The Truth Itself Is a Kind of Bias: An Introduction to the Rant (2009)

For eight years, I worked at New York City's official agency for investigating police misconduct. I began as an investigator, looking into allegations as minor as casual rudeness and as serious as death in custody. Later I conducted outreach, speaking at precincts, schools, community boards, housing projects, churches, and juvenile detention centers about civilian-police relations. Eventually I served as the director of communications and intergovernmental affairs, managing press issues, sitting on panels alongside city council members, and addressing the entire graduating class of the police academy. All the while I continued writing plays, and while I never wrote a play without thinking about the people and the lessons I learned at work, I resisted writing specifically about police abuse. As much as I had learned, the subject seemed too much in flux to capture-no matter what I wrote or thought about the NYPD, the opposite, I knew, was also probably true. When I first sat down to write about my experience, I ended up with half a play mainly about political bickering and clever one-liners delivered by government staffers. I had become entranced with the status struggles between city agencies, and the peculiar jargon of government work (the use of out-years instead of future remains a personal favorite), and had neglected to include anything about what all these people were actually working on. A colleague in a writers group read what I had written and told me that we needed to hear another voice-we needed to hear from an outsider. That night I sat down and wrote the opening monologue of The Rant. I wrote the first draft of the play in eight weeks. The result was raw and scattered but I was much happier with it. I had learned in my job that every police encounter is racially charged to some degree-even the most innocuous, and even those in which the officer and the civilian are the same race. I felt that by giving full voice to each of the four characters, and by making the play more overtly about race, I had written something that was truer to my experience and to the world. The same person who told me to include the outsider's voice blanched when she saw what I had ended up with, warning me to be very, very careful with the result. I hope I succeeded in ignoring that advice. Three days after I completed the first ragged draft, a reporter called me at the break of dawn to ask what I knew about an unarmed man who had been shot by the police a few hours before, as he left his bachelor party. I have answered more times than I can remember that the Sean Bell shooting was not the source material for this play. However, there were a dozen or more other shootings, and many more cases of ordinary human cruelty, from which I have borrowed details or drawn inspiration. Most of these events were not major news stories, appearing somewhere in the thick middle pages of a newspaper if they were covered at all. I will never forget the true and deep human suffering that surrounds every police shooting, and hope that I have not trivialized these tragedies by using them as the basis for a play. The NYPD Rant is an actual messageboard, run by a former NYPD officer to allow cops to vent anger, express approval, or debate with each other about the city, the police department, crime, politics, and baseball. While the posters are all anonymous, the webmaster confirms that they are NYPD officers before giving them a username. …