[Thread] 1. My uncle Rod was a Dallas cop for 25 years. He decried police brutality by other cops but was was abusive himself. He used the n-word, not just in confrontations with black citizens but sometimes thru his car speaker ("pull over or you're a dead n---.").

2. Uncle Rod used to tell black jokes and do the "black voice" as he told them. He presented himself to me and my younger brother as one of the "good cops." Serpico was one of his favorite films. He relocated to Dallas from NYC and joked about "rednecks."

3. He was respectful of women and to my knowledge never had any issues with his GFs or, later, his wife. He was cultured. Directed the department's choir, saw art house movies. Going for that whole Serpico bohemian liberal cop thing. But he was racist and a bully, too.

4. This was over 25 years ago. He retired in the early 90s after he was booking a white guy from the suburbs who got drunk at the West End marketplace and stomped on Rod's foot with his cowboy boot during booking, breaking his instep.

5. The baseline of "good cop" in the 70s--90s was low. There were guys on the force with Rod who were much worse. One officer, M.D. "mad dog" Cosby, had multiple shootings of black men on his record. Local black politicians tried for years to get rid of him. Finally succeeded.

6. I think a lot about how Rod, despite his adoration of Pacino's Serpico, never once filed a complaint against any of those vastly more brutal cops, and in fact stood in solitary with them whenever they were under investigation. Rod with his art house films and opera recordings.

7. I look at the news right now and I think that Uncle Rod probably wouldn't be the one driving police vehicles through crowds of pedestrians and macing people from car windows. But he would absolutely be in the passenger seat, and probably in court months later, lying.

8. Rod was a "good cop" in the sense that he bled blue and was loyal to all the other guys on the force even if they did heinous or illegal things. So how good of a cop was he, really? How good can you be when you throw down with the gang instead of the law?

9. Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: Rod knew his brother, my stepfather, was beating up my mom on the regular and never did shit about it, except for the occasional talking-to ("You gotta get the drinking under control," etc).

10. I get retroactively angry at Rod, perhaps more so than my stepfather, when I think about how he let the abuse go on for all those years and never did anything about it, despite being a police officer himself, and "one of the good ones," in his mind.

11. Rod wasn't going to get his brother entangled with the law, even though Rod WAS the law. Just like he was never going to get within 500 miles of cosigning any kind of complaint by a citizen accusing another officer of illegality, excessive force, etc.

12. Rod died of cancer several years after leaving the force. At his funeral everybody talked about what a good cop he was. A great human being. I saw a man who swaggered and puffed his chest out and cultivated an air of educated East Coast gravitas. But was part of the problem.

13. How good of a cop, how good of a person, was Uncle Rod if he was a racist, let his brother abuse my mother for years, and never stood with the people against all the "bad cops" he said he disapproved of? Serpico would have had no use for Rod.

14. I bet there are a lot of older Dallas citizens, especially citizens of color and "rednecks," who would paint a far less flattering picture of my Uncle Rod than I just did, and I feel nothing but disappointment and anger when I think about him.

15. When I watch footage of police using mace and cars on protestors, shooting rubber bullets at the heads of protesters & journalists, and shoving small women to the pavement, I wonder if Rod would've done that. Maybe. He definitely would've lied in court if his partner did it.