Are cops the same everywhere?

I was walking in Memphis after attending a memorial celebrating the birthday of Tyre Nichols, a young photographer and skateboarder who was beaten to death by police during an illegal stop.

During my walk, I saw a man in the back of a police car, in clear distress. I went to check on him. The cops yelled at me to go away. I started filming and asked why I was being ordered to leave a public sidewalk. “Justice for Tyre! Justice for Tyre!” the man in the back of the police car yelled as they drove away. The cops kept yelling at me, then cuffed me, tightly, and took me to jail.

It was awful. As a spoiled white girl, I’m used to charming my way out of most problems, but damn: neither the arresting cops nor jail staff were open to my friendly banter. In fact, anytime I opened my mouth during the 14 hours at the Shelby County East jail for women, they threw me in the holding tank.

“EXCUSE ME MA’AM!” I demanded petulantly. “Can I have your name and badge number!?”

She laughed at me.

“You are a public servant!” I continued.

She laughed at me some more. “Girl, shut your sass mouth. You’re going to the holding tank.”

A few days after my charges were dismissed (Thanks Mike Working, ESQ!) I FaceTimed with my parents in California.

“Mom,” I said. “You’re the only person in our family who’s never been to jail. Why are you such a nerd?”

She sighed. “It’s my curse in life, as a law-abiding citizen, to be surrounded by people with criminal tendencies,” she said, maybe, jokingly.

In the late 1980s, in Communist Bulgaria, a satellite state of the Soviet Union, my Dad sassed a cop and got thrown in jail. Usually, the outcome of talking shit to a Communist cop, as he had, was a year of forced brick-laying in some village. My Dad is an aerospace engineer, but his childhood in a small Bulgarian town made him no stranger to manual labor. Still, it was not an ideal situation. Luckily, at his trial, the charges were dismissed. The regime was in its final stages, and authorities were worried that a rebellion would get them Nicolae Ceausescu’d. So they were in a mood to practice extreme caution and lenience.

Long before this, my grandmother went to jail in Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, after getting caught trying to illegally escape Bulgaria. My grandma hid in the trunk of a car, but she got caught and sent to the slammer.

And my grandfather, LOL, this crazy motherfucker: he spent 5 years in a brutal Stalinist gulag after getting caught trying to escape the country through the Turkish border. When Stalin died, the gulag closed. He got out. Then he tried to escape the country again, and got caught again, at the Yugoslavian border. He was turned over to the Bulgarian police in exchange for a skinny cow. See, the border police had a deal where for each escapee they caught, and gave back to the Bulgarian police, they’d get a cow in return. “For 10 skinny cows, they took me and the other escapees back to Hell,” he wrote in a notebook late in life. “The police interrogated us. But they were uncouth simpletons!” he snootily added. A few years after that, he got caught again, this time at the border with Greece, where he almost got shot when he encountered a border officer during a blizzard. Back to prison for a few more years.

Then there’s my uncle Tsvetan, named after my grandmother, Tsvetana, who I am also named after (people, if you don’t want your kids to get in trouble with the law, name them John or Jennifer, not Tsvetan or Tsvetana).

Uncle Tsvetan likes to say, “Most people learn from other people’s mistakes. I don’t even learn from my own mistakes!!” My cousin Alexandrina, his daughter, rolls her eyes at these melodramatic statements. Uncle Tsvetan spent a lot of time in both Bulgarian and American prisons (people, name your kids John, not Tsvetan). Uncle Tsvetan says that unlike Communist Bulgarian prison, U.S. jails are like being on vacation. “They feed you and you just sit there, eating free food. It’s great!”

Hey, I’m weaker than uncle Tsvetan. The “food” I got was so disgusting, it me me dry heave and throw up.

Here's my point: I can’t think of a different policing system than Communist Bulgaria, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—and policing in America in 2023.

Yet, they are similar. Most officers come from working-class families. People from rich families become lawyers, asshole politicians, academics, whatever—not cops in the U.S.

During the Bulgarian Communist regime, the people who became police officers came from the boondocks: crappy villages, where police work was their only way out. This dynamic made a minority of them kind; and a majority became giant assholes with power complexes and massive chips on their shoulders. Sound familiar?

In the US, now, this is also the case. Men with hero complexes, and an understandable desire for a good retirement, usually become firefighters, not cops. Most cops who work for the NYPD are white guys from upstate New York. To get them used to policing Black neighborhoods, the top brass has them arrest POC kids for marijuana.

Isn’t it interesting that police, across countries and historical eras, are mostly the same?

Would love thoughts in the comments!

xoxo,

Tana