I have had inquiries about my odd career path – 25 years working with  law enforcement and now obsessed with cannabis. To understand my transition, I need to explain how someone like me, a veteran of the 1960’s peace and civil rights protests, ended up spending 25 years advocating for law enforcement.

In the late 1970s my kids were both in school and I needed to work so I accepted a part-time job at an early community project with the Boston Police Department.  At that time, the relationship between the Department and the people of Boston was tense. A federal court had ruled that Boston schools were unconstitutionally segregated and ordered students bused outside their neighborhoods to correct the situation. Anger, particularly, in the white neighborhoods, resulted in near-riots and numerous incidents of violence.

My job was in a busy police station in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the city. At that time there were very few women or minorities on the force. Most of the two hundred officers assigned to the station where I worked were very outspoken about their conservative views on everything from the Vietnam War to women’s rights to homosexuality. One officer told me he didn’t think “girls” should have driver’s licenses. After many heated but friendly discussions, I got a new nickname, “Jane Fonda.” It was quite a culture shock for a liberal-minded young woman who came of age in the 1960s to find herself plopped down in the middle of this strange world.

I worked there for three years, organizing and facilitating meetings between residents and the officers who patrolled the district’s neighborhoods. During that time I saw firsthand the officers’ constant dealings with armed assailants, drug dealers, drunks, rapists, gangs, the homeless, the mentally ill, and a whole range of garden-variety crooks.  All I knew about cops was what I had read in the paper and watched on TV news. So being in that station every day, seeing first hand what their job was like, I realized I didn’t have a clue about what cops do. It’s not an understatement to say I was continually amazed at the restraint, humor, and humanity they showed as they went about their difficult tasks.

When I look back I can say that many of the officers I got to know back in Boston at that busy police station, were  wonderful people just like Alvin Rountree (pictured here), an undercover NYPD officer getting illegal weapons off the street, a job widely viewed as the most dangerous assignment in the profession. Alvin’s story is a chapter in my book, Brave Hearts: Extraordinary Stories of Pride Pain and Courage.

During my  time working in the bowels of the old District Four, I witnessed extraordinary acts of human kindness and compassion. I will never forget the time I came back to the station and found an older officer sobbing—the kind where your whole body heaves. He had just returned from a call where he found a three-month-old baby dead in a bathtub. It was Christmas Eve 1979 the first year I worked there when I saw one officer take home a particularly violent eleven-year-old boy so he wouldn’t have to spend Christmas Eve alone in a cell. The boy was black. The officer, who had six children of his own, was white.

Then there was the sergeant who was reading the book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Susan Brownmiller’s seminal history of the crime of rape, after he responded to a brutal sexual assault of an older woman near a church. When I asked him about it, he seemed a little embarrassed. He told me, “I’m just trying to figure out why it would happen. My daughter told me to read this book.”

After those three years in that station, I knew I wanted to do something that would help the law enforcement profession. Several years later, when I founded American Police Beat, my goal was to create a publication for law enforcement officers around the country to communicate with one another about the most pressing issues affecting their personal and professional lives. After just a couple of years,  American Police Beat was the leading law enforcement publication in the United States, with over 200,000 readers every month.

I spent 4 years writing Brave Hearts: Extraordinary Stories of Pride, Pain & Courage –  the personal stories of 15 men and women who  worked for the New York City Police Department. Whether they were shutting down international narcotics operations, making arrest for brutal homicides, settling marital disputes, getting illegal weapons off the streets, finding serial killers, or preventing another terrorist attack, they routinely face injury and death to serve and protect people, most of whom they don’t know and will probably never meet. The book sold 30,000 copies and is being used as curriculum material at police academies and colleges of criminal justice. I created a 90 page lesson plan for the instructor.

About the thousands of officers I have met over the past 30 years publishing American Police Beat, I can tell you their personalities are as varied as their assignments. But almost all of them share a passion for their work and a conviction that they are doing something important with their lives. Despite the constant exposure to America’s dark side and these disturbing  times we are in, most cops, when they get the call, still rush to the scene to help.

The picture above is me with my two kids and husband Jim a few years back. You can read the story about how Jim getting Parkinson’s Disease got us committed to the cannabis cause  HERE.