You'd make a great cop, you bet!

What makes a person want to become a cop? What kind of people get hired to be cops?

These are some questions I asked myself after reading this post on The Agitator, yesterday, and watching the video from an undercover investigative report [Police Station Intimidation], which asked a bunch of different Florida police stations how a person can file a complaint against an officer. To quote Radley Balko [The Agitator], some of the officers' responses ranged from "dismissive to rude to confrontational to damn-near criminal." Check out the video, and you'll see what he means.

Local Joke, No Laughing Matter

I grew up in a tiny town in a geographically large county in West Texas. Our "police force" consisted of two or three sheriff's deputies and two state troopers. While the troopers were somewhat respectable fellows, the sherrif's deputies were pretty much the stereotypical small town "county mounties" you see on TV and film. They [all but one] seem relatively harmless in retrospect, but I got the feeling they really enjoyed intimidating us high school kids back in the day. I remember getting a bit nervous anytime one of the deputies would follow me driving down "the drag", or when one would pull into a parking lot where some friends and I had gathered to hang out. And I was a pretty good kid who stayed out of trouble [most of the time], so I really didn't have any reason to worry. But they did a pretty good job of intimidating me, and this apprehension towards cops stuck with me through college. As I grew older, I realized my fear of cops was irrational: if I'm not doing anything illegal, then I have nothing to fear. Well, that rationalization may work better for a clean cut caucasian like me than it does for some of my darker-skinned brethren.

My tiny West Texas town was once also home to the infamous Tom Coleman. Tom was one of the lil' deputies in my town and the most gung ho, for sure. He was a gangly, cockeyed character that was mostly a local joke [everyone called him "Barney Fife"]. Coleman served as a sheriff's deputy in my town throughout my high school years and slightly beyond [c. early-90's]. That is until--so I was told by a hometown friend--he went nuts and skipped town after his son was born with some sort of birth defect. That wasn't all that surprising to me. What was surprising was to, years later, open up an issue of the Austin Chronicle and read about his "crack" undercover drug investigation in Tulia, Texas (population, approx. 5,000). For those not familiar, Coleman was almost single-handedly responsible for indicting 40+ people (mostly black) on drug charges without any corroborating evidence or credible witnesses.

I'm sure a citizen's complaint form wouldn't have done much good in Tulia. But, had standardized complaint procedures and "gypsy cop" legislation been in place back then, Coleman may never have been hired as an undercover agent by the Swisher County sheriff's department, and the mess in Tulia may have never transpired [well, maybe not].

Standardized complaint procedures with anonymous complaint forms and public information regarding law enforcement officer terminations are a good start for after-the-fact accountability. But what standards do we have in place on the front end? How does somebody like Tom Coleman get hired in the first place?