CIVPOL Home >> Newspaper Articles >> A Legacy of Life and Death

A Legacy of Life and Death
By
Dean T OLSON

For me, being selected for police officer meant eight months of testing, examinations, interviews, background investigations, polygraph tests, psychological tests, medical tests, submitting financial statements, questioning my neighbours and my friends, examining my family history. I opened my life and made it public. I competed against 1100 applicants for seventeen positions on my police department. I was accepted to the Norfolk Police Academy. Twenty-one more weeks of academy instruction, three months of field training, and one year of probation finally qualified me to become a police officer. It was a journey in itself, struggling for the honour of becoming a police officer.

It was in my third month of academy instruction when news came of the Virginia State Police officer shot to death on a traffic stop. My new generation of officers-in-training all felt obligated to attend his funeral as a sign of respect and we expressed our desire to our trainers. A friend, a former officer from another city who had relocated to our state, turned to our class and said sternly, “Don’t go there just to go. It’s not a fieldtrip. A police funeral is a very emotional and painful experience. I know. I buried my partner in New York when he got killed.”

We listened to his words soberly and we realized that he knew what he was talking about. He was wiser than us. We did not go to the funeral that day. We were assured by our trainers that we would have many more funerals to attend in our careers. They knew what we would have to learn through experience; there would be too many funerals. A month later, another police officer from our neighbouring city was killed while he was on the side of the street attempting to aid a stranded motorist. A drunk driver ran over him with a vehicle travelling more than 120 kilometres an hour.

I have come to despise drunk drivers.

I spent my first year as a police officer learning the hard way how dangerous and stressful my job can be. Within the first three months, I had already had an attempt made on my life when I was shot at by three unknown suspects. It was rumoured to be a retaliation for drug arrests I had made. Threats against me became routine. It was part of the job. Street violence was everywhere. My idealism wavered, but I carried on.

During my second year, I remember coming home and sitting on my bed to take off my boots, then waking up hours later lying on my back, hanging half off my bed, still in uniform, still in my boots. I had fallen asleep while trying to get undressed, I was so exhausted from working. Some days were like that. Some nights were longer than others. Whenever this would happen I would rouse myself from bed and soak in a hot shower to wash away the dirt and the sweat, and sometimes, the blood. I used to look down at my body and find cuts and bruises on me, and I could not remember how they got there. Probably while arresting someone. Possibly while I was chasing someone. Maybe from a fight. This is a typical life for a police officer.

Over the next few years, more officers in our area would die. Two were shot and killed on normal traffic stops. One was shot and killed when he was trying to apprehend a robbery suspect on a stakeout. Two more officers I worked with were shot while trying to arrest people, but thankfully, both were saved by their body armour.

A few years ago, one of our officers was shot and killed in a domestic dispute. I remember waiting with the other officers at the station to find out if he would survive. When he died, facing his family was painful beyond words and I promised myself I would never put myself through that kind of agony again. It hurts too much to see them and know that there is no compensation for losing him. I could promise them nothing.  There were no words to console them in their grief, no meaning I can offer to explain their loss, our loss. It seems a hollow sentiment to tell children that their father died for a job he believed in.

Over the years, I lost more friends to illnesses and injuries. Some were permanently disabled from injuries they received on the job. Many of my friends have had multiple surgeries to repair damage done to their backs and joints. Other would have health problems related to stress. Police, I would discover, have an unusually high incidence of heart problems and high blood pressure due to stress. And serious injuries are common. Ours is a punishing profession, mentally and physically. There was always a price to pay for being a police officer, a high tax on our lives. And the only reward was our satisfaction in a job well done.

This year I lost four colleagues. Muhammad Ali was a Bangladeshi police officer who suffered a heart attack while working here in Kosovo. Another was a KPS officer named Lazim Rexhepi, who was shot and killed by thieves. One of the officers from my home town was shot and killed in September. His name was James Gilbert. He had only begun his career. He was a police officer for three years when he died. A baby in our profession. He was only 28 years old. 

Today I attended the funeral of Carlyle Schrank, an American officer who died of a heart attack, far from his home and family. I knew Carl. I first met him when we were preparing to leave the United States for Kosovo. He was a friendly, warm human being. He lived most of his life as a police officer. Somewhere in his past, he chose this profession as a cause worthy of his life and he stayed with it despite every hardship, despite every cost. 

The sacrifices of these officers, paid willingly for their duty, is so much like the sacrifices of all my brother and sister officers. And police around the world have all been diminished by their deaths.

It is hard for me to imagine life as a police officer without the spectre of death hanging over us. Police officers know that death can come any day. The officers who came before me taught me that. It is part of our job. Officers dream about their deaths. They dream the violent, painful, grotesque deaths that police officers see every day. They dream about their failures and their fears. And they live with those burdens every day they wear that uniform.

For nine years I have defied death and hatred and cruelty and untold violence to do my job honourably and justly because I believed it was the right life for me to live. Even in the face of my own death, at the cost of so many that are dear to me, I have persisted as stubbornly as I could manage. Being a police officer has been my opportunity to be the best man I could be, to serve a higher cause that was greater than myself.

It has been my pride and honour to have worked with so many valiant souls over the years. I have lost some, but I carry on in their names. I hope I make them proud of me. I hope I am worthy of them.

After losing friends in this job and confronting the worst aspects of humanity, I have come to realize that it is not dying for a cause that makes us righteous. No one becomes special by dying. Anyone can die and everyone will. It is living for a cause that makes being a police officer a truly noble profession. It is commitment and conviction that gives us strength and makes it possible for us to continue on when we have every reason to succumb to our grief and turn our backs to the world. How we live our lives is far more important than how we die. Police officers live this kind of life for everyone we know and care about, so that they can have a better life. Truth and justice. That is a cause worth living for.