¡Ni una sonrisa! Madrid’s police force is insane.

We went on a very strange field trip yesterday.

It got off to a rough start, after our administrators had told us to take our thirty-one kids to the busy plaza by our school to wait for the bus.  It was cold outside.  The kids are rowdy.  After about twenty minutes, we called the school, and the vice principal said she’d call us back.  A few minutes later the bus arrived, the driver saying he’d been waiting outside the front door of the school for half an hour.

Off we went to a police station on the outskirts of the city.  The main goal of the excursion was for the kids to learn about what the police to do help and protect them, a supplement to the educación vial sessions they had earlier in the year where cops came to the school and taught the kids about traffic lights and looking both ways.  Not as fun when you’re not in Safety Town and don’t have movies narrated by Jiminy Cricket.

The cop running the show seemed energetic and friendly.  We all filed into a cold, concrete room and our kids took up the first few rows, waiting for some kids from another school to arrive, and he explained that anyone who doesn’t want to listen to him could go wait on the bus.  Fair enough.  Establishing authority, discipline, and I don’t blame him because our kids need it.  But then the other students — interesting, new, different, fascinating children from another school — come in, something that will obviously catch the attention of a third-grader, and our kids turned their heads to examine the newcomers.  The cop, let’s call him Franco, goes into this whole spiel about how he doesn’t want to see a single kid turn their head around, not once.  And when he starts the PowerPoint presentation and does his narration, they are not to look at him while he talks, ONLY the screen, and NOTHING else and he doesn’t want to see ANY heads turning while the screen is on.  (And I can assure you that for all the technology that the Madrid police force touts, PowerPoint is not their strong suit and the kids would not have missed out on anything by just looking at the floor the whole time.)  

So the other kids got settled down, and he gave them the same speech.  They looked a year or two older than ours, and aside from two or three, they were all Spanish (something you should remember a little later).  Franco then starts talking about the terrible 5% of the population that commits crime and uses drugs and I stopped paying attention so I don’t know what else they do.  A little ways into his presentation two boys from the other school were apparently whispering (which none of us teachers could even hear), and he stopped and asked them their names and said, “Remember that five percent?  Get up and go stand against the wall!  And stay there for the rest of the presentation!”  (Which still had a lot longer to go, and it was really cold in the room.)

So then he comes to a point in his speech regarding the totally acceptable practice here of cops just coming up and harassing people and demanding that they present identification/documentation.  As foreigners we are warned to always keep a copy of our passport on us, and I’ve seen plenty of African immigrants in the park getting hassled by cops in the park (partly because a lot of them do sell drugs in the park, partly because they’re clearly foreign, and definitely because they’re black).  This is mostly a cultural thing that is simply difficult for Americans, and I imagine some others, to grasp, but Franco goes into this long harangue about how they shouldn’t complain when a cop comes up to you and demands your ID for no reason, they do it to PROTECT you and they just want to know who you are and what’s wrong with that?

Somewhere in there he started talking about global warming and having to leave your country because it was no longer inhabitable or something, or so Regina says, which I’ll have to go with because I was daydreaming.  I tuned in when I saw him look straight at my kids and say, “I mean, you can’t imagine, having to pick up all your things and just leave your country!”  For real?  EIGHTY PERCENT OF MY KIDS ARE IMMIGRANTS and frankly you can tell.  So yeah, asshole, they can imagine.

Then he started talking about driving and traffic, and wanted to use me for an example.  Regina had to explain to him that I “only speak English” and his eyes lit up, and during the subsequent explanations of traffic lights he puffed up his chest and occasionally worked in the words “red” and “yellow” and … “blue” for the light that tells you to go.  I don’t know, either, because he said the same thing in Spanish so apparently he believes that green lights are blue.  This segued into a discussion about drunk driving, at which point Franco explained to the kids that from now on, he needed them all to be “child police”, and if they were at a birthday party or a baptism or whatever and their parents/grandparents/etc. were drinking, they should demand to know who is driving them home.  (A baptism?  Seriously?  Living in a country where everyone’s Catholic is funny.)  And they have the right to protect themselves and demand that whoever is driving not have one drink.  And to tell them that if they want to have a drink then they can call a taxi.  Okay, it’s true and at the very least a good rule to try and follow, and not to be pessimistic, but they’re eight.  They don’t really have a whole lot of pull.  These are kids who can’t do their homework because they were up all night at the hospital with their mom because she dragged them to the bar and proceeded to get alcohol poisoning and have to go to the ER.

Next he wanted to explain to the kids what empathy was, and for this he had a lame demonstration where he lined kids up in two rows, and then did some sort of Golden Rule lesson where one kid walked past the others and they hit him on the head or something, and then it was their turn, and they realized that THEY wouldn’t like it if the other kids hit THEM and blah blah blah.  Something that would naturally draw giggles from eight- to ten-year-olds.  But Franco sternly warned before the demonstration that he didn’t want to hear any laughter, and he didn’t want to see a SINGLE SMILE ON ANY FACE.  Dude. They’re eight.  Also, I’m laughing because I can’t believe you’re real.

Finally, almost more appalling than his authoritarian treatment of the children was that throughout his entire presentation he kept throwing in statistics about how Madrid is FIRST IN THE WORLD for this and Spain is the FIRST IN EUROPE for that.  Trumpeting their technology and initiatives, and I don’t know if it’s all true or not (Regina was shaking her head for some of them) but it doesn’t matter.  They’re EIGHT.  The presentation was supposed to be about teaching what the police do for them — they don’t care if Madrid is leading in this kind of video camera to catch drunk drivers, they just need to know that it’s there.  And anyway, their generation is not going to be as impressed by high-tech cameras and other advances as a forty-something cop (who clearly has some control issues).

So that was that.  Of course I can’t say that our host was representative of the entire municipal police force, but he was selected to represent it to the schools, and I can say that I did not leave there with a more positive view of Madrid’s municipal police officers. 

One more thing: The building we went to for this police presentation was also where the mounted police train and keep their horses and practice their little routines.  We watched them practice for a while and then got to see the stalls and pet a horse (I felt bad for it because he/she had hundreds of tiny, dirty hands reaching out and touching its nose).  Being from Ann Arbor, my boyfriend’s family from small-town/rural Indiana call me a city girl.  But no one from Ann Arbor can compete with someone raised in a city like Madrid (or at least someone from Madrid without the money and resources to take trips out of the city).  I personally have never found cow and horse manure to be unpleasant (unlike, say, pig manure), and Regina and our other teacher Pilar agreed with me so we were maybe a little biased, but MAN these are city kids.  We hadn’t even gotten into the stalls yet and the kids were practically puking from the smell.  They had never encountered anything like it.  I wondered aloud to Regina if they even knew never to stand behind a horse.

 I much prefer living in a city to living in a rural area and I’ve had people in Indiana make fun of me for my ignorance on matters like farming and hunting and other country things, but a wave of appreciation came over me there in the stalls, gratitude for having had the opportunity as a child to visit the countryside, go to the Michigan State Fair, pet goats, collect eggs from chickens, ride a horse, smell manure, be chased by a herd of cows, and frolic in fields.