Donna Brown: Retired Police Sergeant & Award Winning Author

How would you measure the emotions of working 560 “dead bodies” over your career? Would it be a truckload of emotions? Or, a metric sh#t ton?   Any way you define it, it is a lot.  When you carry these emotions, as many officers and detectives do, they can wear you down.  Eventually, if you don’t offload them, they can kill you like a bullet or blade.  

Donna Brown is a retired Sergeant from the Tallahassee Police Department, where she worked for 26 years, 3 months, and 5 days.  (Not that she was counting)  The five days are symbolic because she was one of the department's five total female officers when she started.  

In this episode, Donna shares some of her personal triumphs, tragedies, and lessons learned from working “dead body” cases for over ten years and surviving a career as a pioneering female police officer.  In these lessons, she describes her passion for wanting to “humanize” the badge, and from this, the idea of sharing stories in a book was born.  

But there is a plot twist; she shares the stories of other officers across Florida and the country.  These are not the typical cop “tell all” crime stories but rather the personal stories of the offices themselves.  These stories, found in her trilogy of books:  Behind and Beyond the Badge, highlight the amazing men and women who carry the responsibilities of policing in America today.  

https://amzn.to/3D0Pbqi

Writing can be therapeutic.  It can help offload the burdens carried in the heart.  Even if it starts in a place of anger, which these books were.  Anger that our police officers were not being given a fair shake in the court of public opinion.  The media was only sharing negative stories.  They were ignoring the self-sacrifice that she had witnessed over her career.  So Donna took up her mighty sword (pen and keyboard) and started telling the stories that nobody else was.  

I included a link above to Donna’s books. Please pick up a copy and read these stories.  As she talks about in this episode of The Coptimizer Podcast, there is plenty to be thankful for in policing, and the future is bright because of the people still believing in a noble cause.  

You can watch this podcast on our YouTube channel by clicking here.