“Don’t Do That”
Everything I ever wanted to do, I was told not to do. As a fresh police officer, out of the academy, left to my own productivity, learning the way of the streets escalated quickly. The dangers of the world, all summed up into three rules my mother told me not to do:
1. Don’t talk to strangers.
2. Don’t play in the street.
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3. Don’t go looking for trouble.
Can you see the irony in all this? The humor and audacity of me being so bold on blatantly mocking the rules of my childhood. “Stranger Danger” was now my motto as I went from call to call, domestic to disturbance, to fatality. This was the life, proudly introducing myself as Officer Cunningham. In a matter of hours I had introduced myself to a stranger, learned their most horrific incident they were experiencing and offered a small piece of my soul to help them gain back some control and direction to leave this “stranger” and go on to do the same for the next person, the next life changing moment.
When I wasn’t unpacking the next influential moment that needed my aid, I was out monitoring the safety of the roadway. Now I do not fancy ticket writing by any means, but a chance to play in the street was not avoidable. Such as seeing your partner run over by a drunk driver, or a teenager high on recreational drugs turn and run into the interstate. These are literal examples that never occurred to me until I had to be part of the selected crew that cleared the roadway of such a tragedy. Playing in the street took on a different meaning. The streets will change you and make you hard.
The streets are trouble. Being productive and showing initiative meant looking for ways to solve a crime before it occurred. I went looking for trouble. In the mornings and late nights searching for the prowler checking windows and unlocked car doors, checking my route and businesses’ for the car that keeps casing a schedule for cash drop offs, monitoring bus stops for children to get home without being followed by unknown persons. Reinforcement of negative thoughts to negative actions brought by my childhood lived out in my dream job. Don’t do that.
Ten years into my career, my dream job and I’ve experienced the negative. I’ve moved from patrol to criminal investigations and negativity has taken on bigger meanings. Don’t do that. As I move through the day now, a stranger is still a stranger. This stranger yet, is the victim I now work for and speak for. The trouble I look for is to show that used to be stranger that the streets don’t have to be hard when I remove one more danger. I think of what my mother used to say, and how I grew up to rebel against her words. Now I tell myself, Don’t do that. Same rules, different meanings.
