The Institution of Policing: Part I

This is a guest essay by friend of Disaffected TC Pearson. Find him on Youtube at Minnesota Black Robe Regiment.

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Part 1:

Can You Take a Walk with Me?

For those of you who do not know me, I am TC. I am a constant viewer of Disaffected. I connected with Josh back in the days of Unsafe Space. Josh bulldozed into my life at a time when I needed his voice the most. I was facing one of the hardest battles of my life and feeling alone and betrayed by a profession I had become quite good at. I was certain I was losing my mind because my world was collapsing around me, and Josh rushed in via Disaffected to assuage my fear.

I was sitting at home in the late spring of 2021 until early fall of that same year. Sitting at home and contemplating where life had led me. You see, I was a sworn deputy in Olmsted County Minnesota, the third largest metro area of the state. My duties entailed working inside  a jail euphemistically called an "adult detention center.” I had been on the job since January of 2009. It was eye-opening from the outset. I went into the career as a conservative “back the blue” GOP voter thinking I had all the answers as it pertained to law, order, crime, and punishment.

I knew in my heart-of-hearts that criminals deserved to be locked up and to be miserable for having run afoul of “The Law.” Oddly enough, I would have considered myself a liberty loving constitutionalist at the time I started in the career field. Yet, within a few short months I realized how terribly flawed and tragically inept the entire institution of policing had become. In fact, the entire justice system was quickly suspect in my mind.

This is the first article in a series discussing how, as a law enforcement officer, I have lost my faith in the institution of law enforcement. A series of incidents showed me that officers who took an oath to uphold the constitution and the republic were willing to break that oath to silence constitutional right to express my faith and my views. I will discuss that more below, but first I want to tell you a little about how I came to my current views.

Who I Was and Where I came From

I was raised in a religious and socially conservative family. We held all the right views on all the social issues. Gay was bad. Abortion was murder, America is a Christian “Nation,” cops are heroes and yadda, yadda, yadda. My first paper in my high school rhetoric class was about abortion. I nailed it. Even my liberal teacher agreed.

I had no aspiration to become a police officer at the time. I wanted to be a lawyer that focused on prosecution.  Or I wanted to be a doctor, but I only got as far as the handwriting skills. I thought prosecutors were the end-all-and-be-all when it came to protecting polite society from the dirty underbelly of humanity. Sadly, I was part of that dirty underbelly when one looks at the mid-1980s and what was considered acceptable and upright Midwest values. In the small town I lived in, my family was not important. My dad didn’t hold an important position, and I was not a bright student or sports superstar. We were not part of the in-crowd.  

I grew up in what fans of Disaffected would call a Cluster B home. I have all the markers for adverse childhood experiences and Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A violent and physically abusive father and a mother that would give “Mommy Dearest” a run for her money. This drove me to hate bullies and injustice. I was the guy who got bullied and who punched bullies in the face when cornered. In short, I seemed to fit the bill for many of the people that enter the law enforcement career field. Yet, it was my brother who chose that field and not me at first.