[ROUGH CUT EARLY RELEASE] They Don’t Want Protectors. They Want Wolves With Badges.
A Joke in Class, a Warning in Hindsight
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Decades ago, in a criminal justice class, my instructor tossed out a scenario to a room of mostly male students: “What if you came home and found your wife with another woman?” His tone was nonchalant with a grin. The class wasn’t sure whether to laugh, grin, or just stare at each other for a beat to see what the correct response was. At the time, I took it as quirky, even funny, just a provocative hypothetical from a guy who liked getting a reaction. In hindsight, it reads less like humor and more like early conditioning. It taught us what was really allowed to animate the room: the straight male porn script of two women together, treated as entertainment, while professionalism and respect sat off to the side. Even the framing, a husband “coming home” to his wife’s transgression, carried entitlement and a just a lil whiff of payback. It was the kind of moment you laugh at in your twenties and then, years later, you realize it was rehearsing a power reflex.
Same teacher, different class, the other moment that haunts me now wasn’t something another student said. It was me. I brought up Serpico, because I wanted to talk about corruption, about what happens to the one person who refuses to go along, about the cost of telling the truth inside a closed culture. The instructor