At the time of my first assault, I didn’t feel safe reporting.
I still don’t feel safe today, only now it’s a much more well-informed opinion.
Like so many survivors, I gravitated toward service after feeling unable to help myself in my own situation. I didn’t even feel safe admitting it to myself, but I could become the person I needed most.
I became a police officer, deciding I could best improve the justice system from the inside by modeling compassion, communication, and transparency with the public.
I was so young.
My Midwest public education was progressive(ish), but being white in a mostly white area I’d never really learned about racism or police brutality in any kind of concrete way.
It sounds so naive, especially after spending more recent years absorbing all I could about social justice, mental health, and systemic issues affecting our communities.
With the relative privilege under which I was raised, I think I had to see for myself to really understand how toxic it was. I witnessed how resistant the system was to change, and how it pushes out any potential threats to the power dynamic.
Five years of harassment, victim blaming, and unabashed bigotry later, I’d grown disgusted enough with law enforcement system to finally leave in search of a career I could feel more morally right about. It coincided with the end of my abusive relationship with another officer,
It felt like admitting defeat.
What good has happened because of you?
I always feel the need to qualify why I got into that profession, because I in no way glorify law enforcement or my time there. Knowing me at any point in my life, it’s the last thing you’d imagine me going into.
It was in no way all rainbows and smiles, nor was I was always perfect at it, but I can say that because I was there:
- A woman had a hand to hold on her way to the hospital after being convinced not to jump off of a third floor balcony.
- a wife had someone to have coffee with while waiting for the coroner on the morning of her husband’s death.
- A pre-teen had an escort from his elderly grandmother’s house in another city to school every day after his parents were arrested for abuse.
- Many dogs were reunited with their owners, including a stray I later took in. My pride and joy, currently snoring softly on my lap.
One of my goals now is to educate others by describing what it was like inside of that system. What is the disconnect between the idea of policing I wanted to encourage and the officers drawn to the power and violence of the role? And how do we make the changes needed in our communities to move that needle?
I hope to live by the transparency I was muffled from having back then, although facing those memories brings flurries of shame for ever having been part of the system as a whole.