From a Cop to his Daughter, about BLM
My gorgeous Rory. You are the dim star during the evening that once focused becomes the raging sun. Like all your siblings, you take my heart and hand and guide me through life, making hard decisions easy.
The first year of life is unfinished, but you were born during an exciting time. I guess all times can be exciting, depending on where you are viewing those times. I suppose that’s the lesson I’ve learned through my first 39 years of life. The challenges are the same for many, but we stand at wildly different vantage points when they come at us.
The youngest of 10 children and only two months old, you came down with a severe respiratory virus that nearly took your life and the hearts of your parents and siblings. As your parents, we felt invincible to handle your every need and were completely shaken as your condition continually declined. The doctors and nurses had to take extraordinary measures to save your life. During this time, a pandemic struck our planet, unlike anything most living humans have ever experienced. School ended abruptly for your siblings. The hospital heavily restricted visitors. Your grandparents were laboriously filling in at your home to help us out. It was a time of incredibly high stress, and there were many variables and problems. But you were always the one that needed us the most. So we were there for you. There was rarely a time, even though you lay unconscious, paralyzed and intubated, that your mom, dad or a grandma wasn’t by your side.
I am a police officer. It has been my profession for 17 years. I wish I could tell you I did it out of family tradition or some higher calling. But the truth is I wanted to do the job after watching Law and Order and COPS, both television shows during my childhood, that enthralled my sense of justice, investigation, and adrenaline. The path to be a lawyer wasn’t clear or guided in my 18-year-old brain, so after a few ride alongs, I proudly became a Sheriff’s Deputy in the area that I grew up. It was the proudest moment of my life, going through the police academy, getting my first cop car, talking on the radio with my call sign. I had a feeling that I was giving back to my community in the South Valley to those who needed help and couldn’t have a more critical role in doing so.
Your dad is from the South Valley, which, to some, was one of the worst places to raise a child. I never really heard or understood that until I was in high school, but always found it confusing. It was in middle school that I first noticed my skin color. As you know, it’s white. I took notice mostly because others did. “White boy” and “Gringo” became synonymous with your dad. I wasn’t the only white boy, but it was then that I started to notice I was in the minority. For a while, I felt I was disadvantaged by being with a large population of kids that weren’t just like me. I was wrong.
I’ve learned that most adults strive during their lives to get to a place of comfort, around those who are the most like-minded to their core beliefs. I have been guilty of this same desire. As a police officer in my early 20’s, I looked up to the veterans in my department and wanted to be like the very best ones amongst them. On an individual level, I have never met a more exceptional group of individuals than the deputies I knew during that time. I will always remember my most significant “ah-ha” moment in 2013 when your big brother Dodger was still just a baby. For the first half of my career, I had been so focused on making as many arrests as possible (at one point making 27 DWI arrests in a month, which was my highest). I had never stopped to think about a single victim in a case, beyond the several minutes I would spend with them at the beginning of any police case or investigation. I focused on speed and arrests over quality and outcome. So much of police training is getting to specific goals that are highly regulated and written. But sometimes, being so focused on those goals can make it harder to see what the purpose of my job was in the first place.
My goals as a cop changed from how many arrests or cases I can build, to how many victims and disadvantaged people can I positively affect with my skillset and power as a police officer. And so I gave up a sought after position with an FBI task force that focused on digital forensics to start a unit to work cases that no one wanted to work. One that focused on finding and keeping runaway teenagers in a stable home environment. Working with these kids was nothing short of a challenge. Most were very challenging to me, and any police officer they encountered. These kids were not the ones that most child abuse advocates would talk about at their conferences, or acknowledge during their luncheons and planning events. My partner and I called it the Ghost Unit, as a tribute to these lost kids of our neighborhoods who had no identity and that the community seemed to have failed. But I learned so much from these ghosts, and it forever changed me. One of the things I learned early on was to talk less and understand more.
Active listening is hard for someone like me, who tends not to shut up. Once I got better at this, the second part was to give the ghosts unexpected control over their lives. When I first meet a runaway, the first thing I would ask them is, “Where do you want to live?” Giving this power over early on always confused them. My guess was they rarely heard a cop ask them where they, a 15-year-old defiant teenager, wanted to go. Even if they told me they wanted to live in the culvert under the ditch by Rio Grande High School, I told them I would try my best to make it happen, as long as it kept them safe. The behavior they displayed was not due to running to some adventure or mischief. Still, instead, it was running from something that made them fear their safety.
My efforts to help every runaway felt like it had a horrific success rate, although I know I got through to some. When I started to work with a partner who I felt shared this passion for helping, I was happy to see he was even better at it than I was. Together we worked these runaway cases and met a tremendous amount of high-risk kids, right in our neighborhoods that we served. Working in large institutions comes with potentially more resources and the ability to get lost in the mix. When you figure something out that works well, the same institution that allowed you to discover it can just as quickly ignore it. Changing the culture in a police department is extremely difficult. To do so requires not only the right mindset at the top but true believers in the change in every principal manager and supervisor position in the department.
Sometimes, I thought I was disadvantaged because I grew up as a skinny white boy in a predominantly and historically Hispanic area of Albuquerque. The older version of your dad, who sits here today, looks back and cherishes the viewpoints and relationships I was able to make and believe they helped me realize that being a victim-centered and victim winning detective should be my priority as a police officer. If you are a police officer long enough, you start to believe that most of the bad situations people are in are of their own making. We lack the tools or time to help them without overwhelming simple evidence and their full cooperation.
It is easy to feel under attack as a police officer. We are tasked with some of society’s most challenging problems, and their customers can be on the edge of other constructed systems. After working with high risk and traumatized ghosts who would almost always verbally assail me and often soften up as time passed, I learned that general categorizations of a person or group is fatal to my success as an officer of the law. An uncooperative victim today became a person wanting help and succeeding with some patience and understanding.
Police are trained to be the hammer in society that hits the wild nails that pop up from time to time. Over time lawmakers and police administrators have continued to take larger and larger bites of responsibility for every problem in front of a community while keeping a training curriculum that continuously produced hammers. Hammers tend to take an already bent nail that might exist from another institutional problem, and regularly drive it down as hard and fast as possible, usually disfiguring the entire construct.
Our country has a terrible history with how certain races and cultures were treated, tortured, and murdered. Our chance to fix this after the Civil War was wasted with an assassination and a too passive Congress who allowed the cries of the losers of the war to outweigh the justice that should have happened. A different type of control of races we deemed less than white would take place. And throughout this time, it was the police who enforced these policies. With every racist voting law, police were there to apply it. When some schools didn’t want to integrate, the police were there to enforce it. When Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, the police were there to arrest her. This history doesn’t make me ashamed to be a police officer. Still, I can understand some of the deeply seeded mistrust that some might have for police. I know and see the value and necessity of police. There is simply no easy scenario where they don’t exist. But it doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge that our history is what it is.
And like you Aurora, when you were sick in the hospital and near death, we didn’t love you more than your siblings. But you needed your mom and dad more than they did, and we acknowledged that and made the appropriate changes to give that to you. You needed us more than ever, and more than our other kids, so we adapted. Which is why it is easier for us to understand the following more than ever:
Black Lives Matter.
We have to step up and be better as a community, city, state, and nation. We need to sit and listen and give up some control and see where it takes us. These changes don’t always have immediate results, but we need to do better. Still, our society will continue to be the best country in the world to live in because of our unique diversity. It starts with recognizing our history and realizing that, for most of us in the majority, unconsciously, we have participated in and allowed institutional racism to exist for some time. And we as police can make one of the most significant positive changes to fix it. I hope I can be part of these changes, so by the time you’re an adult, you wouldn’t recognize the world I am in right now.
Love you Gorgeous,
Dad
