What Radicalized Me – A Fall Horror Story | Behind the Books

I get asked that, sometimes. Or I’ll see posts that ask it, or posts that tell stories of radicalization moments. And every time, every time, there’s one answer. One story that pops into mind, unbidden. It is the moment, for me, my brain knows it even if my mouth won’t say it. Like asking your favorite colour, your brain knows it’s blue even if you’ve trained your mouth to say red.

When I was young I did a lot of for-hire work. I still do a lot of for-hire work, but back then I blew current-me out of the water. I was in school for journalism and I would use any of the skills I was learning to make extra cash and put myself through school. I edited radio and print stories for working journalists too busy for that part of the process. I shot primary video for CBC at an astronomical hourly rate. I shot music videos for CMT on the cheap.

I was nineteen, and I was full of hustle. In my downtime I’d watch CSI on DVD on a constant loop – the only thing I owned, in the days before streaming. Science-driven crime drama played in my dorm room twenty-four seven.

And then one day my department head, Don, came to me with an assignment he said was “just for me.” I didn’t get what he meant. I think, in retrospect, he meant, “no bullshit.”

The Police had booked out the college for an instructive seminar on interrogation. They’d rented our big lecture hall and they had some big-wig hired to come in an talk to the local squad about it, and they were going to do these mock demonstrations. The demonstrations, they’d get up on the stage, two at a time, and one would pretend to be the cop and one would pretend to be the criminal, and one would interrogate the other until they broke.

And they wanted all that filmed, so that they could go back over it and watch it and re-train themselves and make sure the training was consistent throughout the force.

I said sure. Sounded like fun. I was an aspiring crime writer, this could be good research.

So I set up to film a police lecture for three days for a middle-of-the-road pay scale. There were worse uses of a long weekend.

It was rough from the start, though. The lecturer was the sort that liked to do call-and-response where he’d lead the attendees to a point and then pose that point as a question, and no matter what, he would not say the answer or move on. He would let it hang there. And shattering my first impression of police, they were all timid as fuck. Not one of them would speak up when called on. As an adult I get that they were forced to be there and bored, but honestly at the time they just seemed dim. The instructor would ask some blatant, obvious question. I can’t recall what anymore, but on the equivalent level of “what is four plus four?” and he’d let that hang there and not move on, and the cops they’d shuffle uncomfortably and send side-eye looks at each other. Like none of them wanted to be seen as the keener that knew. And I am a keener, so an unanswered question is like bugs crawling in my chest. Eventually I’d just be like “eight?” And they’d turn and look at me like they’d forgot I was there.

They weren’t math questions though, they were police questions. They were basic reading comprehension questions. “You have to tell people what they’re being charged with when you arrest them in Canada. So if you’re arresting them, what’s something you should do?” Crickets.

And to this day, I’m not sure if the cops in that room couldn’t answer that basic reading-comprehension-style questions where the answer is in the question, or, if the entire squad was made of the type of bro-types who didn’t want to be seen getting the answer right in high school, because only dorks is smart. And to this day, I’m still not sure which answer is worse.

So that was the lecture day, and that was already bad enough. When they were leaving one of them slapped me on the ass and called me sonny-boy and said I had to learn it didn’t always pay to look smart. He was about fifty I think.

But then the mock-interrogations started and… sweet fuck.

Things like this have always seemed stupid to me, these scenario trainings. I’ve never understood the point. Because they don’t in any way train you for the reality of the situation, they can’t. Because in this “mock interrogation” there was a cop pretending to be a cop and he was trying to get information out of a cop pretending to be a criminal… but they both have the same goal, right? Like they “pass” if the fake criminal gives himself up, both of them. It’s not adversarial, and the whole point of the interrogation process is that it was adversarial… right?

So I spent my Saturday watching grown men play the most boring game of cops and robbers I have ever seen in my life. And remember from Day One, all of them are reluctant to speak. So these two men sit across from each other and one says “you did it, didn’t you?” and they both win if the guy says yes, and they both lose if the guy says no. Which is the opposite of real life. The cop playing the crook, he’s not going to spit at you. He’s not going to out your mother. He’s not going be obstructive and just sit there and not say anything for hours on end. He’s going to cooperate, because both parties really have the same goal.

So I’m in about the eighth hour of this and bored as fuck, when this one guy gets up, this youngish cop who had been stationed up in Labrador. Not sure where he’d been from originally. He’d played the role of the criminal a few times, now it was his turn to be the cop. And they’re going through this exercise and he breaks character all at once and he turns to the camera and the instructor and he says “Are we allowed to take other things as a confession?”

And I remember looking up from my lens, and for the first time, the instructor has the same tone as me and he says “what?”

Well, says the guy, he’s stationed up in Labrador. He has to deal with them a lot, he said. The people native to that part of the province, he said, they’d developed a secret language of winks and nods and twitches that were almost imperceptible to “white eyes,” he said. In their department, he said, if they asked one of them if they were guilty and they didn’t say anything but they twitched a certain way or sniffed a certain way, he inferred that as a confession in their “secret tongue” and marked down in the report that they’d confessed.

You know, like a lie.

The colour had gone out of me at some point, right around “white eyes” I think, and when I looked at the instructor he looked the same. He sounded like there wasn’t any moisture in his mouth all of a sudden. “No,” he said finally, “no it has to be in English, and if they don’t speak English, you’ve got to get someone in that speaks their language.

But I swear to God, the creepiest thing? I don’t think he was lying. I think, God help me, I think he really thought that, that the people native to his region spoke in some secret language of twitches that only he could see and could interpret as he saw fit. In retrospect, I wish I’d used the weird tilt of his head to close the book on every open investigation on the books. Pretty sure he killed JFK and MLK, Malcolm X, and every unsolved murder in North America. I read his confession in the tilt, don’t you know?

So that was day two, and that was bad enough. But then, sweet lord, Day Three.

So Day Three they’re going over the footage from the last day, and they’re kind of doing a play-by-play. “Here’s what you could have done different,” the instructor would pause and say, and use each missed moment as a teachable one. That worked, that was smart, and it gave some credit to the prior day’s activities.

And then he paused the tape at some point and he points to the pretending-cop on the screen and he says “Now here, here would be a prime opportunity to put some fear in him. Nothing is scarier than new technology.” He asked if they watched shows like Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and CSI. They said sure, of course they did. “You every watch the credits and see how they’re all produced in consultation with the police” he asked, they all nodded. “But none of them are at all realistic to how we actually police, you ever wonder why that is? We tell them to put shit in because most people – most people you deal with in the public – are too stupid to know that that shit isn’t real. All science seems magical to them, they don’t know what’s possible and what’s not, so we get those shows to put in things we can use.”

“Everyone’s scared of satellites now,” he said, “you can tell them you got the image of them exiting the crime scene off satellite. Say we’ve been doing it more and more since 9/11. Say we’re watching some areas and we caught them, on camera, their plates, committing the crime.”

I knew that episode. Season 2 Episode 17 of CSI: Felonious Monk.

“You can tell them you found their hair at the scene,” he said. “And you might have, but honestly it takes minutes on TV for the tests to come back, when really it takes months or years. So just tell them the test came back and get the confession. You don’t even need to run the test then, we know the answer.”

Every other episode of CSI.

“Fingerprints, it used to be. You used to be able to say it was fingerprints. The problem is, fingerprints are real science. You can see it with your eyes, anyone can. They teach it in school now. It’s too knowable. It’s got to be something that scares them, something they can’t see like DNA. You tell them you got their DNA, they’ll confess.”

“But what if they’re innocent?” I heard myself say, and again, all eyes turned to me like they forgot I was there.

The instructor, he smiled smug. “Nobody would confess if they were innocent.”

But you said you were dealing with the uneducated, I thought, but didn’t say.

Day One? Stupid, and proudly so. Day Two? Racist. Day Three? Liars.

Stupid, racist, liars.

It was hard to watch CSI after that. Every new technology, every crime-fighting gadget they came out with, it was so clear it was just road-testing another lie they could sell. The most watched show on TV, the show everyone watched and talked about, propaganda evangelizing a mysterious new tech that could magically catch criminals. And the criminals were always bad on CSI, they had to be. The science said so.

I got more choosy with my jobs after that.

I wonder if they still use those videos anywhere.