A former Detroit police officer wrote a moving post on Facebook in which she described how tough it is to be a police officer and called for an end to violence in light of the Dallas shooting last week.
Merri McGregor, from Harrison Township, Michigan, shared a picture of herself as a 21-year-old the day she graduated from the Detroit police academy. Her mother took the photo of her smiling as she walked out the door for her first night shift.
She was wearing her father’s badge, which he wore for 25 years, she had her mother’s sergeant stripe patches in her pocket, her lucky $2 bill tucked into her bulletproof vest, a gun on her hip, and “enough naive courage for a small army.”
But her law enforcement career wasn’t so easy.
“The next 17 years would bring plenty of shed blood, black eyes, torn ligaments, stab wounds, stitches, funerals, a head injury, permanent and irreparable nerve damage, 5 ruptured discs, some charming PTSD and depression issues and a whole lot of heartache. They brought missed Christmases with my family, my absence from friends’ birthday get-togethers, pricey concert tickets that were forfeited at the last minute because of a late call and many sleepless nights.”
McGregor then went on to describe the kinds of incidents she faced throughout her career which began in 1998, according to her LinkedIn profile, “things that haunt our sleep at night and our thoughts during the day.”
“I’ve dodged gunfire while running down a dark alley in the middle of the night chasing a shooting suspect, I’ve argued with women who were too scared to leave their abusive husbands until they realized they had to or they would end up dead. I’ve peeled a dead, burned baby from the front of my uniform shirt. I’ve felt the pride of putting handcuffs on a serial rapist and I’ve cried on the chest of and kissed the cheek of my dead friend, coworker and academy classmate even though it was covered in his own dried blood and didn’t even look like him from all the bullet holes. I know what a bullet sounds like when it’s whizzing past your ear, a few inches away, I know what the sound of a Mother’s shrilling scream is like when she finds out her son has been killed in the middle of the street and I know what it’s like to have to tell a wife and mother of 3 that her husband was killed in a car accident while on his way home from work.”
