I've been mulling over how to unpack an encounter I had a few weeks ago. I am a huge fan of Friends because, quite frankly, all the cool kids are. There is an episode entitled "The One Where Chandler Crosses the Line." In it, Ross decides to come out of retirement and grace his friends with his keyboard skills.
Before he actually starts playing, he over-explains what he's about to do. Eventually, they just demand that he start playing. The funny part is that he is an awful keyboardist and everyone recognizes this but Phoebe.
So I want to talk about what happened, but I don't know how to preface it. I want to relate the events journalistically, but I also want to give context. So I'm going to rewind a bit to give background, then try to talk about what happened more recently.
Last summer/early fall, I asked Brian if I could take a nap. It used to be a daily thing, but in the past couple of years it's become really rare. I don't remember why I was so tired, but I wanted to lie down. He needed to mow. When he's doing yard work, I'm usually point person for the kids. I run interference until he's done.
We live a block away from our grade school. The school has two playgrounds, one for the primary (K-2) grades, one for secondary (3-5). We don't have a clear line of sight to the playground, but we are close enough that if something happens, someone can run back home without any issue.
All four kids headed over to the park. Doug didn't want to go with the others the secondary playground because his classroom assistant had told him that there were dinosaur bones hidden in the dirt on the primary playground. He had taken his bulldozer and wanted to dig for bones.
(Please note that from here on out, I am telling this story secondhand. I wasn't present for what follows.)
Some time later, Jeremy came home to tell Brian that Brooklyn (our youngest) needed a diaper change. Brian grabbed a clean diaper and went with Jeremy back to the park. As he was returning home (with all four kids in tow), a police cruiser pulled up.
The female police officer started a conversation. She said that someone had called because they saw a boy playing in the park, unattended. Brian told her that we live a block away, we let them play there by themselves all the time.
She then proceeded to tell him that there was someone in Woodstock who had been approaching kids [in an attempt to kidnap them].
(Brian told me later that he felt the officer hoped this piece of info would make Brian feel bad about having let Doug play on his own. Brian has incredible instincts and so I am inclined to believe him.)
Brian immediately asked her for the source of her news.
She didn't take kindly to him pushing back against what she was saying. She told him she was going to have to report us to DCFS.
And that's where it was for about two months. As someone with anxiety and depression, it was not pleasant to have the threat of a visit from DCFS hanging over my head. I felt like crap about myself and my parenting skills.
I don't remember how much time passed, but we eventually received a letter from DCFS that they were investigating us for neglect regarding Doug. They didn't lay out what the basis was for the claim.
The investigator showed up looking tired and overworked. I forget his name (I'm tired), but he told us that he had a bunch of questions to ask us. (The toughest part of the interview was not being sarcastic with our answers. If you know me or my husband, we are telling jokes almost every moment of the day.)
He took us through the questions. When he was done, we asked him the burning question that had been on our mind--why had we been referred to DCFS.
It wasn't just that Doug was playing by himself at the park. Apparently, whoever had observed him at the park by himself watched him walk down [street name redacted] and go into a garage halfway down the block.
It all clicked. Our house is halfway down the block. Someone saw Doug walk down our block and go into our house through the open garage.
Here's the kicker. The social worker had to come from Peoria. The closest DCFS office to us is in Rockford, and they are currently understaffed. So he had to drive up from Peoria to see us. And then he had to drive up again because he had to observe all four kids for 5 minutes. That was actually the toughest thing to wrangle, with all of the kids' activities.
I will insert some commentary here and then unpack what happened a few weeks ago.
The police officer never told us what the person had observed. Had she taken a few minutes to lay out what the witness had seen, we could've explained to her that Doug is autistic and has ADHD. He is obsessed with dinos and will do anything he can to incorporate them into any type of play he engages in. The witness said Doug was muttering to himself and pacing. Yup, that's what he does when he's anxious. She could've mentioned that the witness saw him go into a house halfway down the block. "Yup," we would've said, "he was going home, probably to get more tools for digging."
Doug does not give off an air of neglect. He is chubby, has a lot of language, is bathed regularly. It absolutely kills me that someone had to come up from Peoria to investigate this baseless claim. It was a waste of money and time.
(I will pause here to insert say that recently had a tragedy in our community. A little boy was found to have been murdered by his parents. DCFS was involved with his family at different points during the boys' life. I feel the resources involved in researching the neglect claim for Doug could have been put to better use.)
This series of events was unpleasant. I didn't feel like I could talk to anyone about them. I felt a deep sense of shame that our family had been investigated by DCFS. I felt like it was a referendum on our parenting. I felt like it was a referendum on my fitness as a human being. Brian did his best to help counter these feelings, but it was as if one of my worst fears grew legs and became human.
A couple of weeks ago, Bekah asked if she could go to Indian Prairie park (meaning the playground on school property). Again, it's half a block away from us. I told her it was fine. It was a Monday night. Brian has a regular engagement on Monday night. At 7:15, around the time he was going to leave, I asked him if he could go send Bekah home. He said he could.
At this point in the evening, I had already taken my medicine. It's not sleep medication, but it does have the side effect of making me sleepy and a bit groggy. I was on the verge of going upstairs to bed when I heard a loud banging on the door.
We live in a heavily residential neighborhood. There can sometimes be a steady stream of people knocking on our door to sell goods and/or services. The knocking was more insistent than the normal knocking, so rather than ignore it (as per usual), I got off the couch and went to see who it was.
There was a police officer on my front porch. He asked if he could talk to me. I said, "sure," and went out to be on the stoop with him. Was my husband home? "No," I answered. "He is at [information withheld], at a church on the corner of Haligus and Algonquin."
"Haligus and Algonquin?" He said it with incredulity and as if he didn't believe me. This threw me into a major anxiety attack.
"Well, I'm not sure if it's Haligus, but it's the church right across from the hospital." I stammered, "I'm so sorry, I'm having a hard time coming up with the name of the church, but I know it's across from the hospital."
"Are you okay," he asked me, rather brusquely.
"Actually, I said, I'm not. I'm a little overwhelmed because you're standing here asking me questions and I don't really know what's going on."
"Does your husband drive a tan Toyota, license plate [information redacted]?"
"Yes," I answered, hesitantly.
"We had a phone call from someone that witnessed a man in a tan car approach a girl on a pink bike and then speed off in the opposite direction."
In this time, another officer arrived. The first caught him up on what had happened so far.
"Um, well, my *husband* went to tell my *daughter* to come home. She doesn't have a phone and I wanted her to come home. I didn't want to pack everyone up to go find her, so I figured he could just tell her to come home."
"Would you mind if we talked to your daughter?"
"No,"I said, "but please keep in mind that she may be nervous to talk to the two of you."
I went to retrieve Bekah. As soon as we got to our driveway, the officer said to her, "can you point to the bike you were riding?" She pointed to her bike.
"Was that your dad that talked to you?"
"Yes," Bekah said.
"Did anyone else approach you or try to talk to you at all?"
"No," she answered.
"Okay."
And that was it. Please note, at no point in the interaction did the officers introduce themselves to me. That is something I *might* be able to overlook, but they also didn't introduce themselves to Bekah, even after I explained to them that she might be nervous to talk to them.
In general, I don't feel like the officers treated me like a human. They treated me like I (and by extension, my husband) was a criminal.
I was incredibly shaken by the whole interaction. I posted something about it on FB. One of my neighbors mentioned that the officers had been knocking on doors, asking about a missing girl. It has continued to baffle us how Bekah could be considered missing if we hadn't made that report.
I had a hard time sleeping that night. It bothered me that the officer hadn't introduced himself. It bothered me that he had been condescending and dismissive when I pointed out an error in something he had said. It bothered me that they had initiated a rumor about a missing child, especially in light of recent events.
The thing I couldn't convey a couple of weeks ago was that the previous interaction (last fall) we had with police was still fresh in my mind. I had never really processed it. I was still carrying around a nagging sense that I was a crappy parent. This current interaction reiterated the negative narrative that had been playing in my head for several months.
I made a decision to go talk to someone at the station the next morning. I was nervous and almost in tears as I sat, waiting for the sergeant to emerge. I just wanted to be heard. I wanted him to look at me, to listen to what I had to say and acknowledge my feelings.
The thing that actually happened was about as far away from that as you could possibly imagine.
I prefaced things by apologizing for crying. I told him that I struggled with anxiety and depression. This didn't change his demeanor at all. He had walked in radiating arrogance and didn't soften at all, even when I grabbed a Kleenex as I started crying.
I tried to lay out for him what had happened, at least from my perspective. It was clear that he had pulled up the report from the previous evening. It was laying next to him, face down, on the table.
I laid out my concerns, that the officer had not introduced himself or explained why he was there.
His brusque response was that the officer was not obligated to introduce himself, he was investigating a crime. (As an aside, I will point out that the officer was investigating an *alleged* crime. This seems like I'm being pedantic, but the difference is huge. We live in a country where we are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The sergeant, in dropping or omitting this word, was asserting that a crime had taken place. To review, there wasn't. It was a misunderstanding.)
I told him that the officer was condescending.
"How was he condescending?" He asked, again very brusquely.
I calmly explained myself.
"That's not condescending," he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. "It's a simple mistake."
(I am a bit hamstrung to explain the mistake the officer made. I can't name the two organizations that the officer mistook for one another because I can't publicly identify as a member of the organization. It would break my anonymity. Let's just say, it is like I said my husband was going to play Scrabble and the officer said Words with Friends. Fundamentally, they're the same, but really, it's two totally different games. The common layperson shouldn't be expected to know the difference, but I felt like a police officer should be sensitive to the difference between the two. This is magnified by the fact that the court system regularly sends DUI offenders to the one organization. Again, the sergeant dismissed it as a minor mistake--to be clear, that's condescending--but it's not a minor mistake.)
I told him that the officer had told my neighbor that they were searching for a missing child.
"Did you hear the officer actually say that to your neighbor?"
"Well, no, but this is a neighbor I trust--if she says he said it to her, then he said it to her."
"That's hearsay. He never said that. That's hearsay. That's the problem with social media."
I tried to engage the sergeant's sense of empathy, that I was home, alone, with my four kids. A man with a gun knocks on my door. He *looks* like a police officer, but how am I to know what his purpose or his motive is? Can he imagine how that might be intimidating?
Nope.
He was unmoved. He didn't concede one single point to me. I got incredibly emotional, especially as the interaction went on. He kept cutting me off, then accused *me* of not letting *him* finish talking.
In short, it was a disaster. It was like walking into a buzzsaw.
Again, here's where giving a factual account of something is difficult. I have been binge watching Forensic Files. It's a fascinating show. I love science. But one of the things I've learned is that eyewitness testimony is fundamentally flawed. It's notoriously unreliable. People don't always see what they think they are seeing.
I think the same is the case here. There are probably three versions of the story I'm trying to tell--my side, the officer/sergeant's side, and the truth. Maybe if Brian's interaction with the officer last fall had gone more positively, I wouldn't have been so affronted by the officer's behavior. I *do,* in fact, struggle with anxiety and depression. Maybe someone without a history of mental health issues would have been able to let the whole thing roll off their back.
Everything that I've recounted demonstrates my bias about things. I have not published any of the officers names on social media or in any verbal accounts I've given to friends. It's not my intention to assassinate anyone's character. I absolutely understand that everyone has bad days. Being a police officer can be a thankless job. The pay isn't what it ought to be. It's a dangerous job. There are a lot of risks.
I respect all first responders for the hard work that they do for our community. That doesn't mean, however, that I think they should be able to behave without being held accountable. I also feel that policemen and women should be held to a higher standard. The officer last fall was perpetrating a myth. It's almost statistically insignificant how many kids are kidnapped by strangers. The real danger for kids is from those who are known to them (e.g. priests, soccer coaches, Boy Scout leaders, family friends). Having this unspecified "stranger danger" fear thrown over our communities has been a disaster.
I also don't blame the neighbor who spotted the interaction, though if (s)he ever stumbles across this blog post, here's what I want her/him to know.
Police officers investigate crimes. They treat the people they encounter in the gathering of data as criminals. It is not pleasant to be treated like a criminal.
Police officers are not interested in clearing up misunderstandings. That's outside the purview of their job.
Police officers are humans and approach their job with their own biases and prejudices. They tend to react to things like missing children (again, Bekah was never missing) in a way that can be disproportional.
The weekend after this happened, I made homemade cinnamon rolls from scratch. I set up a table, poured water and waved at every car and person that drove by. I still don't know who called the cops, but I want people in my neighborhood to know who I am and who my kids are. I felt like an absolute fool, waving at everyone and offering free baked goods to passerby, but alas, my feelings are not always accurate depictions of reality. I intend to do it again next month. Bekah made a sign that helps advertise that the rolls are absolutely free (I guess it appeared to people as if I was trying to sell them--most people were incredulous that I was giving them away). I am going to have popsicles for the kids and water balloons. This month, I had one or two good friends come by to support me. I met three or four total strangers, one actual neighbor and one random passerby. I almost burst into tears at three separate instances, but was able to hold it together until I got home.
I have to choose kindness because it's all I've got right now. I am not a woman of means and I don't have a voice that broadcasts all over the world. I am a mom with a tiny blog, a pile of unfolded laundry and a wounded heart. In order to heal, I have to forgive. I may not ever be able to face the officers involved again. I may get anxiety every time a cop approaches me for a long while. But I can choose to be kind to everyone. I don't want to hold a grudge or a resentment because I'm the one who ends up getting burned by that.
I need to be able to get my kids out of the house, that's the bottom line. We moved into our house *because* of its close proximity to the school. I get overwhelmed when my kids are in my house 24 hours a day. They get overwhelmed. They are kids. They need to be outside, riding their bikes and climbing the monkey bars. I can't afford to install that in my backyard.
I have started doubting my decisions. Again, this is two small incidences. Maybe I blew them out of proportion (spoiler alert, I've done that before and I'll most likely do it again). I wish, in my heart of hearts, that the sergeant had sat there, listened to me, patted me on the arm and left. Even if he went back to the squad room (or whatever) and lamented to his officers that I'm a crazy lady, I would've walked out feeling like I'd been seen and heard. As it was, I will be reaching out to the city council and seeing how we can proceed with this. I think it's important to hold a mirror up to the department and show them where they can grow. Am I wrong about this? I could be, time will tell.
The bottom line is, I have two boys with autism. Up to this point, I've always wanted to tell them, "if you're in trouble, look for a police officer, they can help you." Based on my own interaction, I worry that the officers may not be able to demonstrate sensitivity to the way my boys communicate and interact. I am very leery of them soliciting help from police officers if they are not well-equipped to handle those kinds of scenarios with care and understanding.
Again, as I've stated, I've not named and don't intend on naming the officers involved in this encounter. I don't hate the police and I don't want the perception to be that I'm bashing the profession or specific humans. Part of me writing this was a) so that I could sort out how I'm feeling and b) so that I can help others see what's on the other end of a "suspicious activity" phone call. Plus, now I've written for three days in a row. And I worked out today. I get to wake up tomorrow and try it all over again.
