Most of Patrick Skinner’s colleagues know almost nothing about his life before he joined the police force in Savannah, Georgia. Skinner, 47, wears humor and extroversion as kind of a shield, writes The New Yorker, and his skills include being able to memorize license-plates backward in mirrors. He didn’t learn this on the force, though. Those are skills honed in the CIA. Skinner joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan and Iraq. “I became the Forrest Gump of counterterrorism and law enforcement,” he said to The New Yorker, stumbling in and out of the margins of history. However, over the years, he started to believe that counterterrorism was actually creating more problems than it was fixing. He saw it fueling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the U.S.
He also saw American law enforcement adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had watched give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told The New Yorker. “It doesn’t work.” So he came home and joined the Third Precinct in Savannah, and lets the CIA’s fixation on area familiarization shape his approach to policing.
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