It’s a new era for the Phoenix Police Department, as Matt Giordano took over as chief on Aug. 11.
Giordano’s tenure begins with the department in transition, following a Department of Justice investigation which found, among other things, that officers routinely used excessive force and discriminated against the city’s Black and Latino population.
Given the department’s troubled reputation, I found myself curious about what life as a cop is like for officers of color.
For one answer to the question of what life as a police officer is like in the department with a troubled reputation, Officer Dujhan Brown — who’s been in law enforcement for over a decade — sat down with The Show. He shared what made him decide to become a cop, and what he makes of how the Phoenix police is perceived.
The conversation is, of course, just one person’s perspective — he was speaking for himself, not the entire Police Department.
It actually starts with a coincidence that has nothing to do with policing; when he was in college, a casting crew from MTV visited his campus, and on a whim, Brown and a friend went to the auditions.
KJZZ’s “Policing the Police” series examines the U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation of Phoenix by section, as well as the city’s efforts to self-impose reforms.
Full conversation
DUJHAN BROWN: My friend got casted. I got casted, so we were on the show to be boyfriend-girlfriend and then the air at the show. Very thankful to get that opportunity.
SAM DINGMAN: So were you studying acting at the time?
BROWN: No, I was actually going to school for criminal justice. I wanted to be a lawyer.
DINGMAN: So then from there you kind of got bit by the bug, or?
BROWN: I did. I definitely, and I tried my best to live in LA and to do the acting. I guess the, the lifestyle. When you park your car, you get about three tickets, you go to an audition, you get out your car gets towed, you got to pay your bills, and it was a fun ride.
I just wanted to be a little bit more altruistic and that’s why I chose the path of policing.
DINGMAN: You mentioned wanting to be a little bit more altruistic. Say a little bit more about that. What do you mean by that?
BROWN: So when I was in college, one of my best friends ended up passing away due to a drunk driving related incident. So in the, in between me choosing acting and kind of doing my undergrad, I kind of found a place where I said, hey, I want to do a little bit more and I want to put boots on the ground and I want to help people in a better way. And that’s why I chose policing.
I drove out here with probably like $500 to my name and then I just went to the academy and it was a live-in academy so my living expenses were pretty much taken care of and I went through the Department of Corrections out in Arizona. I went to their academy and I became a correctional officer.
DINGMAN: Was the idea of being an officer something you had ever thought about consciously when you were growing up?
BROWN: No, I, my direction, my goal per se, my eye on the prize was more so to become a lawyer. I enjoyed case law. I enjoyed reading it, interpreting case law, but sometimes it can be subjective, just like all things in life, right?
But I felt like I could make more of a change with boots on the ground, talking to people, communicating every day, being in crisis situations, having the ability to help people right then and there right now. I’d like to kind of be more preventative.
DINGMAN: Right. When you’re a lawyer, everything’s already happened and you’re trying to kind of reconstruct how things probably went.
BROWN: Right, right.
DINGMAN: Can I ask, what was it about that experience of your friend who passed away that nudged you in this direction specifically?
Was it something about like, well the person who was driving while intoxicated should be caught? Or like there should be some justice for what happened?
BROWN: It wasn’t necessarily there should be justice for what happens. The the the main focus was I knew that my friend passed away and really the nail on the coffin for me, or I don’t want to say that, the nail that the hammer that hit the nail in the head for me was seeing his mother when we were at the funeral and to see how distraught she was.
And I, and I told myself, I don’t want to see another person like that if I can prevent that against whatever anybody says like I, I’m now determined to get into this field, come hell or high water.
DINGMAN: So you get to Arizona, and you started out as a corrections officer.
BROWN: Yes.
DINGMAN: What were those early experiences like and how did it speak to that intention that you had?
BROWN: So that intention that I had was, was quieted a little bit when I got into the Department of Corrections because in the Department of Corrections, you’re working with people who have already been convicted of crimes. Most likely if you’re in a prison setting, they’re going to be felons.
I had to compartmentalize and understand that although they’ve committed crimes and they’re felons, they’re still people as well, and I need to treat them the same way as I would treat any other person.
So even though I’m not out there, obviously at this point in my career, stopping crime and preventing things from happening. I’m still here providing the best service that I can provide to people, which is treating them like human beings, giving them things that they deserve, being respectful.
My first couple of months I experienced, I viewed a lot of violent activity. It’s a very violent place. A lot of people call it the concrete jungle, but I also viewed a lot of people who were reformed, a lot of people who wanted change, a lot of people who they believed in a higher being, a lot of people who, you know, they, they were repenting for the things that they did.
So it was very surreal to see grown men, you know, 30, 40s, 50s tell you, “hey, you know, I make these choices, don’t make the same choices, you can change your life, you can do better than I can,” and they barely knew me.
So it kind of gave me a very personal perspective on how to talk to people when, when you, when you meet people on their worst day and you say, “hey, yeah, you did this crime or you committed this act, but you’re still a human being.”
DINGMAN: Yeah. Did the violence that you witnessed in that setting, did that ever make you question the decision?
BROWN: No. It made me empathize with the situation. And it made me understand further that this is the field that I’m in, that in some instances when you’re in a setting, there will be violence and violence is not pretty. And in some instances when this happens, my job was to react and to stop the violence.
I’m getting this education in the field of like gangs, learning sign language, learning the lingo, learning how to communicate, learning, you know, who talks to who, etc. And I can take that and use that. I could utilize that on the street.
DINGMAN: So when do you move from or how do you move from corrections work to the work you’re doing now?
BROWN: So I applied to work for another agency.
DINGMAN: And when you say agency, that’s like, police force in the Valley?
BROWN: Yeah, police force in the Valley. The colloquial term is, is agency. That’s what we kind of use.
DINGMAN: Yeah. And what did you like about that as distinct from the, from the CO work you were doing?
BROWN: Being a police officer, you’re kind of like in control of your day, meaning you have, you have a plethora of different calls that you go to, they all require different levels of intensity, intelligence, and everyone is in their own crisis.
So you have an opportunity to change everybody’s day. A lot of people that I encountered, they just made bad decisions. Heat of the moment decisions. Some of them were premeditated. But when you got an opportunity to sit and speak with them in a calm setting and just you ask them, “Hey, what’s your name? You know, where, where were you born?” And you kind of humanized the badge.
A lot of people opened up to you, they would listen, they would tell you, hey, this is what’s going on in my life. I’m dealing, you know, I’m dealing with the passing of my mother, which caused me to lash out at, you know, my husband and I shouldn’t be here, but this was my fault.
DINGMAN: So can I ask you, I mean, from the way you’re talking about it, you’re talking about having a lot of empathy for the people that you’re interacting with. I’m sure you know that there are a lot of negative perceptions of police officers, particularly in Phoenix, in the wake of the DOJ investigation.
For people who do have a negative perception, where do you think that gap comes from? The perception that police officers are going to be aggressive towards certain populations or not empathetic in the way that you are describing being empathetic.
BROWN: I think people become upset because there’s been different pockets of different types of interactions with different types of police officers or sheriffs or people that just are, you know, work for law enforcement.
Law enforcement is not parallel, they don’t all work in unison, and I think people identify the uniform universally as one. And I understand people have that perception of policing, but I think with more transparency people will start to maybe understand a little bit more what police officers deal with.
I think that if people were to take away a little bit of their bias, kind of open up their mindset a little bit, and inquire against their bias, they might see that what their perception is, is not necessarily not the reality.
You know, I’ve been standing with a couple of other officers and I’ve heard a couple of expletives involving my color. And that’s, that that had nothing to do with the situation. It had nothing to do with the call for service. It had nothing to do with anything. It was just the, the, the choice of words that people chose to use just to attack me because I was in uniform and I’m, I’m of a certain color.
DINGMAN: And you weren’t interacting with them at all?
BROWN: No. You also have certain communities that say, hey, well, you’re, culturally you should be this. And what you’re putting on a uniform to do this.
DINGMAN: So can you say more about what you mean by that?
BROWN: So I can. I want to expound on it in the, in the safest way because I don’t want to offend anybody, but, culturally, you should not be a police officer. You should be doing something else.
DINGMAN: Like as a person of a certain ethnicity?
BROWN: Yes, yes. As a person of a certain ethnicity, you should not be in this field. And my counteraction to that is as a person of a certain color, I should be in this field so I could show you the different sides of policing, so I could be an example for that young adult that wants to maybe be in this field and make a difference, or maybe they want to do this and then they want to go and be a federal judge, but they have the experience of working with people hand in hand.
So you know I can be a conduit for them, but you have to get rid of that bias and you can’t just say because of you assume that my cultural, you know, my cultural upbringing is this, I should act a certain way. That’s not how it works.
DINGMAN: Are these conversations you have amongst yourselves like as officers, like we know that we’re perceived a certain way, people aren’t understanding the whole story. How do we counteract that? Like, is that something officers talk about amongst themselves?
BROWN: I, I definitely believe that they are having these conversations, you know, from my personal experience, I can tell you people want to do better. They, we want people to perceive us in a positive light and we want to be there to help.
It’s just unfortunate that sometimes if a certain crime is committed or someone does a certain wrong, there has to be an arrest and there has to be this it’s a part of the law sometimes we have to separate a person who’s committed a crime so that we could prevent something worse from even happening. But sometimes people don’t see that because they’re just seeing what’s in front of them and not the long run.
DINGMAN: If we think back to that version of yourself that had to go to this funeral and saw your friend’s mom really suffering. Do you still feel a connection with that version of yourself? Is that still what, you know, like gets you out of bed every day to do the job, or has it changed?
BROWN: Oh, it’s always, it’s always stayed the same. I, I think the key to success in this job is humility. Every day is, you have to have humility because this is not a career where you can wake up and say, well, I, you know, I’m the leader of all leaders and I can.
That, that doesn’t work here, right? Because people see right through that, you know, and sometimes on very contentious calls for service. You know, to prevent something from, you know, blowing up, you might have to talk to somebody and you have to have humility because they might be at a level 10 and you’re at a level 2 and they just want to be heard.
And as long as you’re taught, you’re listening per se, and you’re letting them de-escalate, right? Deflate that hot air and now they’re at a point where they can listen. Now you could say, “Hey, I heard what you’re saying. I understand your feelings are valid, but we need you guys to let us do our job.”
And that, that comes from humility. You have to have that in this job. That’s what keeps me motivated to keep doing what I’m doing. The second I feel like I’m no longer connected to that person that started this position, I’ll probably quit. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
DINGMAN: So circling back, you know, we started our conversation talking about your acting work. Are you still acting?
BROWN: Yes.
DINGMAN: OK. What does that look like for you these days?
BROWN: For example, I one time I booked a gig through my agency and I had to go to Utah for three days. So they flew me out to Utah for three days, shot my lines, and then I came, I flew back into Arizona and then that night I had to go to work and worked my whole shift.
It’s, it’s definitely a little surreal to go from set being kind of pampered and you’re reading lines and you have lights everywhere and you have, you know, a person in your ear trying to tell you what to do or you have a person holding a boom mic and then switching gears and you know you’re standing like in an alleyway at 4 in the morning talking to somebody and trying to determine if they’re a suspect to a crime, right?
DINGMAN: When you are working as a police officer, do you feel like you’re playing a character or do you feel like you’re being yourself?
BROWN: That’s a good question. I’d probably say I feel like I’m being myself.
Now, some people, when they find out that I work with that, hey, you’re in movies or or excuse me, you’ve been in the movie or commercials, they, they look at me differently like, I don’t see you as an I’ve never seen you in this this light, but then they look up some things and like, oh, well, I guess I was wrong. You, you can do both.
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.