The There's a lot that defines us as people and in some ways there's probably a little that defines us as people and in some ways

there's probably a little that defines us more than the work that we do.

You know, when meeting someone knew, what do you do for work?

It's one of the first topics discussed.

It seems like sometimes it's just a shorthand easy way to quickly get an idea of the kind of person that your meeting is.

A quick way to put someone in a box as it were, get an idea of who they are without really needing you spend a whole lot more time or

asking enough questions to get a real feel for them. It's kind of like the abbreviated quick version.

And as a result, I think it's easy to start thinking of ourselves as defined by our work. If everyone else is going to judge us that way, we might as well

judge ourselves that way too, right?

For me, working in law enforcement doesn't make that any easier.

If you know any cops in your own life, you might find that cops are often guilty of seeing

the world as being made up of two groups of people.

Cops and everybody else. And it's in some ways just a lesson that's taught to us early on. I mean I

remember being in the academy and even being on field training being taught over and over.'t trust anyone you meet. No matter what there's always a

possibility that the person that I was going to be interacting with was going to try to hurt or kill me simply just because I was a cop.

So the academy it seemed, they almost seemed to make sense to only trust my fellow cops while I was working because I could never know who else to trust.

You know, but even though it kind of made sense to me, I didn't really fully realize

the dependence I would feel on my partners until I started working out in the field. And the area that I was assigned to, there were about 200,000 people who lived in the

city. So overnight, during graveyard hours, you get about 200,000 people in the city.

And my graveyard shift, I spent most of my time working graveyard, is made up a five two-man

police cars, two cops working the same police car. So five

cars total that that means there's only ten cops. And if you even you know if you want to really stretch, add some supervisors, we had two sergeants and a lieutenant.

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