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When did you start to become politicized regarding the law enforcement field?

Fourteen months into my career. I had made what we commonly refer to as an attitude arrest -- I didn't like the guy, so I arrested him. I wish I could put it in a prettier way, but the fact is that he challenged my authority. He was 19, and I was 22. I stopped him for driving slightly over the speed limit. I really didn't have strong justification to stop him in the first place.

He got out of the car and immediately gave me a ration of shit, and [the] little part inside my brain that was becoming accustomed to this clicked. I [started] trying to find a reason to bust him, and I did. To call it a shaky arrest is to put myself in a charitable light.

What was the reason for the arrest?

I arrested him for being drunk in a public place. Of course, we decriminalized public intoxication absent of other...criminal behavior many years back. But in those days, it was a crime. It was a bailable offense -- if you pay your $29 bail, you don't go to court, and that's the end of it.

But this guy decided to go to court. As I said, he was 19 years old, and I thought he had a chip on his shoulder. I showed up in court with him and I gave the prosecutor a wink and a poke...I slid up and [told] him it was a slim arrest; I said, "You'll probably want to dismiss this one." He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "Well, he had a shitty attitude."

He asked, "Was he drunk?"

The question in my mind was, "What the hell does that have to do with anything?" That was honestly how I felt. I was like, why is this prosecutor giving me the third degree?

When I said, "No, he wasn't drunk, but he had a really shitty attitude and he called me a pig," the prosecutor glared at me -- I'll never forget this moment -- through his tortoiseshell glasses, and said, "Officer Stamper, does the United States Constitution mean anything to you?"

I was enraged — 'What gives him the right to question me?' He works in this sanitized, air-conditioned environment, and if he's got a question about law or policies he can go to colleagues and books...while I'm out there on the streets in blue line (though it was a tan line in those days).

I was scared to death. I was scared that he would report me to the department, but that wasn't my big fear. The biggest fear was 'Oh my God, I didn't think this way, and I certainly didn't behave this way, before I joined the police department.'

I believed in civil rights, I believed in human rights. I believed, as a matter of fact, that the police were pretty useless and oppressive. I didn't have high regard for the police before I became one, and yet five months down the road I'm saying things and doing things I've never said or done in my life.

So it was a defining moment, which...helped trigger a profound change in me. It reintroduced me to some earlier values, and it radically altered my behavior.

It was at that moment, at about 14 months into the job, that I set out to atone for the way I had behaved. I had to acknowledge how much I enjoyed throwing people around. I had to confess to myself that it was great fun, and what did that say about me?

That vague sense of joy that was associated with screwing people around -- did it go away?

Well, it wasn't vague. To be completely honest, it was unalloyed.

I had turned my back on some pretty deeply-held values...I had to work to -- I know this sounds very woo-woo -- but to get in touch with what I stood for. In that process I clearly did not like what I saw. I was behaving like my father, and starting around age 13, I put as much distance between [him] and myself as possible.

Anyway, it sounds pretty psychological, but that's what was going on for me, and then I became more and more political....