I can still remember my worst day at work. It was my birthday. I had to stay in the building until 7:30 that night trying to appease an irate parent during parent-teacher conferences. Right before I went home on that cold March night, I realized I’d locked my keys in the car, along with my phone. I had to walk, sidewalks coated with ice, to the nearest place of business to call home.
My husband still remembers his worst day at work, too. On that day, he was stabbed in the neck with an eight-inch carving knife.
In June 2002, the Hartford Police Department received a 911 hang-up, which is usually routine. Unbeknownst to them, this particular call was disconnected by a nineteen-year-old man after stabbing his girlfriend, Rosa, and their two-year-old daughter, Ajah, in the kidney, liver, and spleen.
When Doug arrived at the call, there was no backup. Rather than wasting valuable minutes waiting, he decided to head in alone.
When the man opened the door, it was very dark. Doug never saw the knife, but he felt it.
By the time his backup arrived, he was still fighting for his life, despite having been stabbed in the neck with six pints of blood on the floor.
By some miracle, everyone lived. Ajah is now 20, and Rosa is doing fine. The man is receiving mental healthcare. Doug has trouble breathing at night, he can’t turn his neck, and he still isn’t ready to tell our children why he has two long scars down both sides of his neck. But each day, he’s grateful that when the priest came to read him his last rites that day, he didn’t need them after all.
A few years back, Rosa and Ajah reached out to give Doug this police Build-A-Bear, which Ajah designed herself. They thanked him one more time and acknowledged that had he intervened seconds later than he did, neither of them would be here today. The bear is one of his prized possessions.
Each time you hear about a horrific incident of police brutality, please remember that on that same day, more than 800,000 other U.S. police officers also reported for duty. They got up and put on their uniforms, knowing full well what a bad day at work could potentially entail.
When soldiers go out to battle and die for our freedom, you don’t hear anyone say “They signed up for that,” “That’s their job,” or “That’s what they get paid for.” Yet as the wife of a retired police officer, I hear it all the time.
We’ve all felt unappreciated at times, and many of us think our jobs are thankless. We don’t expect that all our good deeds will be reported. But there are some out there who willingly signed up to risk their own lives for complete strangers every time they go to work. Think about that for just a minute. There are some who need to be appreciated just a little bit more.
It’s easy to watch YouTube clips from the safety of our homes and critique how the situation was handled. It’s easy to speculate how we might handle things differently when forced to make a life-or-death decision in a matter of seconds.
It’s easy, after watching a monstrous act from someone who never deserved a badge in the first place, to hate everyone in a police uniform—which ironically, is an example of prejudice and discrimination in itself.
If you’re under the opinion that police are detrimental to the public good or that we should defund them–or, to say it more gently, redistribute their workload to social workers–maybe at the very least, you’ll consider there are heroes among them.
You can support both our law enforcement and social justice at the same time.
Let’s start rebuilding the morale of our police officers. Someday, you just might need one.
cc: Thank you, Patrick Michael.