An inside look at how police officers are trained to perpetuate state violence Michael Brown. Philando Castile. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. As the names of those killed by the police became cemented into public memory, the American public took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to mourn, organize, and demand changes to the current system of policing. In response, police departments across the country committed themselves to change, pledging to hire more women and people of color, incorporate diversity training, and instruct officers to verbally de-escalate interactions with the public. These reform efforts tend to rely on a "bad apple" argument, focusing the nature and scope of the problem on the behavior of specific individuals and rarely considering the broader organizational process that determines who is allowed to patrol the public and how they learn to do their jobs. In Before the Badge, Samantha J. Simon provides a firsthand look into how police officers are selected and trained, describing every stage of the process, including recruitment, classroom instruction, and tactical training. Simon spent a year at police academies participating in the training alongside cadets, giving her a visceral, hands-on understanding of how police training operates. Using rich and detailed examples, she reveals that the process does more than test a cadet's physical or intellectual abilities. Instead, it socializes cadets into a system of state violence. As training progresses, cadets are expected to see themselves as warriors and to view Black and Latino/a members of the public as their enemies. Cadets who cannot or will not uphold this approach end up washing out. In Before the Badge, Simon explains how this training creates a context in which patterns of police violence persist and implores readers to re-envision the future of policing in the United States.
Samantha J. Simon is Assistant Professor in the School of Government & Public Policy and the School of Sociology at The University of Arizona.
"Simon's remarkable fieldwork reveals how the institutional culture of policing is shaped by recruitment and training procedures that make us all less safe; a must-read for anyone who thinks we can fix American policing with more training." * Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing * "This is a brilliant book! Through careful research and compelling writing, Simon shows how racial violence by police officers is organizationally produced, enabled, and sustained. Over 600 hours in police training academies and dozens of interviews with individuals working in recruiting, hiring, and training police officers, reveal how polices, practices, and interactions within police organizations enable and sustain racial violence. Police officers are selected in relation to their experience with, and willingness to use, violence. Police academies teach - and cadets perform, practice, and perfect - violence. As a result, and despite demographic changes in police forces across the US, racialized violence at the hands of the police continues. This is an incredibly important and timely book that should be required reading for policymakers, advocates, and the public interested in prospects for police reform. Contemporary American policing is steeped in a long history of racial violence and racial injustice and to overcome it, Simon argues, will require a fundamental reorganization of American policing itself." * Becky Pettit, author of Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress * "Simon has crafted a richly detailed, emotionally intelligent, and historically informed account of how human beings are transformed into cops. Before the Badge is a noteworthy addition to the all-too-sparse annals of effective ethnography exploring day-to-day human life within the carceral state." * Jarrod Shanahan, author of Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage and co-author of States of Incarceration *
