‘Anyone can kill you at any time’
In defeat, the group bent its narrative to remain relevant — and endure as a potentially deadly menace.
“Everyone you meet here would be happy to kill you,” Officer Murphy told me.“That’s what you have to remember.” It was my first night as a patrol officer, and Murphy was showing me the ropes.
“Everyone? You think even the little old ladies here want to kill me?” I asked.
Murphy gave me a tight smile. “All right, almost everyone. But you have to watch out for some of these old ladies.”
It wasn’t the first time I had heard this sentiment. When I joined the Reserve Corps of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, I went through the same police academy training as full-time career officers, and it often seemed that the primary lesson of our training was the same one Murphy tried to drive home on my first post-academy patrol shift: Anyone can kill you at any time.
At the academy, we learned that there were a thousand ways for cops to be hurt or killed. Unwitting police officers conducted traffic stops, only to be gunned down by meth addicts previously invisible behind dark-tinted rear windows. They were overpowered by combative suspects who grabbed their service weapons and shot them in the head, and beaten to death by crazed PCP addicts who kept right on pummeling them despite being repeatedly Tasered. They were poisoned, strangled and pushed off the roofs of tall buildings.
The dead cops were all heroes. But, our instructors quietly intimated, they were also failures. Mostly, we were told, they died because they weren’t prepared.
They let down their guard. They interviewed domestic violence suspects in their kitchens, forgetting that kitchens are full of weapons — until the suspect grabbed a butcher knife from a drawer and stabbed them in the heart! They told the meek-looking elderly driver to go ahead and retrieve his registration and insurance, figuring he was harmless — until he shot them in the neck with the gun he pulled from the glove compartment!
“Never forget,” the instructors told us, “you have a right to go home safe.” Going home safe after each shift was an achievable goal, but it required constantly reminding yourself of the police mantra: “There’s no such thing as a routine call.” Any situation could turn lethal in an instant.
There’s plenty of truth to this. Just weeks before I began my police academy training, Ashley Guindon, a young officer in a neighboring jurisdiction, was shot and killed while responding to a domestic violence call — on her first day on the job. It happens.
But statistically, being a police officer is not nearly as dangerous as most cops imagine. Contrary to popular mythology, policing is not even close to being the nation’s most dangerous job; that honor typically goes to logging, fishing, roofing,
As I went through training at the police academy, the primary message seemed to be: Any situation can turn lethal in an instant.
refuse collection and a range of other unglamorous occupations. Granted, few people shoot at roofers or fishermen, but even when it comes to intentional homicide, policing isn’t as dangerous as, say, being a taxi driver; taxi and limousine drivers are about twice as likely to be murdered on the job as cops. In 2019, just 48 U.S. police officers were “feloniously killed,” according to FBI statistics. (In contrast, roughly a thousand people a year are shot by American police.)
The commonly held police conviction that everyone they meet poses a potential threat has lethal side effects — not for cops, but for ordinary Americans. When you’re trained to believe that threats can come from anywhere, you start seeing threats everywhere. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, a person reaching into a pocket during an encounter with police is doing so for innocuous reasons — but police training tends to encourage a fixation on the one time in a thousand that someone is reaching for a weapon, making cops prone to overreact whenever anyone reaches into a pocket (or a glove compartment, or a backpack), and inevitably making some cops decide that it’s safer to just pull the trigger.
This is a big part of why police in America end up killing so many people. (It’s far from the only reason, but it’s a reason that’s frequently overlooked.) Most encounters between police officers and members of the public contain a degree of uncertainty and ambiguity, and sometimes officers make mistakes when assessing the degree of threat (especially when racial bias comes into play). But at the moment, both police culture and the law push the cost of police mistakes onto members of the public.
That’s the opposite of the way it should be. Police officers take risks in the course of their duties, but they’re trained and paid to take risks, and the costs of their mistakes shouldn’t be borne by ordinary members of the public.
One way to fix this is for law enforcement training to focus far less on the tiny percentage of situations in which officers face lethal threats, and far more on how officers can further reduce the already small percentage of dangerous encounters. Deescalation skills can help officers defuse tense situations; implicit bias training can make officers less likely to perceive threats where none exist; and good tactical training can teach officers when to slow down and back off, creating the time and space for thoughtful responses instead of panicky reflexes.
Instead of constantly reminding officers that they have “a right to go home safe,” police training should focus on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe too. Cops have every right to defend themselves in the face of genuine danger — but their mission, first and foremost, should be protecting residents of the communities they serve.
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City,” which draws on her four years as a reserve police officer in Washington, D.C.
It would be a mistake to believe that the election of Joseph R. Biden as president will silence the QAnon movement. Adherents of the conspiracy theory made former President Trump into a quasi-religious figure, and when he lost the November election it forced them to confront a reality that challenged the essence of their belief system. So they did what cults often do — and bent their narrative.
Instead of admitting defeat, some QAnon followers are promoting a new convoluted conspiracy theory with the outcome they desire: Trump will once again be sworn in as president of the United States on March 4.
The most radical QAnon believers exhibit traits that have manifested among dangerous cults and doomsday groups — a willingness to dismiss their own individuality for a perceived greater good. These disciples often shun their families and friends in favor of QAnon fantasies. They identify with a calling to participate in a movement and share a belief that they are improving society, or themselves, in a new way. Members of the QAnon movement seem to truly believe they are fighting a secret cabal of elites who are engaged in the exploitation of children. Believers often wear clothes adorned with the letter “Q” and use slogans such as “Where we go one, we go all” as mantras to illustrate their commitment to a belief system.
Despite repeated predictions associated with the QAnon movement proving to be false — such as the arrival of an apocalyptic storm that would destroy the “deep state” during Trump’s presidency — the conspiracy theory continues to captivate followers by morphing its messaging to remain relevant. For more than a decade, I had observed that phenomenon as a federal government official charged with sanctioning groups and individuals as “terrorists.” By examining classified and unclassified research, I came to know the vicissitudes of ethno-nationalist separatists, religiously motivated extremists, left- and right-wing radicals and cults.
The followers of Q — an anonymous figure thought to be an individual or a group of people — more than fit the pattern. The QAnon movement has successfully blended elements of religious and cult-like practices to harden QAnon individual belief systems of its most ardent supporters. Because of this, I remain highly concerned that the QAnon movement constitutes a significant national security threat.
In 2017, Q began anonymously
posting conspiracy theories. The first one purported to explain that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested and her passport had been flagged in case she tried to flee the U.S. It was relatively straightforward, and wrong. Future posts, known as Q-drops, were inchoate. Q’s followers, some of whom attracted large social media followings, would feverishly try to decrypt Q’s riddles. Over time, the posts and decryptions began to take on more religious and violent overtones. And, ominously, they began to attract more followers.
Most cults have easily identifiable leadership figures who push members to the edifice of a belief system, but Q remains ethereal even while delivering messages to the faithful for four years. Trump’s outsized presence brought him a messianic-like following within the movement. Together, Q and Trump are an ample substitute for a clear cult-like figure. According to the most zealous of believers, if Trump or Q say something, it must be true — or eventually will be.
And if someone cannot see the so-called truth, they aren’t looking hard enough. A refrain among QAnon adherents I track online is “dig deeper.” The phrase is often uttered by seemingly hardcore believers and is directed at those who begin to question the conspiracy theory or say they cannot see it.
In 2020, amid a global pandemic and a contentious U.S. presidential race, the QAnon conspiracy theory took on even more sinister overtones. The language of QAnon began to parallel that of previous cult leaders who had encouraged followers to take another step forward toward full indoctrination — a step that could result in selfharm or staging an attack.
For example, after one of the cofounders
of the Heaven’s Gate cult died, the other began preaching about taking followers to the “Next Level,” a science-fiction version of the afterlife. To explain the unexpected death of his co-founder, he began sermonizing that his followers’ bodies were unimportant vessels that they would shed upon reaching their final destination. He blended aspects of New Age science and evangelical Christianity to persuade them to go on one final trip, which ended with a mass suicide by 39 cult members in 1997.
Like the Heaven’s Gate cult, the QAnon community brandishes religious imagery and repurposes theories to fit new truths. Q’s theory about an impending storm where global elites are vanquished is a recurring end-times scenario in many religions, including Christianity. The predicted storm is still coming, they now say, when Trump retakes power on March 4.
When the Rajneesh Movement emerged in the 1970s, it used spirituality to cultivate a mass following, much like QAnon does. Leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was known for saying variations of “I was asleep, and I am awake, and you can be awake also.” This message is echoed in the QAnon concept of a “Great Awakening,” a single event where people will become enlightened and see the truth. Ultimately, Rajneesh’s followers turned to violence, poisoning salad bars in 1984 as part of a failed plan to depress voter turnout in an Oregon election. It was the first documented bioterrorism attack in the United States.
The Rajneesh movement’s overarching philosophy — to awaken the masses and then steal an election — could have served as a blueprint for the many QAnon members who stormed the Capitol Jan. 6 in an act of politically motivated violence with the objective of gaining power.
Like the cults that came before them, the followers of QAnon see great purpose in what they do — they believe they are saving God’s children. When March 4 comes and goes, and President Biden remains firmly in power, the threat of violence by QAnon conspiracists will persist. They’ll simply shift their narrative, hatch new plots and repurpose old ones — and endure as a potentially deadly menace.
is a professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism and a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center.