The supercop scenario; can one man's obsession change the nature of police training?

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 18-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

On several chilly nights last November, from ten o'clock until six in the morning, a college campus in Missouri was transformed into an imaginary metropolis, Corps City East, meant to be one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in America. Drama students and off-duty St. Louis undercover police were imported to Mineral Area College, in Park Hills, to play perpetrators; a dispatcher and squad cars were borrowed from local police departments; a block of dormitories was transformed into a low-income housing project. The scenarios came fast at first, and then intermittently, punctuated by long, deep-night lulls. This was the final exam for twenty-five cadets, participants in the Police Corps -- a tiny, creative, and unabashedly elite federal program for recent college graduates, who would go on to join police departments throughout Missouri. One persistently careless cadet failed the exercise; a lazy search of a drug suspect was his most serious mistake. (The cadet and three fellow-cadets were "shot" by the perpetrator.) He was asked to leave the program the next day, two days before graduation.

"He'd been a borderline case, but in this program there's no room for borderline. We want our graduates to excel," said Mark Byington, a former Dallas police officer who serves as the Police Corps director in Missouri and looks more like an accountant than a cop. He is short, soft-spoken, and becoming bald; his complexion is perpetually salmon-pink. But he has developed a reputation among the other state Police Corps directors as a particularly skillful trainer.

Byington often works with his cadets at night, when the bulk of police work takes place; he puts them in complicated, unexpected situations where they have to make instinctive judgments on the basis of incomplete information, which may be the most important skill a police officer must have. This class had already been through a weeklong scenario in which they worked as illegal immigrant farm workers and endured a physical-training regimen called "Hell Week"; each candidate had mentored a child from Missouri's Boys and Girls Town. They had learned to use firearms at night, often in abandoned buildings and confusing circumstances, with trainers shooting back at them with tiny paint pellets called "simunitions." Every fourth week, Byington's cadets worked a midnight shift at the academy. "One thing a police officer has to learn," he told me, "is how to sleep during the day, when the neighbors are up and making noise. They don't teach that at most academies."

I spent two midnight shifts with Byington, prowling the Mineral Area campus, watching his cadets handle domestic disputes, traffic stops, wild parties, burglaries. Given the events of September 11th, Byington decided to throw in some hints of terrorist activity: there was an anthrax scare the first night and a bombing the second.

Two cadets, Jonathan Brown and Mike Strong, responded -- gingerly -- to the anthrax call. The door of the apartment was slightly open, and they could see two people on the floor and a plastic bag with white powder spilling out. They called the dispatcher, who told them to wait for the HAZMAT team.

"This is frustrating," said Brown, who was sweating even though a stiff, cold wind was blowing, as one of the victims on the floor began to moan. "Maybe we should go on in and help them."

"They told us to wait," said Strong. "But if this isn't anthrax I'm going to feel pretty guilty."

The next morning, Byington criticized Brown and Strong. "You had two people suffering there and you did nothing," he said. "I don't care what the dispatcher told you -- you should have acted on your instincts. They could have passed out for any reason. The white powder could have been cocaine. And anthrax is treatable. Your first duty as police officers is to save lives, to protect people -- and you didn't do that."

Jonathan Brown, who received the Top Cadet award for his class a few days later, sat staring into his lap, exhausted and depressed. "He's really hard on himself," Byington told me. "But he won't make that mistake again."

Policing is a notoriously inbred line of work. It is at once local -- there are no national, and few state, standards -- and universal: police officers tend to share a dark fraternal sensibility. They are natural pessimists, convinced that they stand on the sane middle ground between the lawless on the streets and the law-obsessed in the courts, and they have an equal disdain for both. They assume that outsiders are incapable of understanding what they do. There is, furthermore, the conviction that it is impossible to prepare for this work. The standard greeting a rookie police officer receives from his veteran partner is "Forget everything you learned in the academy."

The idea of a Police Corps, a lawenforcement equivalent of the Peace Corps, in which men and women would be asked to spend a few idealistic years bringing civilization to the...

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