Every once in a while, after working long and sometimes grueling shifts, after getting yelled at and spat on and occasionally having plastic cups thrown at him, Officer Brian Vaughan feels so worn down that he wonders if being a cop is still worth it.
“I guess the answer, for now, is I’m still here,” the 13-year police veteran says with a thin smile. Vaughan works patrol at the Brookhaven Police Department. It’s past eight in the morning as he sits down at the agency’s Buford Highway headquarters, the quiet beginning of a 12-hour shift that can spin into a major crisis within seconds.
After several high-profile police killings of Black Americans by white officers in recent years, tensions reached a boiling point in the late spring of 2020, when George Floyd died under the knee of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Cellphone images were broadcast to the world, waves of protests and riots swept the country, and anti-police sentiment soared. (Chauvin was soon fired and was later convicted of murder.)
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