Chapter 52: The Academy

January 2008 - March 2008

When I went back to work, I let Captain Carson know about meeting the Gorsky family, and that I was sure that a lawsuit was on the way. Both he and Lieutenant Brownell quizzed me on what I had told the Gorskys and I swore six ways from Sunday that I hadn’t said anything that could be construed as an admission of guilt. Their general feeling was that we would be named in the suit, but we could dump any responsibility onto the Sheriff’s office, since they ran the jail in any case, and Gorsky’s lawyer had been with him when he was sent over there.

One thing I did was something I should have done when I first came home. I took my uniforms, even the old ones I had in storage, and took off all my ribbons, badges, and insignia. The uniforms I stuffed into a duffel bag and took to the Goodwill Box over on Carstair Street. The rest I put into a shoebox, balled up some newspapers to fill it out, and then taped the lid on. I made a label and mailed it to the Pentagon. Inside I left a note, simply stating, ‘I don’t deserve these.’ I hadn’t put a return address on the label; knowing the Army some jackass would probably mail them back. My time at the funeral had convinced me that I didn’t deserve to wear an Army uniform again. I just hoped I would be good enough for the Matucket Police Department. I’d find out soon enough.

The week after New Year’s was my last in Matucket for a bit. I would be heading to the academy the following weekend, and I spent my weeknights sorting and packing. I would be moving in with Kelly for almost three months, and we might only be getting back to Matucket on weekends. Friday morning, I simply packed the Toyota and drove it to work. That last Friday afternoon, the secretaries in Services gave me a cake with the words ‘Good Luck!’ on top, along with an MPD logo done in edible ink. They did it in the MPD’s colors, white with bronze lettering and logos, just like on the patrol cars. After work, I just drove to Athens without going home. I did let Grandpa and Grandma know I was going to be gone for a while, but that I had also given a key to Jack in case he needed some private time with Teresa. Well, I only told that last part to Grandpa, who asked if I had given another key to Bobbie Joe. I grinned and nodded, and my grandfather had laughed. Jamie Hughes wasn’t Bobbie Joe’s first girlfriend, but for sure she was his first serious girlfriend, and he was constantly looking for places to be alone with her.

Kelly was happy to see me, but the interesting thing was her roommate, Megan. Hannah had been away visiting family, and she and Megs hadn’t seen each other for almost two weeks. Now she was back, and while the door to Megs’ bedroom was closed, the sounds of romance were loud on the other side as they made up for lost time. After one particularly loud climax, I looked over at Kelly and smiled, trying to contain my laughter. “Are they always like this?” I asked quietly.

She was biting her lip, too, to keep from laughing too loudly. “Not really. Hannah’s been away and just got back this morning. I think they’re just both extra horny.”

“Does it ever bother you, you know, hearing them like that at night?”

“Grim! No, it’s not that bad! Besides, the bathroom is between the bedrooms. It muffles the sound.”

Kelly giggled some more, as the racket in the closed bedroom started up again. We just rolled our eyes and snickered quietly. We grabbed a couple of beers and sat down on the couch and cracked open the bottles just in time to hear, “YES, YES, JUST LIKE THAT! MORE! MORE!” I couldn’t tell if it was Megs or Hannah doing the demanding.

“You have got to be shitting me!” I told Kelly.

Kelly smiled, and then she began bouncing on the couch. “OH, GOD, GRIM, DO IT TO ME AGAIN! DON’T STOP! I NEED IT!”

I laughed at her, and Kelly just kept bouncing on the couch, moaning and wailing in fake passion. She looked at me and said, “Well, you’re part of this, too!”

“Give me a fucking break!” I told her. Then I simply shrugged and started bouncing on my end of the couch, really causing it to squeak. “OH, BABE, IT’S SO TIGHT AND SO JUICY!”

Kelly laughed. “That’s disgusting!”

“WHERE’S THE ASTROGLIDE, BABE?” I replied.

“Ack!” she squawked.

We both kept it up a couple of more minutes, and eventually the door to Megs’ room cracked open, and the two women peeped out and saw us bouncing on the couch. “That’s not funny! It’s just not funny!” Kelly’s roommate yelled.

Kelly and I stopped and just laughed. A few minutes later the door to the bedroom opened and the two women came out wearing bathrobes. “You two think you’re so funny!” scolded Megs. Hannah simply looked embarrassed. “I am so going to get you for this!”

Kelly laughed some more. “You deserved it! What were you two up to? No, don’t tell me! I don’t want to know! Aaccckkk!”

Hannah brought a couple of beers over, and then she and Megs criticized our performance. Eventually they settled down, got cleaned up and dressed, and went out for dinner. Kelly and I spent some quality time in her room, and then did the same. Otherwise, we just settled in for the weekend.

Check-in was at 0800 Monday, January 7. The academy wasn’t that big a place, and from the road it looked like a white pole barn off Beaverdam Road. It was mostly hidden by a row of pine trees, with just a small brick-and-concrete sign out front stating it was the Regional Police Academy Athens. Only after you got into the driveway did you discover there was a long and low-slung building behind the pole barn that was much larger. It looked a lot like Matucket County Community College, in fact.

I left all my gear in the Camry, grabbed my paperwork, and headed inside. The instructions had specified wearing Academy clothing (pants, khaki, tactical cotton; Academy logo polo shirt, white; black belt; socks, black; Academy logo baseball cap, khaki; black shoes, high shine.) I also took a winter coat, though it didn’t have a logo on it. If somebody bitched, I’d just have to go and buy one.

The academy didn’t have a dorm or barracks; instead, they offered you a room package at a motel about five miles away. That was good, in case Kelly, Megs, or Hannah threw me out. After that, it was off to an introduction and orientation meeting, which was to be followed by a tour of the place and meeting the instructors. There was also an equipment check, to make sure I had the assigned gear. Some additional gear would be provided by the Academy, like fake pistols, and we received some CDs with training materials on them so we could review things at night. The entire day was spent processing into the system.

One thing, which I hadn’t been expecting but which made perfect sense, was that the academy did more than just train new police officers. I mean, that was what the idiot movie showed, but there is a lot more to a real police academy than just that. I was enrolled in something called the Basic Law Enforcement Training program, but that just got you certified as a police officer. Afterwards, every officer must undergo Continuing Law Enforcement training for a certain minimum number of hours every year. Want to be on the SWAT Team? There are different levels of SWAT training and you needed to take the classes and be certified. The same applied to becoming an instructor. You can’t just be good at something; you needed to be certified as being able to teach a subject. There were dozens and dozens of different courses, some of which were held routinely and some which were very infrequent, and some were short one-day seminars and others were very intense and lengthy. Most of these courses were given at the main Academy in Forsyth, but some were done at the satellite academies, like Athens.

I had seen this already back at the MPD. Scheduling was a real pain with this stuff. There was always somebody out for training, and it tended to mess schedules up. The same was true with vacations and testifying for court. Just because you might have a dozen guys scheduled for a particular patrol shift, it didn’t mean you had a dozen guys out stopping crime. Somebody was always out and usually more than one. I’d heard various officers and sergeants cursing about this more than a few times.

The police academy ran eleven weeks and was a strange combination of Army Basic Training and taking classes over at M-Triple-C. The basic training part was some really basic stuff, like learning to march and salute and stand in formation. We also were yelled at by the equivalent of drill sergeants. We even had PT like in the Army, physical training, at least three times a week. It was just like being back at Fort Benning. Déjà vu all over again.

The classroom stuff involved a lot of classes and at least one test or quiz a week. You could flunk a test and get a chance to repeat it but flunk any three tests and you were history. A passing grade was a minimum of a 70, however, which was the equivalent of a C-. If you couldn’t get through the place at that level, you probably shouldn’t be given a gun and turned loose on the public. In addition to the weekly tests, you also had various mid-terms and finals.

More interesting were the ‘hands-on’ tests, where you were taught actual procedures and then had to demonstrate you knew what you were doing. Some I already knew about, like firearms training and proficiency, but we also had to learn how to handcuff somebody, how to search them, how to put them in the back of a car, and so forth. Before they let you pepper spray somebody, you had to be taught how to do that. (Don’t laugh – it was a pressurized canister, and you didn’t want to hit the valve if it was pointing in your own face!) As part of that, we had to do gas mask training just like in the Army. Even more fun, we had to take a hit with it in the face ourselves! Very unpleasant, and you can’t just wash it off with water. It’s not water soluble, so you need to wash it off with a detergent solution. Washing it off with water simply prolonged the agony.

We had a real mix of students. We had three-dozen in my class, though we were told not all of us would make it through. Some were as young as eighteen and were just out of high school. The oldest guy we had was in his mid-thirties and had always wanted to be a policeman and had finally just quit his job and enrolled. We probably had about the same racial mix as Georgia, though maybe whiter than the straight statistics would bear out. Likewise, women were not statistically representative, which simply meant we didn’t have a lot of ladies in the class. I wasn’t the only veteran, but I was the only Iraq veteran who hadn’t been an MP. There was another combat vet, who had done a couple of tours in Afghanistan, and he was about as burned out as I was, if not more so. It made for some interesting discussions in proper police procedure, Georgia versus combat zones.

For example, at one point we were being given a demonstration of proper procedures for the two-person detention. In this case, two police officers have apprehended a suspect and need to handcuff him, detain him in police parlance. The correct procedure is for one officer to cover the second, his weapon drawn, and in a position a few feet away, and not in a position where he can shoot his partner. The second officer then approaches the suspect, does a search, and then handcuffs him. Everybody had seen this a million times on television.

The procedure was explained, and a pair of instructors demonstrated it with a student, Travis Hogan. Travis was the Afghan combat vet, and afterwards he made a comment that it was done a little differently in Helmand Province.

“How so?” asked Mister Buckley, our lead instructor.

I think Travis realized at this point that he should have kept his mouth shut, and that the best way to survive training, any sort of training, is to become invisible. “Well, for one thing we usually had more than one suspect to haul away, and you needed to establish dominance very, very quickly.”

“Demonstrate, please.”

“Uh ... okay. Well, one guy does the search and handcuffing, just like you were doing.” He motioned the instructor to approach the ‘suspect’ from behind. “The other guy does it a little different, though.” He pulled out his rubber training pistol, which simply looked like a gun. He then stepped up and screwed the pistol into the suspect’s ear. “This works best if you have an interpreter with you, because then you tell the suspect that if he acts up, you’ll pull the trigger. Of course, if that happens, the next guy is much more cooperative!”

I started laughing at this, though about half the people were staring at us in horror. “Yeah, that was the best technique in Iraq, too,” I said. “It could be very persuasive.”

Mister Buckley replied, drily, “Let’s try to avoid that one, hmmm?”

“Yes, sir!” we both said.

“I think I am naming you two Tackleberry One and Tackleberry Two!” he added.

Travis and I smiled at each other and traded thumbs-up signs, which got laughs from our fellow cadets and groans from our instructors. Those were our nicknames the rest of our time at the academy.

I think the hands-on training was where most people had their troubles and at times the results were a touch odd. For instance, during the search-and-detain training, a lot of the students had to be very explicitly shown what to do. “Cadet Minckler, search and detain Cadet Jankowski!” Unfortunately, Cadet Minckler is a fine and upstanding citizen. The last time he actually got into a beef with somebody was in the eighth grade. The odds were that the first time Cadet Minckler approaches Cadet Jankowski, he hasn’t laid his hands on anybody other than his girlfriend in a long, long time. A lot of people would freeze up or do it so weakly and tentatively that any form of resistance by Cadet Jankowski would end up with Cadet Minckler on his ass on the ground. Almost everybody had to be demonstrated on, with an instructor slamming them to a wall, kicking their legs apart, and getting a very rough pat-down, before their hands were twisted behind them and handcuffs were applied.

It could get amusing. On occasion, one of the fine and upstanding young cadets would try to reason with a suspect, or be exceptionally polite, or otherwise try to talk the suspect into something. While you weren’t supposed to violate any rights, and we were constantly getting lectured on that, ultimately, we needed to be able to exert our authority and coerce somebody who didn’t want to be coerced. Saying ‘Please, pretty please’ was not going to cut it. ‘Knock it off!’, was much more useful, especially when done in a loud and authoritative tone! In that, I had an advantage, since I was six-foot-one, weighed 210 pounds, and had a baritone voice that I could pitch to be heard in a battle. Some of my fellow cadets were at a disadvantage.

I wasn’t surprised when I took top honors in the class in firearms. I could probably beat any of the instructors, and I certainly beat all my fellow cadets. The only time I had any trouble was during one of the drills on the firing range, when I shot two rounds so close together that the second shot went through the bullet hole in the target. The instructor judged it as a Miss, and no amount of arguing would change his mind. I was tempted, so tempted, by the thought of doing the smiley face on the target, but I decided that might be counterproductive. I simply shrugged my shoulders and made sure all my future shots were separated from the others.

We lost one of our cadets on the firing range. One of the things they were constantly beating us over the heads with was the need to use firearms safely. It was standard stuff, like always assume a gun is loaded, keep your finger off the trigger unless you plan to use it, and never point a gun at anybody unless you plan to shoot them. For most of the cadets, it was brand new territory. Unless they had been through some sort of military training, or they had been a hunter as a teenager and had taken a safety course, they had never learned it before. Like Tim and Creighton had warned me, most couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn at ten feet. Well, this one girl proved she couldn’t shoot, put a new magazine in her Beretta, and then turned back to the instructor, pointing her live weapon at just about everybody. Three people hit the dirt and the instructor wrestled it out of her hand before she managed to do something even stupider. She was gone by the next morning. It made me wish I had borrowed some body armor after all!

Most of the other hands-on training was interesting. It was stuff that was probably taught at MP school, but I wasn’t sure; I decided to ask Tim when I saw him next. It was definitely not what was taught us at Advanced Infantry Training! Where do you stand when your partner is approaching a stopped car, how to use your collapsible baton, how to take somebody down and cuff them - those are all things the aspiring police officer needed to know. Again, I was a relatively large guy and had been physical my entire life, so it wasn’t a terrible stretch to do that stuff. Even better, I had learned how to take people down as both a football player and as a soldier. Where the average student would approach somebody gingerly and nervous, if I was told to grab somebody, I would just grab them. A lot of people had to be taught it was okay to grab somebody. On the other hand, the only hand-to-hand combat training I had ever received was what was taught to me back at Fort Benning. If I ever had to arrest a black belt ninja type, I was probably going to get my ass kicked.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, we were being taught all sorts of stuff. Some of it was straightforward, like what was legal or illegal, and what was covered in both the Georgia Code Title 16 (Crimes and Offenses) and Title 40 (Motor Vehicles and Traffic). Those were the specific laws I was to enforce, including the possible penalties to be assessed by a court. In addition, one could often lead to another. It was actually quite common that a routine traffic stop for speeding (Chapter 6, Article 9) or running a red light (Chapter 6, Article 2) could lead to an arrest for stealing a car (Chapter 8, Article 1). Fortunately, all of us had to learn the same set of laws. Regardless of where we were in Georgia, stealing a car was stealing a car, and the same laws and penalties applied.

There were some big topics we covered a lot. One of them was probable cause and all the rules behind search and seizure. The Fourth Amendment prohibited illegal searches and seizures, so we had to make sure we could legally search or seize somebody. For instance, if I pulled you over for speeding and discovered you are driving a stolen car, then I had probable cause (the car was involved in a felony) to search the car for whatever I wanted to, typically for drugs or weapons. However, if you were speeding in your own personal car, I didn’t automatically have probable cause to search the car. I might gain that cause if I looked in through the window (plain sight rule) and saw drugs or weapons, or if your car was weighed down in the rear and you were acting squirrelly, I had enough suspicion to call a drug dog to come and sniff. If the dog made the appropriate response, typically by sitting down, that gave me probable cause and I could search for drugs. If, however, I violated these rules and found a ton of heroin and the Lindbergh baby in your trunk, it was an illegal search and you got to walk away, scot free.