FOURTEEN police recruits sit in nervous anticipation, wearing crisp blue uniforms and polished badges that they have yet to earn.
“Police Academy; ten-hut!” a sergeant barks from the back of the classroom. Chairs skid backward on the scarred floor as the class jumps to attention; backs stiff, chins high, arms locked.
Police Chief M. David Hooper, flanked by the top officers of the Roanoke Police Department, walks into the room.
It is the first day of the 36th Basic Academy, and Hooper is here to welcome the recruits to what lies ahead: 14 weeks of mental and physical testing that will make or break a cop.
Scanning the fresh faces of the recruits, Hooper sees a class like none before.
Seven of the 14 are black; one is a woman. They are here because City Council – responding to community complaints about the lack of blacks on the police force – hired extra police officers to create a special academy class that is the most racially mixed in the history of Roanoke.
If everyone in the class makes it to a graduation ceremony next year, it will nearly double the number of black officers in the Police Department.
But first, the recruits must survive the next 14 weeks.
“We hope that you do, but we’re realistic enough to recognize that some of you may not,” Hooper told the class.
To get this far, the recruits have endured a series of written tests, physical exams, background checks, interviews and psychological testing. But as with every other class, Hooper said, that is not enough.
“Whether or not you have the desire and the determination, we don’t know.”
“Whether or not you have the temperament and the restraint, we don’t know.”
“Whether or not you have the motivation, we don’t know.”
“Through this academy, we will make those determinations.”
This is no art course
For the next 3 1/2 months, the recruits will follow a structured schedule.
At 7:45 each morning, they line up for inspection under the watchful eye of Sgt. J.W. Slusher. Something as minor as a scuffed shoe or a wrinkled shirt could get the day off to a bad start.
At 8 a.m., class begins in a large, second-floor room of a Kirk Avenue office building that was once a television studio.
Lecture topics change – the history of law enforcement, search-and-seizure laws, narcotics, how to write a crime report, interpersonal communications, radio use, officer survival – but one thing remains the same: Every Friday morning, there is a test.
Recruits must maintain at least a 75 percent average on the tests, and then pass a final examination, to complete the academy’s classroom requirements.
Every test question that is missed is asked again, and again, until it is answered correctly.
“If you’re taking an art appreciation class and you confuse Monet with Manet, it might not make a difference in the rest of your life,” said Lt. William L. Althoff, head of the Police Academy. “But if you’re a police officer and you confuse something about search-and-seizure law, it could make a difference in someone’s constitutional rights.”
There is more to the academy than classroom instruction.
At 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday, the recruits head to the department’s shooting range off Shenandoah Avenue for an hour of physical training – not as tough as boot camp, veterans say, but tough enough.
Fridays are killers. After completing the weekly test, recruits head for the shooting range at 1 p.m. for four hours of running, jumping, stretching and straining.
To complete the academy’s minimum physical requirements, recruits must run the mile in seven minutes or less, run three miles in 25 minutes or less, sprint 220 yards in 30 seconds or less, climb a 15-foot rope in 12 seconds or less, and do at least seven chinups, 20 pushups and 45 situps.
After 14 weeks of training, the recruits will still have a lot to learn. Those lessons must be learned on the street.
“There are a million things a police officer needs to know, and he can’t learn them all here,” Althoff said.
“You put on a uniform and walk down the street, and immediately people expect a great deal from you – from solving their personal problems to telling them where the Shenandoah Building is.”
While this class may have been created for special reasons, Althoff said, they will receive no special treatment.
“I’m not here to push anybody through,” he said, “but I’m not here to push anybody out, either.”
`I might not go home’
The recruits’ eyes widen as M.A. Lee, a vice bureau detective, plops a plastic bag containing $110,000 worth of crack cocaine onto the classroom table.
“Crack is what you’re going to be living with from now on,” said K.L. Wood, another vice detective teaching the session on narcotics and dangerous drugs.
A cop on the street isn’t likely to come across such a mother lode as this, a bag filled with pure cocaine that was seized at the airport last summer as part of an organized crackdown on smuggling.
But it can be just as exhilarating, Wood said, to grab a few small “rocks” of crack before a panicked drug dealer flushes them down the toilet.
“If you can find one or two pieces of crack floating in the toilet, you’re the happiest person in the world,” Wood said.
During a 6 1/2-hour lecture, Wood and Lee offered some practical tricks of the trade. “When you search a motel room, get down on your back and slide under the sink,” Wood advised. Drug dealers sometimes tape their goods to the bottom of the sink.
But they also gave the recruits an overview of just how bad the crack problem is in Roanoke.
As police officers, they said, be prepared to deal with addicts so strung out that they are nothing more than walking zombies. “You’re going to meet a lot of them out there,” Wood said. “It’ll be 30 degrees below zero, and they’ll be wandering around on Patton Avenue.”
Be prepared to see women selling their bodies for crack – like the successful clothing-store owner whom police once found in a crack house.
“Basically she was a crack whore,” Wood said. “Having sex with anybody who would give her the price of a rock.”
But most importantly, they said, be prepared for the guns that most drug dealers carry as part of a dangerous, sometimes deadly business.
“You always have to think: I might not go home tonight,” Lee said. “Don’t take anything for granted.”
The macho days are over
On Friday, Oct. 25, three days before the official first day of the Police Academy, the recruits gathered at the shooting range for a taste of what is to come.
As they sat on bleachers covered with coal dust and grime from the nearby railroad and scrap-metal plant, Sgt. G.C. Hurley raised his voice to be heard over the drone of heavy machinery.
Wearing mirror sunglasses and a whistle around his neck, Hurley is the drill sergeant who will lead the class through 14 weeks of rugged physical training.
“I’m sure all of you have heard certain things about what is expected of you out here,” he said.
Most of it is true.
While a police officer on the job might never have to climb a 15-foot rope in 12 seconds, he is likely to confront an obstacle just as challenging.
“We can’t put that kind of pressure on them in a classroom situation,” the academy’s Lt. Althoff said. “But we can put some of that pressure on them through physical training.”
Here on the shooting range, the recruits will come the closest to the actual nitty-gritty of police work: wrestling in one-on-one combat, shooting at targets in the dark, dealing with disorderly people in staged confrontations.
But while force is sometimes necessary, the recruits are taught that it should only be used as a last resort.
“The days of the macho police officer are over,” Hurley said. “We’re not out there to kick ass and take names. We’re out there to do a job and perform a service the best way we know how.”