Sorrow and the Badge

One of the best assignments I had as a police officer was in 1989 when I worked as a member of a street crimes unit. I rode bikes, walked foot patrols and worked in street clothes to catch people doing everything from drug dealing to aggressive panhandling. Every day was an opportunity to arrest felons and write tickets to people for nuisance crimes. Santa Barbara had a large population of homeless people and the focus of the team was on the small percentage of them that chose a criminal lifestyle. I was always busy and put many of the same hard core, criminal homeless in jail over and over.

In early 1991, I received a call from the Santa Barbara County Elections Department and it was not good news. A clerk working at the front counter watched two homeless men enter the office and begin searching a publicly accessible database that listed the names and addresses of registered voters. The clerk figured out that they were searching for police officer’s names. He heard them talking about me.

Days later, a neighbor saw two homeless men enter the apartment complex where I lived with my wife, Margie. She was pregnant with our first daughter. They looked at the names on the mailboxes and left. Our name was not listed. The manager of the complex removed the nametag from the mailbox hours after I heard from the Elections Office. A week later, we moved out of Santa Barbara. This was the only time that I was targeted off duty for being a police officer and had to move.

More times than I can count people called me names, swore at me and threatened me. I recognized that their anger and hatred was not because of the person I was but because of the badge I wore on my uniform. I did not respond in kind, but did my job and made an effort to be fair no matter how evil people were towards me. In the book His Passion, Christ’s Journey to the Resurrection, the following passage reminded me of this kind of hatred.

“When Christians speak of Jesus as a ‘Man of Sorrows’ who is ‘acquainted with grief,’ they are not describing His spiritual nature. Grief was something thrust upon our Lord by his opposition. It was flung at Him along with blows and curses. He did not exchange his joy for sorrow; the sorrow came from without. The joy remained within Him and the hostility that built up against Him, all the conspiring that resulted in His betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, trial, crucifixion, sentencing, flogging and crucifixion did not change Jesus. If he became acquainted with grief, it was only to endure it.”