'll teach you in the academy.

They're like, if it's a wobbler, you always charge felony every single time. Even if you don't think it's gonna work, charge it felony, kick it to the DA and let the DA see 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 living under you're you essentially have to live as like the diet version of a felon while that's hanging over your head you do 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 da's love to crack deals they love to make their they make their little backroom deals. And facilitating that is cops charging high. You're in the room, you're facing felony charges, and the DA is going to be like,

oh man, I can knock that down to a misdemeanor, but that's because he knows he doesn't have a case. Yeah. 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 so reasonable very reasonable very fair the products and services that support our podcast welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast

network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast We're back. So the next thing you've got on here is kind of talking about cult characteristics. Questioning doubt and dissent are discouraged or even punished. And you've written, academies are commonly paramilitary. They are working to break down and build up cadets. As discussed last season on my show, the FTO program is where fresh cadets meet salty veterans and 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 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 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, well, 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 make it work better. And that's how kind of everything

should work. And that's what you're getting at here is interesting, because it's the reticence to actual change among police is 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 we'll 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 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 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. Cause who's going to charge them, um, to, yeah. Cause it's what they've always done. Always. Uh, my department famously had, um, our union got, uh, all of our union dues embezzled by people in our brass and they got caught dead to rights, but that case never went anywhere nobody would touch it with a 10-foot pole uh and even if you go and google it 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 like what what is the impulse to defend

that well because so there's a division in in cop culture of like like ranks and occult once you get to what they call brass you're you're a lieutenant captain or higher they they don't look at us the same way they don't look at the the grunts the line workers the guys doing the 12-hour shifts we're all that family talk goes out the window and it's like well we're mom and dad now and they 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 idea that like there used to be less restrictions. There used to be – like we used to really be able to like do this and do that. 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 shit

because often this like community policing is referred to like yeah we need to go back to the old methods of policing it's like well but there were prop do you remember the fire hoses being used on black people during the civil rights movement oh there were issues back before we got militarized it's it's yeah and i, and that was the stuff they were doing outside. The jail I worked in, because you bring up fire hoses, this is where I'm going. We had big cotton fire hoses

up on the floors in this jail and it was actually built out of old parts of a 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's gonna who's gonna tell on me who's gonna believe these guys yeah and that was back in like 70s era you know it's the it'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 very – I mean, worse stuff happens in prisons today. Oh, man, yeah. So, yeah. I'm not surprised.

All right, moving on down your list, this one's really interesting to me. And I'm curious for some detail on this because this is not something I ever really thought about. So mind-altering practices such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, or debilitating work routines are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leaders. And you've written cop talk, briefings, evals are always negative, and the work routine is abusive. It is paired with hypervigilance. I'm extremely interested in that and kind of like 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 memories from those years like but i'll talk that makes sense yeah yeah yeah i'll talk to ex-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 10 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 going to have friends outside of work. Cause you're going to start talking in this language. You'll say, you know, what's your 20, you know, I'm code for you. 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 J 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 perceive reality and you just start seeing everything that way. Um, the, the big one is the hyper vigilance cycle is the is the abusive part that's the that's the part that really got me thinking of cults of how they'll you know uh deny you food sleep make you work crazy hours and do all these things um and that's that's that's the one that really keyed the whole cult aspect for me was the hypervigilance cycle,

the studies that have gone into it. 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. Gilmartin PhD. He's an ex cop who got a PhD in neuroscience and studies, studied cops brains

and got to see how they function and he's the one that kind of coined this whole hypervigilance cycle of you're always edging at this parasympathetic fight flight or freeze response time when you're on duty yeah yeah it just stays up there the entire time I'm sure soldiers

have had the same thing fuck I'm sure you had the same thing Robert when you were doing your war journalism stuff man or fuck just being in portland last year yeah um but yeah you it keeps you at that edge that cresting peak and then you crash and you get back up and boom you peak up again and then you crash and it's almost like a drug your brain becomes addicted to that peaked out feeling that you get from the hypervigilance because you do hear a little better. You see a little better.

Your brain's 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 work feels good jesus yeah i mean the same thing happened i i'm sure garrison it happened like during like 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 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 feel it would feel more relaxing just to stand on a street corner and watch people throw stuff over events yeah that that's just that's more relaxing than laying down. It was like, it's a very weird disassociative feeling

that yeah, my brain is, it's accustomed to this environment now, so this is the environment I'm going to be in. Right. And look how fast your brain got into that groove now. You know, imagine doing it for 30 years.

Yeah, instead of like six months, or it's it started only after like two months right and or even even in some cases like a month yeah 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, or marry, or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth. Very classic cult shit, right? Like the nut, really, of what it is to be in a cult. We had all that stuff when I was a kid. Yeah, I would guess that like 99% of the time

if you ask someone for a quick definition of a cult, this is what they're gonna say. Or this is the kind of shit they're gonna highlight. And I'm interested in, yeah, just talk, because you already chatted

a bit 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 a living, you will wash dishes differently forever, right?

Like if you bag your, like bag shit at a grocery store, like that's something that you'll always kind of know how to do, like there's 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 – as an adult, you do something that you're like, oh, I used to do that at my first job when I was like 15. But yeah, it does stick with you. The muscle memory sticks in those neural pathways that your brain gets carved unless you get the right kinds of mushrooms to fix that. Yeah. So.

Then you just throw shit in the bag. Fuck it. Yeah. Smooth out those curves. Yeah. But yeah, the leadership really does dictate. I mean, some of them are, some of them you can FOIA and some of them are public. 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 like tinking away at your armor of 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 resist that it washes over you real fast because while that's all going on especially as a young

cop you feel great. You're special now. You're in the magic club. You have 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. Yeah, permissions. So permission to date and things like that might sound a little weird, but there are times where my wife and I don't dress like the typical conservative Central Valley person and act out of work functions. I would get comments from people being like, hey, maybe your wife has a lot of really colorful hair. Like maybe she should tone that down. And for,

again, Oh, 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. Should. Yeah.

Um, the, uh, uh, the next thing you have here is the group is elitist claiming a special exalted status for itself its leader and its members uh 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 sheepdog thing we're kind of like the cop is the center of the cult for people who are not cop – cults. I don't know. Like does this exist?

Like I don't see like a cult leader sort of within this thing. I think 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. I don't know. This is probably – I'm interested in your thoughts on this. This probably deserves significantly more analysis than 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, what 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 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's kind of a religious belief though, yeah, it's obvious. I mean, if you've met a cop. It is kind of a religious belief, though, that like, yeah, it's illegal, so it's bad. They were a criminal, so they deserved X.

Yeah. Making a homebrewed cleric that believed in the law for D&D was pretty easy to be like, yeah, this is a church. This is a religion. Yeah, it is the sheepdog among sheep. And, 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 a brass guy, a lieutenant, that would give us these prepared speeches whenever he thought someone's morale was getting low. Where he would talk about how, and he was wrong, that the word sheriff comes from like Sanskrit or Arabic Sharif, which is not true.

No. It comes from Shire Reef. It's old English, just squished because English is a hideous language. But he had, 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 to me that was another thing that clicked where i'm like god it's like talking it's like a call and response when you're in church sometimes yeah anytime you confront uh a religious person they just they have that that's that dogmatic spew that regurgitates and just like well here's my opinion that i was told by someone who told me.

Okay. So, uh, 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 anything you'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington state patrol. No, um, no, I don't really have anything to'd like to plug? Maybe the Washington State Patrol. No. No, I don't really have anything to plug.

I'm never say die where all the easier threes because I'm that elder nerd from the 90s. Yeah. And saw hackers in the theater. It's claimed to fame. So, yeah, I'll never say that on Twitter. If you want to come see me. How are your hips doing? Stuff.

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,

uh, did not take, didn't take it's, it's a, who's still like five years older than Garrison and, uh, did not take, didn't take it's, it's a, it's a time thing. Well, my, 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 as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Thanks for listening. terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.