These accounts are from Michael A. Wood, Jr., a retired Baltimore police officer and Marine Corp. veteran. He has becoming one of the biggest critics of modern day policing and a proponent for change. He has also become a social pariah in the police community.
Wood has been on the front line of the modern day “Drug War” and gives damning accounts of how the police in this country are programmed to operate. In an interview on the radio show “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Wood details how he had personally instructed other officers, as a unit shift commander, to stop pulling over old white people and cute white girls and focus on black males.
Wood goes on to explain how he came to realize that he was perpetuating a cycle of institutionalized racism, which puts poverty-stricken young black males into a continuous grinder called “the system.”
Wood also offers a simple solution: empathy. He tells the story of how he found his empathy while interrogating a young suspect and then later while doing drug surveillance in an abandoned building. He had his epiphany while watching how different and normal life was in black neighborhoods when there was no police presence.
Even when he was watching drug dealers interact with their families, children playing, people going to work, he saw a much different world than the one he witnessed when he rolled through the neighborhood with his lights flashing.
The answer Wood talks about is basically called “Community Policing.” And it works, as an openly gay police chief named Chris Magnus in Richmond, California can attest to.
Most liberals already know the facts Wood shares in this interview with Joe Rogan. Most conservatives put their fingers in their ears and say things like “You don’t understand what it’s like to be a police officer, you’ve never walked in their shoes!”
Well, Wood has walked in both police shoes and soldier boots, so I will be very curious to see how the dismiss the things he has to say.
This interview is a full confession, including some of the crimes done by police officers that he had both witnessed and participated in. Wood describes a culture that should be indefensible for most conservatives.
In fact, to my knowledge Wood has yet to be invited to appear on any conservative radio or TV show. It’s kind of weird isn’t it? I mean Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity love to bring on professors and activists without any police experience in order to “debate” them alongside former police officers, but they have not tried to “debate” Wood? After listening to this interview you’ll quickly understand why.
This interview is an eye-opening account into modern day policing, to say the least. Most cops do not like this guy. And the “good cops” who do agree with him are probably smart enough to keep their support anonymous. The Joe Crystal story and other stories like his have taught “good cops” to keep their mouths shut.
You can watch the full interview with the former cop here; it’s over two hours but its well worth the time. If you agree with this man, do me a favor? Make his story viral. People need to hear this man. There’s a short clip of the interview below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDIpvO8w5LY
