Have you ever had that happen? You walk into a room where people are having what they thought was a private conversation about you… and there you are standing there listening to it. I’m sure it has happened to me several times over the years, but one instance stands out because there was absolutely no mistaking what was happening. I was a Sergeant at the time, in charge of a very busy Serious Crimes investigative unit. My team spent most of their shifts driving across the reg

Don’t get me wrong, this is not The Sixth Sense . I don’t actually hear dead people speaking to me. What I mean is that people at the end of their lives offer insights that can only come when you know the life you had a chance to live is almost over. And interestingly, the advice is almost always the same. Those who die younger often have slightly different reflections than those who lived long lives, but the themes repeat themselves over and over again. There are a handful o

I remember when I was a newly promoted Inspector and was asked to attend a monthly meeting at provincial headquarters. It was the room, the one with the top leaders from across the province. Updates. Direction. “Marching orders,” so to speak. I was there to present on a safety device I had purchased for my frontline officers. It hadn’t been approved by headquarters. I had the budget. I saw the risk. I made the call. The device was commonly used by firefighters it alerts when

Last week I listened to a podcast that was hosting a Canadian Police Officer, his identify was hidden to protect him from backlash. Still employed with the National Police, this officer was experiencing a moral crisis knowing that his organization was not only selling their employees false information, but also the public. The lack of resources to do the job and the crisis that was putting him and his colleagues in, all while listening to his leadership say 'nothing to see he

I have two things I want to say today. I’ve been thinking about them for several days. At one point, I almost didn’t post this. That hesitation, my quiet internal voice warning me I might be criticized or attacked. And then I realized: that is exactly why I need to say it. There are many people right now who should be speaking up when something goes wrong. For a range of reasons, they remain silent. I’ve written before about being a whistleblower and the devastating consequen

After so many years in policing, after exposure to incredible trauma, loss, gore, and pain, I sometimes look at devastating incidents reported in the news or unfolding around the world and find myself feeling… nothing. When this happened while I was still operational, I told myself it was professionalism. I needed to keep my head clear so I could do my job. I was often moving from one major event to the next. There was no time to sit with my thoughts or allow emotions to surf

Stop Waiting to Celebrate Have you ever found yourself mentally preventing yourself from celebrating or acknowledging something positive because you were waiting for it to be better or more, or bigger? Like losing a pound at the start of the new year- you don’t celebrate because you are trying to lose 10. Or having success with one element of a project but you haven’t completed it yet so you wait. Or making it 50% of the way to your target number for anything, but you are wai

There’s a question I heard many times throughout my policing career. Sometimes whispered behind closed doors, sometimes stated outright, and once quite publicly, on the nightly news. Years ago, I became the center of a controversy that had nothing to do with performance, capability, or integrity. The spark? My salary as a female police leader appeared too high  for some people’s comfort. Instead of examining what all executives were earning, mine was singled out. For context,

You may not know these terms, but you know the behavior and so do cops. Because we’ve all seen it, heard about it, or done a little of it ourselves. I’ll go first. “Contempt of Cop” is slang for perceived disrespect toward an officer’s authority. It’s not a crime, but it can trigger emotional responses that lead to escalation, unnecessary conflict, or questionable decisions. It shows up when an officer feels challenged or disrespected and reacts from that place rather than fr

I didn’t learn that lesson overnight. It took years and a very specific moment before it finally landed for me. A few years ago, I sat at the most senior leadership table in my organization and presented a staffing issue that I knew was coming. I didn’t show up with opinions or hunches. I showed up with researched data, operational projections, workload impacts, and solutions that aligned with both present and future needs. My intent was simple: to raise an issue early enough

We rarely say those words out loud. Instead, we find a thousand different ways to communicate the same thing, just without the honesty of the sentence itself. When I was writing Tightrope , I originally kept in a few stories about people in policing that I genuinely didn’t like. After 27 years there were only a handful, which isn’t bad for a career lived in close quarters. But those stories were eventually edited out, not because they weren’t true, but because they weren’t th

This is often a difficult topic for police officers and police leaders to talk about honestly. That’s because police corruption is not limited to the obvious acts people usually imagine: taking a bribe, misusing police intelligence for personal gain, planting or manipulating evidence, or stealing it outright. By definition, police corruption also includes organizational gain —actions that benefit the police organization itself through unethical means, including the suppressio

It’s that time of year again. Everywhere you look, people are wrapping up the last twelve months and declaring the next one as some new mantra for how they’ll live their lives. Versions of New Year’s resolutions, moving on, moving forward, changing habits, creating new ones. Whatever it is, someone is writing about it. I started paying attention to patterns. Were there trends? Waves pushing people in certain directions? I’ve noticed that when I see a post on social media, I f

Something changed in me when I left policing. I talk about it briefly at the end of Tightrope , but I never really flushed out how deeply it reshaped the way I see time. I stopped technically doing my job in May. I didn’t formally resign and retire until October, six months later. That in-between space was both challenging and enlightening. The weather was beautiful. I travelled to Africa. I finally slept in. For the first time in decades, I caught my breath. Then October cam

… So Are You Last week, an elderly family member of mine chose MAID, medical assistance in dying. The night before, they told everyone that this would be their last night on earth. They would be dying the next morning. They were 95, lived a long life and did things very much on their own terms. They had been in pain for many months, age and other medical conditions meant there were few options left to manage it. They decided that this was their final page. Two days later I tu

The Hell I Can’t It was a horrible and frightening file. A young woman, biking home from work. Grabbed off the street. Dragged into a cemetery and sexually assaulted. Then forced back to the suspect’s home, where he held her for hours until she seized an opportunity to flee, calling police, and guiding us straight back to where he was. She was young, quiet, gentle. A virgin, which mattered. As the suspect sat in our cells, I walked through the file in my mind: What we had. Wh

It’s that time of year again. The parties, the lights, the music, the shopping, the world seems to overflow with “joy.” But not everyone experiences the holiday season this way. For some, this time of year amplifies heaviness, not happiness. I was in high school the first time I realized how deeply some people struggle at Christmas. Oddly enough, it started with the movie Gremlins . There’s a scene where the female lead tells the male lead that suicides are highest at Christm

Silence is a currency in policing. Some people spend it willingly. Others spend it because they have no choice. In my 26 years in law enforcement, I learned that silence is often rewarded more than courage. We celebrate bravery on the street, but behind closed doors, inside meeting rooms, hallways, and performance discussions, bravery looks very different. It looks like speaking truth to power. And that kind of bravery can cost you. We rarely talk about this publicly. We rare

Introducing Tightrope – Balancing Duty with Courage and Conviction After months of writing, cutting, adding, reworking, and bravely editing, it’s finally here. My book,   Tightrope: Balancing Duty with Courage and Conviction  is now available. I’ve said this many times throughout my life and career: no one walks their journey alone . Not in policing, not in leadership, not in healing, and certainly not in writing a book. Whether we’re facing moments of success or moments of f

Over my 26-year policing career, I worked with hundreds of people across three organizations and six different communities, municipal policing and the RCMP. With that many transitions, I’ve seen almost every reaction imaginable when someone leaves a unit or moves to a new posting. Some departures were celebrated with speeches and cake. Some were quiet handshakes in hallways. And some were so uneventful that you’d hardly know someone had spent years of their life there. But I’