The Post in Which I Write about our Life in Law Enforcement

Ok.

So, this post has been in my drafts folder for nearly two years.

And honestly, the internet for the past two years has not felt like a space that I can be safe enough to share the kinds of things that I needed to write in this post.

But I need you to know, at least in part, what it is like to a law enforcement family during these current times.

This is our story. I do not speak for everyone. I try not to toss around “you should” or “they should” type statements or conclusions when I write from our own personal experiences. But I hope that reading this can bring you just a bit of understanding of what it has been like to function in this capacity for the past few years.

There are some families who work in law enforcement who seem to make the job their entire identity. They fly the flag, have the bumper stickers, wear the clothing, and it can seem like every conversation had with them involves talking about law enforcement life. Honestly, we aren’t that family. On the other extreme, there are many people who want LEO families to say that it is just a job. Just like any job. What happens in the field stays in the field and the job doesn’t overflow into any personal or family capacity.

Honestly, we are somewhere in the middle. Our entire identity is not being in law enforcement. I don’t define my husband or the time I spend with him solely through the lens of where he works and what he does for his job. On the other hand, his job affects a lot more of our lives than a typical job does. The hours are often long and sometimes being on call is unpredictable. My husband works many holidays and sometimes weekends, and it can be hard to fit into the typical schedule when our schedule is anything but typical. The things that he sees and experiences on the job are not things that will ever leave his mind, so when he comes home, he is bringing a lot of it with him. He often needs ways to decompress that frankly feel overwhelming to me, as it usually means that I am still in charge of the kids while he goes for a bike ride or just spends some time alone processing what he has experienced that day. He is trained to respond to emergency situations and he is often in “flight or fight” mode, even off the job. I heard recently that most people experience one or maybe two traumatic incidences in their lifetimes. Police officers (and fire fighters as well as ER workers) often experience one to two a week. That’s a lot of traumatic incidences filling their minds, and coming home from work or taking off the uniform does not remove those experiences from their minds and bodies.

It is no secret that many law enforcement marriages suffer, and I think that this is because of the extreme level of trauma and brokenness that our officers see in the field on a daily basis. Many officers do become hardened or pursue coping mechanisms that are not healthy. This is one of the saddest realities of the job that I have seen. While personally our marriage continues to endure, it sure does take a lot of work on both of our parts to work through the emotional and mental effects of his job.

And that’s just the job during a normal time.

In June of 2020, our family faced some incredibly traumatic times. I know that we all went through the horror of what happened and the protests and riots that followed. I know that many people protested peacefully. I know that many people feel like what happened was more than justified. I know that many people were able to move past it much easier than I did. I mean, here I am two years later and barely able to talk about it. Many people who were at our city protests said they were peaceful and had stories of how the police instigated it all. Meanwhile, my husband had rocks thrown at his head, a bottle of urine (opened) thrown at him, his car completely vandalized and defaced with ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS and PIGGY PIG. People shouted nonstop about how they were all racist, all pigs, all rapists, all murderers, etc. They shouted they would burn the city and all the cops they could take down with it.

Sure, to an outsider, those probably seem like harmless threats that clearly didn’t live up to what they said. But I sat at home that day stunned at the footage I was seeing. I was trying to take care of my kids knowing that nearly 1000 people were angry enough to kill my husband. Theo worked for 22 hours that day, and went back the next morning for his next shift.

(Usually about this time, someone pipes up and says “Well, then how to you think _______ feels?” Listen. This experience has made me more compassionate to people who are victims of unacceptable conduct. I now know firsthand that it doesn’t feel good at all. But also? Two things can be true at the same time. And as I write this on my blog, I am writing my own story. There is room for many other stories and cries for acknowledgement of mistreatment. This is my story and this is what I am sharing about.)

The next few weeks were really difficult for me. I had very few people (IRL or online) reach out to me, but I felt like I was being crushed by fear, anxiety, and hurt.

I went off of social media, but before I did, I saw many posts that were not well thought through and said things that hurt me deeply. To be honest, the posts I saw on social media hurt more than the angry shouts I heard from the protests. Many friends took to social media to air any grievance that they had ever had with an officer and to point out every part of the system that they felt was failing. Many friends suddenly hated all police and weren’t afraid to post about it on social media. Friends posted about how to take over their local police forces – “do harm if necessary”, they said. Most people posted what they probably thought was innocent, but was honestly naive and ignorant and quite hurtful, and really just fed the fire. It felt like the entire world had just realized that there were problems in our country, and the entire world was ready to point their fingers at police officers, to blame them for all the problems. As if no one else deserved blame for racism and intolerance and mistreatment of people.

To me, this wasn’t just a system that was broken and a safe place to spout about it all online. The things people were saying about officers in general was very personal to me. We had a fence company give us an estimate, then find out what my husband did and refuse to install the fence for us. Theo was followed home from work almost every night for weeks. Some people would honk and flip him off, or tailgate him and lay on the horn the entire time. Some people would just follow him. Theo learned to take a different route home every day, or pull into a store or gas station and waste some time before continuing on his way. One night around that time, we woke up to a loud crash and our front door was wide open. Theo swept the house and didn’t find anyone, but I am convinced that someone was trying to break in.

After a few months, things started to die down. There wasn’t planned protests every weekend and I could actually scroll through my social media without seeing the hashtag acab (all cops are bastards). People would smile cheerily at me and ask me if I was so glad things were calm now?

But in reality, things were just getting worse for my husband at work. He would respond to a call (like an accident on a highway, or a missing dog) and be cussed out, called a murdered and a racist – and have cameras shoved in his face (while trying to do something like CPR- COME ON, PEOPLE). Businesses started displaying discomfort at his presence. All of the businesses that had signs saying “Thank you, Police” took their signs down. Ambushes on officers were becoming more common. City leadership suddenly went from praising the police force for their heroic response during the Oregon district shooting, to instead publicly denouncing the police force and reprimanding them for anything and everything. They began to announce policy changes that truly made no sense and obviously no police were consulted on it. They implemented strategies that made it so hard for the police to do their jobs and keep the community safe. Things began to feel more and more unsafe for the officers. The officers begin to shrink away from proactive policing because they would get in trouble for any type of activity that was perceived as against new policies. Everyone wanted to complain about the officers. Everyone had some type of negative feedback for his supervisor- even when he was doing his job with excellence and above reproach. People would make serious accusations against my husband. They were always false- and body cam footage as well as bystander footage verified that he was not in the wrong. Everyone is watching and waiting to catch him in a misstep.

At this point, I had to stop interacting with other police wives because all of the stories that I was hearing were deeply affecting me. I would hear hundreds of stories of how officers were mistreated, and each and every one got to me. I was struggling with fear and anxiety. I had little to no support, even in real life friendships, because no one understood how challenging it is to withstand the daily subtle attacks and lack of support. Sure, there were no more riots or protests, but this daily questioning of my husbands very character? Theo began to feel discouraged. I can’t imagine who wouldn’t. I can’t imagine who wouldn’t look objectively at those situations and say that the work environment wasn’t toxic.

At that point, we began to have conversations about quitting. Theo was tired, exhausted, overworked, and deeply discouraged. It’s hard to go to work every day when you know that there will be very little support, that every action can lead to an accusation, and that every interaction will be filmed and in the background will be shouts of “racist! pig! murderer!”

And, honestly, that is where we are at now. Every few weeks, we talk about a different job. We talk about all the officers who are leaving. We talk about how the defund the police movement took away so many resources from the police department and they are now barely about to do their job, while the same people still cry out for them to do more. We talk about the things that he sees, the lifeless 3 year old that he found on the ground ejected from a vehicle. We talk about the 14 year olds he sees running the streets with guns, shooting at random people just for the fun of it. We talk about the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drug money that he found at a traffic stop. We talk about the prostitutes that he knows by name.

I think if Theo could give a speech to every person, he would want to tell them that they probably don’t understand how broken and deeply depraved humanity can be. It seems like everyone wants officers to give compassion and second chances, but we don’t see what they see on a daily basis. We don’t see how broken and harmful some people can be to others. We don’t see the burden of finding kids who are abused and neglected. We don’t see the 15 times that the officer has driven the homeless man to the shelters and called many different places to set him up with resources, only to find him back on the street corner the next day. We don’t see the overdose in the McDonalds bathroom, we don’t administer the narcan, we don’t find the dead girlfriend an hour later in their apartment. We want to assume the best in all people, and assume that if *someone* out there just did their job properly, none of those things would be happening. But imagine seeing those things day after day after day.

As I wrote this post, I asked for some questions that people would want to ask police officers if they could have a sit-down conversation with them. Honestly, some of these questions frustrate me. So many people asked me what an officer does if they see another officer misbehaving. And this question bothers me because why is the first assumption that an officer will misbehave? Do we assume that of any other profession? It’s the same as any job. What would you do if you see a co-worker misbehaving? Don’t we have nurses, accountants, librarians, teachers, pastors, engineers who all misbehave on the job? Why is it that police accountability is SO POUNDED IN OUR HEADS that the first question we would ever ask a police officer is how they are keeping their co-workers accountable? We should all be keeping our co-workers accountable to behavior that is above reproach!

But I will go ahead and answer the question, because if I remove all of my personal frustration that I literally get asked this question every time we bring up policing, it is a fair question.

Does Theo ever feel the need to cover up and downplay another officers response? Does he feel comfortable that all his colleagues would act appropriately?

Here is something that you need to know about Theo. His co-workers call him “Amish”, mostly because he doesn’t live like everyone else does. He drives a beater car, has no debt, doesn’t drink, and is known as the only cop that doesn’t cuss. There are many things that his co-workers do that he does not approve of (and, honestly, vise versa!). However, none of those things happen on the job. Just like in any other job, there are human beings who bring their own personalities, their own strengths and weaknesses into the job. We all know a teacher who raises her voice a little sooner than we would have. We all know a pastor who has dropped the ball on serving his community. We all know humans. And our officers are also humans. So are there some calls where Theo would have handled it differently? Yes. Are there some calls that hindsight proves a better decision could have been made? Yes. Do some officers come to work with personal life problems that put them in a bad mood? Sure…I’m not sure what profession doesn’t have days when a bad mood happens. Of course, there are certain profession that have little to no margin for error (hello, police officers who carry guns and anesthesiologists who knock people out for a living, along with many others). These people cannot let a bad mood affect their job. Which is why their jobs are so challenging!

Now, does Theo know any officers who are outright targeting people of other races and would like to harm/hurt them? No. No, he does not. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any out there. It just means that in answering this question personally, he can say that of all the colleagues he works with, they are above reproach and truly want to be police officers who care and serve their communities.

I will also say that the department that my husband works for is known to fire officers who have acted out of line, both on and off duty. This usually applies to off-duty incidents (such as driving drunk while off duty). If an officer is caught doing something that a normal citizen would be charged for, the officer is fired and charged as a normal citizen would be charged. Unfortunately, there have been several incidents like this over the past several years. To my knowledge, all officers were fired for off-duty misconduct, not anything related specifically to policing.

How does the current climate impact the way you raise your children?

I hate to think of the ways that it has subtly impacted my children. I know that both Theo and I have been under a great deal of stress in the past two years (as have most people, honestly). Sometimes I think that our children hear too much of what we are talking about, they know too early what broken people can do to other people. Theo is also fairly strict because he is determined to raise kids who are able to have functional relationships and exercise personal responsibility (yes, we do know that we can do everything “right” in this area and still have kids who struggle, but my point is that because Theo is so aware of the extreme end of dysfunctional, he is very determined that our family is a family that communicates, that works together, that learns how to cope and manage hard situations, that can manage money well, and that doesn’t treat other people like garbage. Add that to our family mission statement haha.

We also try to be careful about how we communicate my husband’s authority. The kids know that he carries a gun and that he also catches people who have made the wrong choices or are hurting other people. But we are very careful to not refer to other people as “bad guys” that Daddy catches. This language makes the people seem inhuman and we want our kids to understand that while there are people out there making horrible choices that will have really unfortunate consequences, they are not less than human and their Dad is not so much better than them. This is a really complicated concept, especially for our little ones, so for now we just stick to not calling people “bad guys”. We are also strict about talking about shooting people. We are honest with them that sometimes Daddy may have to make that decision, but it would only be as a very last resort. We don’t joke about shooting people, killing people, or anything of the sort. We also never, ever joke about Daddy dying or not coming home from work. Because a kid has said that jokingly once or twice and because I live with that being a potential reality, I NEVER let my kids say anything of the sort.

What’s the best part of your job that keeps you in a profession that is so challenging?

At this point, this is a really hard question to answer. There isn’t much in it that is beneficial right now. We are tired, exhausted, run-down, strongly disliked no matter what we do, and feeling like our decisions can never be right. We are scrutinized, accused, misjudged, under-represented, under paid and not supported. So many officers are walking away. If an officer is even close to retirement, they are taking it now. There is not much incentive to stay in a field that has so much potential liability with so little reward.

And, yet. Here we are. We do it because someone needs to. We do it because the general public does not understand how much we actually do and what we actually protect them from. We wish we could all go on strike so that people would understand what a week without police would look like. But we would also never do that to the people that we vowed to serve and protect. So we continue on, day after day, praying and hoping that something we do today will make a difference. Save a life. Have a conversation. Get drugs off the street.

But is it worth the cost that it is costing our family? I don’t know. If we leave policing, who will step up? Will it be someone we can trust?

How can we support LEOs and their families in our communities?

Honestly, if you know a LEO in real life, just giving them a healthy space to decompress is SO helpful. Like a game night or just inviting them to social events. If you don’t know any LEO’s, something really helpful is to just stop sharing negative stories on social media. Just like I had to leave my police wife groups because all I was hearing was negative, I encourage you to leave groups that are constantly bringing negative stories forward. Of course if that is all we hear, we are going to think that is all that happens!

What are your biggest fears as a wife?

Obviously, I fear my husband dying in a line of duty death. But honestly? Even more than that, I fear that my husband will make a decision at work that leads to an accusation that will get media attention and that he will be ripped to shreds by everyone who has an opinion of what he should have done and what he did wrong. There are so many circumstances where an officer has a split second to make a decision. I pray and pray over Theo that his decisions will always be the right one, but what if one is wrong? What then? I know very few people who would even consider having compassion on a police officer who has made a mistake. Or one who did the right thing, but the outcome was less than ideal.

Do they receive counseling support?

They do! After the Oregon District shooting in 2019, this became something that our department really pushed for and encouraged. In some cases, it is required. Personally, we have not sought counseling because of the time commitment, the fact that we would want a counselor who is also able to give sound Biblical wisdom, and the fact that we have three kids who would need childcare, blah blah.

And on the flip side, I personally have been afraid to find a counselor for other non-police related mental health needs because I am afraid that they will have pre-conceived notions about police and what it is like to be in a LEO family and will not be supportive and helpful to me. I know that a counselor cannot bring their own notions into a session, but the three counselors that I follow online are also VERY anti-police and this has made me feel very uncomfortable in a counseling space.

How much does Theo talk about cases at home?

He has no restrictions about talking about cases at home. He is not a detective, so each case he responds to is resolved by the end of the day (or handed over to a detective to continue the investigation). He will come home and tell me stories, but he also says that he keeps a lot of the worst ones to himself. He has told me stories before that have really bothered me just to hear about them, so he is very sensitive with what he shares with me. But then this become a challenge because he has no one else to talk to about what he has seen and experienced. And I don’t just mean “talk with” as in receive counsel, but just talk about his day with!

Well, if you made it through even half of that wordy post — thank you! I am sure that reading my thoughts can bring up a visceral response in you, with a desire to contradict and argue about what I have written. As I said at the beginning, this is just one perspective. This does not mean that what I have written or experienced is the only truth. There are people on the other side of the fence who have experienced so many challenges because of someone in my husband’s profession. I get that. But I also needed to write about what I have experienced because of my husbands profession. I hope that you will hold my story gently and that you will respond in kindness and gentleness to what you have read here today. If you live locally, we would be more than happy to have an in-person conversation about any questions that you may have or respectful conversations that you would like to engage in.