“She’s dead,” the cop said into his radio, his voice flat with exhaustion. He was standing at the open door of an apartment that had been locked tight fifteen minutes earlier. The woman inside had called dispatch barely able to breathe, a severe asthma attack, lived alone, couldn’t get to the door. She was already going silent on the line when fire and rescue pulled up outside.
They didn’t go in. Police can force entry under exigent circumstances, and the fire department knows they have that same authority for medical emergencies, but no one wants the paperwork. So they called us. We were slammed, a busy night just like every night, and my corporal told them we’d get there as soon as we could, but also told them straight: they can enter too.
It’s allowed. If it’s needed, go in. They didn’t. They waited.
The dispatcher on the other end heard the woman go quiet. My corporal finally cleared from his call and drove over. He didn’t bother with the front door. He walked around back, found it unlocked, and walked in on her lying on the floor about six feet from her front door.
She never made it. The medics got her breathing again, revived her, and she lived. There was talk of a lawsuit, but I don’t know if anything came of it. I left that department.
I still think about her, lying there, knowing there were people right outside her door and being too weak to reach them. That’s the thing people don’t understand about protocol. It’s meant to protect us, but sometimes it leaves the people we’re supposed to protect dying on the other side of a locked door. One time, when I was a security officer at a private estate, our policy allowed us to detain suspicious individuals for up to an hour.
Every shift, a homeless man would show up near the property after dark. So I’d detain him for an hour each night. He never caused trouble. He just needed somewhere to warm up.
We weren’t allowed to do more than that, but I could at least let him sit in the cold that slightly longer and pretend it counted as a shelter. There’s a lot of good we can’t do because the rules say no. I served a search warrant once at a house where a woman was being arrested on a stack of meth charges. She had three kids: sixteen, nine, and two.
Protective custody took all of them. The sixteen-year-old had dropped out of high school to raise her younger siblings because their mother was always tweaking out, couldn’t be trusted to hold it together for a single day. She was the one who fed them, put them to bed, made sure they got to school. But the system didn’t care about any of that.
She was a minor herself. They wouldn’t let her have custody of her brother and sister. The state housing for children split them up. Emergency foster placements only take certain ages, sometimes only boys or only girls, never all three.
So the kids were separated. The sixteen-year-old cried and cried, wasn’t going to stop, kept begging not to be torn from her siblings. There was nothing I could do. Protocol said she was a child too, and so she couldn’t be a parent.
I ran into the juvenile intake worker from that call a few weeks later. She said two weeks after the split, a family friend came forward and was able to take all three kids. They were together again. That was the one time I got to feel like something had gone right.
But most of the time, it doesn’t. We turn away people all the time for civil issues. Divorce, custody battles, one partner takes the kids or the car and leaves. Nothing we can do about any of it.
Housing is a problem too. In my state, if you let someone live in your house long enough, they can claim it as their residence. Relationships fall apart, friendships end, and suddenly the homeowner wants someone out, but we can’t make them leave. That’s an eviction.
Evictions take forever. People wait in limbo for months, fighting every day just to get their own beds back. Then there are the people who just need help once, a ride somewhere, no money, no options. City policy says we don’t give rides, not unless it’s tied to a call or we’re gathering evidence or statements.
Hard telling a desperate person who has absolutely nothing that we can’t help them get somewhere. It doesn’t matter how much you want to. You just have to watch them walk away. My uncle is a lieutenant with the Blacksburg Police Department in Virginia, a member of the SWAT team.
He was one of the first officers inside the school during the Virginia Tech shooting. My dad told me he had to see a therapist afterward because he had to ignore wounded students. Kids shot, crying, begging for help, and he had to keep walking past them because they hadn’t secured the shooter yet, and that was the priority. The shooter had already killed himself.
They didn’t know that then. My uncle and the other officers moved forward, past the moaning and the blood, because they thought the danger was still real. He lived with that for a long time. I’m not a cop, but back when I worked security, we watched a group shoplift in a store.
They walked toward the exit with concealed merchandise, and the alarm went off. The older ones ran, all of them eighteen or nineteen, and one girl froze. She was twelve. Because she stayed, because she complied, she was the only one who got charged.
She had a conscience, and it cost her. Her friends who did the wrong thing got away. She did the right thing and got punished for it. I tried to tell myself it might be a wake-up call, that those older kids were dragging her somewhere bad, but pulling her in felt awful.
She was the only decent one in that group, and the system treated her like the criminal. I knew a fellow soldier who got messed up in Iraq. He was on his first term with the Army National Guard, had just gotten back, was still decompressing. He lost it in a nightclub, hit a guy, knocked him unconscious.
I never got the full story of what started it. The civilian police picked him up and saw immediately that he was not in a good place mentally. They decided not to charge him at all. Instead, they admitted him to a civilian mental health facility because it was that obvious.
He needed help, not jail. His National Guard unit gave him a bad conduct discharge anyway. Because he was on his first term, that discharge wiped out every veteran benefit he had, medical, mental health, aftercare, everything. The court said he wasn’t a criminal, but the military treated him like one anyway.
Last I heard, he’s barely off the streets. His family took him in and cares for him, and that’s the only reason he’s not dead. He can’t work. He can’t handle his own care bills.
With his discharge history, no one will hire him. And even though he got wrecked in Iraq, Veterans Affairs can’t touch his case because of that BCD. It’s been over five years, and I still can’t think about it without wanting to break something. That Guard unit threw him into the cold.
The civilian police handled it better than most people would believe, but it wasn’t enough in the end. I’m not a cop, but I’m a real estate appraiser. I appraised a 120-foot-long, low-quality house that was basically trailers welded end to end. It had seventeen bedrooms.
Sixteen of them were occupied by foster kids. The sixteenth bedroom had padlocks on the outside of the door. I called CPS to let them know. They said if it wasn’t like that at the exact moment of inspection, there was nothing they could do.
I still worry about those kids. I picture them coming home from school and being locked in those rooms and me not being able to do a thing about it. I work in the criminal justice system, and my caseload is mostly addicts and people with mental health disorders. One of my guys is a twenty-five-year-old who turned to alcohol because his parents are terrible to him.
They verbally and mentally abuse him, tearing him down every day, telling him he’s worthless. He needs good friends, support, someone to give him a hug. I can’t do any of that. I have to keep telling him to move out, even though his mother never let him work, always insisting he has OCD and other issues, so he has no job experience and no license and no way to get anywhere.
He’s currently facing jail time, and he’ll probably end up right back on my caseload when he gets out. I hate it. I’m hoping to convince him to go into a group home at some point, somewhere that will give him the support he actually needs. We’ll see.
There’s something truly sad and humbling about arresting three generations of the same family over ten years, all of them in the same area, all of them continuing to have kids. You get to know these people and their whole families, and you watch them self-destruct over and over and over. It’s like Groundhog Day. I know the kids with potential will be dragged down by the whole “that’s my family, they come first” mentality.
Sometimes I want to put them in the back of my car and drive them cross-country, dump them somewhere beautiful where they could start fresh, away from the influences that got them where they are. But they’d just find their way back. We’re all creatures of habit. At the hospital, I found a girl sleeping in the lobby.
She was homeless, admitted it openly, said she was looking for a place to sleep. But she didn’t look like your typical homeless person. Her clothes were relatively clean, she didn’t seem too rough. I got her to the ER because she said she was trying to come off a meth addiction, and I’d seen her in the ER a couple of days before, so that checked out.
She stayed overnight because of unstable vitals. The next day, they kicked her out. She asked for a ride to the local addiction center, about forty-five minutes away. The nurse refused.
Total jerk. She said the girl clearly had money, so she didn’t need the ride. So there I was, standing in a hallway with this crying homeless girl no older than twenty, drawing her a map, explaining how she could walk all that way, and I could see her eyes just glaze over as I talked. I stopped and said, “I’m sorry.
” She said, “It’s okay. You’re doing more than anyone else ever did. ”
She went missing that week. Her family posted flyers.
Her body turned up two weeks later. She jumped off a bridge. I was eight years old, riding in the car with my mom in busy Southern California traffic. She tried to make a left turn across a busy road and the car just died, right in the middle of the intersection.
A cop pulled up. He told us we needed to clear the vehicle out of the road. We asked if he’d help us push. No can do.
We asked if he could use his reinforced bumper to push us. No. We asked if he could stop traffic so we could try pushing the car ourselves. Nope.
He stood there like a statue, threatening to have the car towed and impounded. Finally, a nice passerby got out and helped us push through a sea of honking, angry drivers. That cop just watched the whole time. Scumbag boyfriend hit my mom, so I kicked his ass.
She called the police. She took his side because he was on probation. I ran before the cops got there. They couldn’t do anything to him, but the officer filed a domestic abuse complaint against me.
I had to go to court. I moved in with my benefactors, who pay for my schooling. I’m a talent musician. The judge assumed I was in a foster family and classified me as a troubled youth.
Three nights in jail and a hundred hours of community service, because that cop had decided to interfere. That was the thanks I got for protecting my mother. I was riding shotgun in my friend’s truck during a winter drive when we hit a patch of black ice. A car coming toward us was a little too close to our path, so my friend corrected slightly and the truck spun out and flipped onto its side in the ditch.
We were lucky. We wandered around in a daze, and a truck and a car stopped to check on us. Then a DNR officer pulled up in his beautiful diesel F-350. He mentioned he had a tow rope in his utility box, but he couldn’t help us.
Insurance protocol. Tax dollars at work. I’m a medic. Our policy is to wait for the police to clear a scene before we go in, in case there’s danger.
Cardiac arrest, seizure, respiratory failure, it doesn’t matter. If dispatch flagged the scene as unsafe, we don’t go in until police secure it. The policy exists for a good reason, but sometimes it means waiting while someone’s life runs out. My brother and I had a beat-up 93 Cadillac DeVille.
We broke down in the middle of a busy street, kind of on the side of the road, and for fifteen minutes everyone just drove past. Then it started pouring rain. Absolutely dumping on us. Out of nowhere, a cruiser pulled up, two city cops.
They asked what our problem was. We said we had no clue about cars, asked if they could help. They looked at each other. The driver said, “We don’t know anything about cars either.
Good luck, boys. ” Then they drove off. We watched them pull into a gas station about two hundred feet up and go inside to buy food. We sat on the hood of that dead Cadillac in the rain until a guy in a truck towed us into a Goodwill parking lot and drove us home.
I’ve got five family members who are cops. I’m not anti-police. But come on. Really.
That story about the woman with the asthma attack, though, that’s the one I can’t shake. She heard them outside her door, must have known they were so close. Fire and rescue stood right there, waiting for us to do their job, while she suffocated six feet from freedom. They brought her back, thank God, but she lived knowing that help was right outside and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come in.
It’s hard to get that out of your head. I still hope they got sued into the ground. Somebody needed to pay for that. But protocol didn’t care.
It never does.