Behind the Curtain

Early in my career I remember thinking, “everyone should be a cop for ten or fifteen years.  No one should do it longer.” 

A few months ago I retired from policing after twenty-four years on the job. 

Policing opened my eyes to worlds I did not know existed.  I’d grown up in a loving middle-class family in small-town Ontario.  I knew little about life other than what I’d learned in school, sports and church. 

Within weeks of being a cop I’d seen domestic violence, daily crime, and death.  Naïve me was shocked that we regularly arrested people for impaired driving, often in the middle of the day.

I’ve written elsewhere that the great privilege of the job, and the great burden of the job, are one and the same – the glimpse behind the curtain it affords into peoples’ lives, and into the dark corners of society.

I’m still working – for the government now.  A ‘normal’ job, with normal hours.  I am never on call, don’t work night shifts, and instead of commuting ninety minutes a day, I walk upstairs in the morning with a cup of coffee to my office in our home.  I feel like I’ve won a lottery where the grand prize is time and sleep. 

I have my physical and mental health.  I am extremely grateful for that.  And I feel guilty about it.  I have friends and former colleagues who have been injured, physically and psychologically.  Serious wounds.  The lucky ones have healed.  Others suffer daily.  Many live somewhere in between.

I never feared for my life, and I never came close to firing my gun in the line of duty. Something else to be thankful for.  And something else to feel guilty about.  How would I have performed in a critical incident where death was imminent and I had to react?  Maybe even shoot someone.  I’ll never know.  And I’ll always wonder.

I was affected by the things I saw and did.  Working in homicide I gained intimate knowledge of the last, awful moments, of victims’ lives.  I saw dozens, if not hundreds of bodies, during my career.  I have forgotten almost all of them.  The details aren’t buried deep inside me. They’re just not there.  Even the most consequential deaths fade.  When I was in uniform, in Ontario, a young man died in front of me, crushed behind his steering wheel.  He was unconscious, but alive.  He swallowed and died.  I think about him and his family fairly often. But  I’m not haunted by what I saw.  Almost ten years ago a child died of natural causes.  I spent time with him in the hours before his death.  There was no indication he was unwell.  His death shocked me.  It shook me.  I went home after that nightshift and told my wife it was one of the worst shifts of my career – one of the worst things that had happened in my life.  That boy deserved to live.  I wish my memory of him was stronger.  But the details of that night have faded.  The details of so many things I’ve seen have faded.

I wonder how many thousands of miles I’ve run in the last twenty-four years.  If I averaged twenty miles a week, which is probably about right, then, as a cop I ran approximately 24,960 miles.  The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles.  Metaphorically, I ran around the world.  Those runs helped me leave work at work.  Those runs helped turn traumatic incidents into fading memories. 

I read hundreds of books in those twenty-four years as well.  Each and every one of them transported me somewhere else.  Those books took tiny pieces of me along with them for the ride.  Tiny broken pieces that got stitched back together by the words of authors who transported me away from reality.  A different way of travelling around the world.

At the start of my career, I didn’t know if I was capable of being a cop.  I wanted to test myself.  I wanted the challenge.  I wanted to do something that mattered.  I wanted to look behind the curtain.  I’m thankful I got to do that.  For better, and for worse, it’s made me who I am today, as I set out on the next chapter of life.