I have come to dread Mother’s Day. That second Sunday in May marks the beginning of Police Week and after roughly 35 years in law enforcement, it’s a rough week. There is an upside though and I’ll get to that, too.
If you’ve never personally attended Police Week, I highly recommend you do so. I didn’t until about ten years ago and after I’d stopped actively working the street. My wife refused to go with me until I had completely stopped working the street. She was sure that otherwise, my name would end up on that wall. Two years ago, my youngest son went to the memorial with me and attended part of the Candlelight Vigil. When I asked him what he thought about it, he said he never wanted to go back. He called it, “…a gut punch.”
Yes, it is an emotionally moving experience. It can be hard. On the one hand, it feels awesome to walk around a couple square blocks of our nation’s capital and know you are surrounded by family. The Thin Blue Line is thick in D.C. during Police Week and especially when the Candlelight Vigil is held.
On the other hand, when you walk around the memorial and look at the memorabilia that has been left to honor the fallen, it’s rough, emotionally. I cry every year and I admit that without shame. Wreaths are quite common, photographs, some poetry. This year there was a pair of shined boots left in honor of a fallen officer. Some agencies put up their own small shrines to honor all of the officers who have died in the line of duty from the same department. All of them are moving and give you pause. Then you look down along the wall and you see a letter written from the child of a fallen officer to the dead parent. I even have to take a pause from typing because remembering them fills my eyes; surviving families pay a larger price than any of us can imagine.
What can we do to honor the fallen? Yes, we attend events in our own communities. We post memorial images and plaques. We build statues and make proclamations. We support the families in every way we can because they’re part of the Thin Blue Line family. That’s what we do.
What else? We can learn. We can commit to doing all we can not to end up on that wall and not to let our partners end up there. I have to believe that one of the greatest honors we can give to the fallen is to let their sacrifice serve as a training tool, as a lesson in our profession. Sometimes though, sometimes there is nothing that can be done differently. Sometimes we just have to do our duty, managing risk as best we can, but facing what risk we have to take head on and full of courage.
That’s the job. That’s the commitment. That’s our duty. We do it with pride. We do it with full knowledge of what we risk. We do it supporting each other and keeping the Thin Blue Line strong. It’s a family I’m honored to belong to.
Stay safe and stay strong.
Frank Borelli
