Can You Come to the Office?"
Six words. That's all it took. I was riding in my patrol car, doing what I always do, when my phone lit up with my chief's name. I answered the way I always do. Professional. Calm. Yes, sir. And then he said it — can you come to the office? — and just like that, my heart was in my throat and my anxiety was doing 500 miles an hour and I already knew. I just knew.
I want you to understand something about those six words when you work in law enforcement. They are never good. Nobody calls you into the office to tell you something wonderful. So I drove there already bracing myself, already building my walls, already talking to that little girl I keep a picture of on my dresser at home. The one I look at and tell, every single day, that I will protect her. Because nobody protected her when she was small. But the grown woman will. Every time.
I walked into the office and it was empty. That was the first sign. It is never empty. There is always somebody in there a voice, a radio, movement, something. But that day there was nothing. Just silence and fluorescent lights and the sound of my own footsteps. My boss came out and said let's go to my office, and I followed her, and somewhere in the back of my mind I was already thinking whatever this is, I didn't do it. Whatever they're building, it isn't true. And they know it isn't true.
She sat down with her head in her hands and told me there had been complaints. That people didn't feel safe with me in the office. That I was being placed on administrative leave, effective immediately. I wanted to laugh. I have over a decade in law enforcement. Over a decade of showing up, doing the work, being professional even when this job gave me every reason not to be. And they were sitting across from me telling me that someone they wouldn't say who didn't feel safe. Because of me. I asked the obvious questions. Did I pull my weapon? Was I physically threatening? Did I make verbal threats? And the answer to every single one of them was no. They just had statements. From people they wouldn't name. About things they couldn't specify. That was it. That was the whole case.
What I didn't say out loud in that room what I've learned the hard way over years of being a Black woman in this profession is that attitude is always the charge when they can't find anything real. You're too much. Too loud. Too confident. Too unbothered. And unbothered, apparently, reads as threatening when you look like me and you refuse to shrink.
They took my weapon. My badge. My IDs. Everything. How I walked in that morning was not how I left. And I signed the administrative leave paperwork because I read it and it was what they said it was, and I went home, and I gave myself about ten minutes to be furious before I started making calls. My attorney. My kids. And then I told that little girl on the dresser we are going to be okay. I don't know exactly how yet. But we are going to be okay.
The following week they called me back in. Bring your vest. Your radio. Your uniforms. All of it. I already knew what that meant. You don't return equipment for a write-up.
I got there and there were two papers on the desk. A termination letter and a resignation letter short, clean, three sentences, like they'd made it easy for me. My supervisor looked at me and said, all you had to do was go home and chill. You reached out to someone and now I have to terminate you. What she meant was I had called a coworker and asked if they had ever seen me do anything wrong, ever seen me be aggressive or threatening or unsafe. And that person told me no. Never even seen y'all interact. Which is exactly what I thought. But apparently asking the question was the offense.
I read the termination letter. All of it. And when I got to the part that said I had been walking around the office saying I was from the south side, trying to intimidate people, trying to start a fight I laughed. Out loud. In the room. Because it was so absurd, so clearly constructed, so obviously a lie that there was nothing else to do. I had practically put those words in the air myself when I asked if I'd been physically intimidating. They just picked them up and ran with them.
My chief pulled his chair close and looked at me and said if I didn't resign, he would put me on a Brady list for insubordination. I almost laughed again because that is not what the Brady list is. I said I wasn't signing either paper. He said the resignation would expire when I walked out the door. I said I wasn't signing either paper. He wrote refused on both of them, made copies, handed me mine, and that was that.
I walked out. And then I went to find my daughter.
Ki works down the hall. She came out when she saw me and we stepped into the stairwell and I held it together for as long as I could, which wasn't very long at all. She read the termination letter and when she got to the part about the south side she said ain't no way and I said I know. She was getting upset and I had to be the one to calm her down, which is its own kind of thing being the person who just got fired, holding your child together in a stairwell, telling her everything is going to be okay because you cannot afford for her to lose her job too. So I did that. And then I walked out of the building, got in my truck, called my attorney, and drove away.
I want to tell you that I cried the whole way home. But honestly? What I felt was closer to relief. The stress of that job had been sitting on my chest for years. The constant scrutiny. The feeling that nothing I did was ever right, never enough, always somehow wrong. My therapist and I spent a long time working through what that does to a person the way it makes you question yourself, shrink yourself, wonder if maybe they're right and you really aren't good enough. We worked through it. And somewhere on that drive home, I felt the weight of it lift.
I came home and I took care of my plants. I went out to my garden. I just moved through my own space, in my own quiet, and I exhaled in a way I hadn't in longer than I can remember.
Two days later my attorneys called to tell me they had reduced it. Not termination — a Level 2 disciplinary action. No take-home car for 60 days. No off-duty work for 60 days. They seemed to think I should be grateful. And maybe I should be. But I still don't have answers. I still don't know who said what or why. I still have to walk back into that building and do my job next to people who may have lied about me, and I won't know which ones.
What I do know is this, I defended myself. In less than 24 hours I wrote a rebuttal, sent it to my attorney, and something in it scared them enough to change course. That little girl on my dresser? She did that. The grown woman who promised to protect her did that.
Nobody else was going to do it. Nobody else ever has. But I will. Every single time.
March 2026 · Building While It Burns