The Blue Wall of Embarrassment

Here’s a maddening misconception about law enforcement that drives most cops crazy: The old “Blue Wall of Silence.”

Yes, police culture does demand a certain amount of brotherly and sisterly loyalty. After all, these people you suit up with in the locker room are the same people who may have to pound ass down a blind alley, responding to your “Officer needs assistance call.” They are the same people who may have to drag you out of a pool of broken glass and your own blood under fire.

I know this because I spent seventeen years in this culture. I have screamed into the radio for help. I have been fighting a psycho, high on God-knows-what, and losing. I have been in a frantic pursuit, more than one, wondering if the next thing I would hear were gun shots.

And, I have responded to those calls. I have run blindly into any number of pre-fucked situations, sometimes to save people I cared about very much, other times to save people I didn’t much care for. But they wore the uniform and did the job. So, if they called for help, I went. That’s the deal.

To imply that this compact of mutual aid always implies an unspoken contract of complicity, however, is pure bullshit. It is a lie, perpetrated by those who wish to paint the police as a problem, rather than a flawed instrument of solution.

That’s my experience; it might not be everyone’s. To begin with, I am a Canadian, a second-generation law enforcement officer whose father rammed a central idea into his head: Tell the truth about what you did and what you saw. Or you’ll burn too.

Not all police cultures see things this way. Garrison police cultures, such as the old departments of the US Northeast, do tend towards a more “Keep quiet till this shit blows over” sort of approach.

But I, and most of the people I worked with, were quite prepared to chatter like the judges on American Idol every time we saw a case that embarrassed us. A case that made us do a combined “Blue Facepalm” in response to a video-documented case of bad judgement, or outright abuse.

Yes, we do that. We can be as savage, if not more so, than the keyboard heroes who leap on any story of police malfeasance and pepper the comments section with “They’re all the same,” and “Take their guns away” type comments.

We, unlike the keyboard heroes, judge from a place of training and experience. And so, our judgements are more informed, more telling, and more stinging. Unlike you, we might have to work with these people. We might have to risk our lives running into a shitstorm they created.

Case in point: A recent takedown in Lethbridge, Alberta, caught on camera. A 17-year-old girl was dressed as an Imperial Stormtrooper, given a plastic toy blaster, and sent onto the street to promote a local café. Someone called the police. What happened next was cringe worthy.

To begin with, let me state this clearly: The owner of the café is a fucking idiot. Lethbridge is not a big place. He could easily have picked up the phone, called the police, and said “Hey guys, here’s the deal.” But he didn’t.

But that doesn’t let us off the hook. We are trained to make deadly force decisions and equipped accordingly. Café owners, and seventeen-year-old kids, are not. We’re the grownups here.

Officers respond to dispatch’s call of a person with a gun. They “Follow their training,” that is to say, they proceed on a sort of flowchart basis to the situation.

Do I see a gun? YES. Draw weapon-deadly threat.

Issue commands-Do they comply? YES. Handcuff them, facedown, on the ground.

Yes, this is how we are all trained. To assume any gun is real until proven otherwise, and to perform every armed takedown the exact same way.

Of course, there’s something missing here, isn’t there? Something civilians might be better at pointing out than cops “Following their training.” That something is context.

Context is the accumulation of situational factors that helps a cop figure out what’s really happening in a situation. Here’s some context that could’ve helped my friends in Lethbridge figure out what was really going on:

-Where: Outside a “Cosmic Cantina.” A Stormtrooper, hmm, makes some sense?

-When: May the Fourth. Star Wars Day. Hmm.

-How: Mass shooting…in a Stormtrooper uniform? Where’s the extra ammo? Where’s your peripheral vision?

Here’s something that can be very hard to teach young officers: Slow the fuck down, and assess the situation, whenever possible, before you engage.

But consider this: Does society really encourage officers to do this, or do we damn them every bit as much if they hang back? Consider the Parkland shooting in Florida a couple of years back. To me, this jury is still out: Cowardice, or an officer who simply wasn’t confident enough in his training to know how to decide.

But: We are the cops. We must decide, not blame society after for our failures. That’s a shitrat lawyer’s game. Insider criticism: context is sometimes sorely lacking in police use-of-force training.

People make themselves very comfortable in the Training Kingdom, in any agency, as they do in any job that takes their ass and puts it, in the words of Lt Lockhart in Full Metal Jacket, “…where I belong. In the rear, with the gear.”

The best instructors are the battle-hardened ones, the ones for whom context does not need to be explained: it already is everything. I recall from my own experience of often I would tangle on issues of training and doctrine with the insufficiently experienced, yet rarely clash with those whose battle scars exceeded my own.

It always came down to context.

I recall a conflict I had with one instructor. He insisted I should’ve drawn my gun in a training scenario on a man with a desk stapler. I demurred.

“The only way he could kill me with that,” I insisted, “Is if he took it apart and fed it to me.”

I had context, and experience. He didn’t. That doesn’t mean I always made the right calls. I can’t say that there aren’t a few I would’ve made differently if I had a do over.

And maybe some of those Lethbridge officers see things the same way, in a sober second light. If I were the Chief there, I’d be asking two main questions:

-Do my officers have training which factors in context?

-Do my officers have supervisors and trainers who emphasize context in making common-sense policing decisions?

I bet the officers involved would do it differently, if they could. But for those insisting they should’ve known how to deal with it, right out of the gate, remember this:

-We are not living in an era that rewards common sense. I know of officers who have been disciplined for not asking daily cross-border commuters whether or not they went to China.

-We are wedded to manuals and doctrine, in large part because of the hyperactive oversight mandated by the “cops get away with murder” set. Manuals and doctrine obscure the common-sense approach we so loved about the cops we grew up with. You can’t have both.

-Gunplay is uncommon is most Canadian police jurisdictions. Most cops never fire their guns in anger, and many can count the number of times they’ve drawn on the fingers of one hand.

So, yeah, I don’t like what happened in Lethbridge. But, unlike you, I don’t see trigger-happy jackboots hoping for a kill. I see scared people, trying to deal with an unfamiliar situation, with insufficient training, experience, and supervision.

Not as sexy as a “crazed cops” headline. But probably closer to the truth.

So, fire them all? Take their guns? Or issue an apology, write a cheque, and sit down and fix a few things?

From behind the Blue Wall, let me say, I’m a bit embarrassed. But nobody’s dead, and nobody’s done anything that can’t be forgiven. They’re humans, recruited from the human race, and they can be fixed.

Anytime everyone involved is left alive, that’s something to be thankful for.

Grant Patterson is a seventeen-year veteran of the Canada Border Services Agency, and was one of the first armed officers in the Agency’s history. He retired in 2017. He is the author of nine novels, and recently completed “A Life on the Line,” currently available on Wattpad, an account of his career in law enforcement. His opinions are his own, and do not reflect the official position of any law enforcement agency.