At The Ready
I feel like this is an interesting topic for a documentary, a high school program near El Paso, TX that is kind of a vocational program for future police, correctional and border patrol officers, but I'm not sure this is a particularly interesting treatment of that topic. It opts for fairly observational most of the time, which makes some of the times when it seems to be stressing points play worse than if it was more didactic. One notable thing about the students in the focus here is that they are overwhelmingly Latinos. This creates a certain natural tension around the border patrol and immigration. The film also works in at least one particularly more liberal student who is a closeted lesbian and also feels a bit more alienated over concerns about police violence. Certainly I noticed the prominence of the Thin Blue Line flag in multiple classrooms here.
This program, as one example of what should be a broader array of vocational education opportunities, is a great opportunity for economic advancement as policing careers have very solid pay relative to the education required. And I think there is a ACAB problem where certain segments consider police officer a taboo identity (The NYT had a story recently about a woman ousted from her band for dating a (female) police officer). If you don't create space for people who broadly share your values or identities to become police officers, you guarantee that police officers will be exclusively drawn from the antithesis. I had a documentary a year or two ago in a film festival that tied into the findings that diversifying police forces actually does have positive effects.
Of course, the usual counterpoint to those kind of reformation hopes are from abolitionists who basically feel the whole institution of policing is so broken that it will taint anyone it touches. Watching the training offered to this group of non-white, fairly gender balanced students, one does get some fears of that. I'm not sure that the teachers who find themselves in these programs are necessarily there because they are really good at passing along best practices. Sometimes it feels like they are passing on views and values that are likely to create problems among this next generation of cops that have made police such a political issue. It's so tricky to break generational patterns when the training is structured to cascade down through the generations.