So, over the last couple of years, there has been extreme tension with the police officers and the African Americans with the shootings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc. This has started a movement called #BlackLivesMatter, which is about standing up for African Americans against police brutality. In response, there has been a #BlueLivesMatter, which is about standing up for police officers against violent people and for backlash from the shootings. #BlueLivesMatter has gotten huge backlash itself because people think that #BlueLivesMatter means anti-black people and racism. However, it actually means the title. Blue lives do in fact matter. Trust me.

Police officers run in my family. My great-uncle is a retired officer and my second cousin’s husband is a police officer. My siblings and I were born and raised by two police officers. Every day, when I was very young, my parents would go to work while my grandparents would watch us. They dealt with all kinds of criminals and crazy people. My parents have a bunch of stories, but I’ll tell you one later on that it isn’t personal. The point is ALL of the things my parents went through were dangerous and my parents were always in danger.

When I was five, after my AM Kindergarten, my dad picked me up and he told me that Mommy was in the hospital and we were going to take her home. He told me that she badly hurt her knee. My dad didn’t tell me what happened, but if he actually did, I wasn’t worried. So, when I got there, my mom was on the hospital bed, with a bandage on her knee. But, she was very cheerful when I was there. I was actually happy she got hurt because now I could play nurse with her. I remember giving her yogurt, reading a book, and watching HGTV with her. The innocent little girl who was taking care of her mother didn’t realize that her mom was in a car accident while responding to an emergency at work.

Now, think about it. If the car accident were so severe that it killed my mom, she would have “fell in the line of duty.” What if my mom died? She would have left a widowed man and five little ones. Do you know how hard it is to raise five kids alone? Yes, he would have his family (My aunt pretty much lived five seconds away from us), but it would still be very hard. As for me and my siblings, we would have grown up without a mother. A mother who loves us, helps us get ready for school, make us dinner, helps us with our play dates and other motherly duties. She would have missed the big moments like graduations, proms, baseball games, high school, plays etc. And that would all be because that she fell in the line of duty. And now that my dad has stage four cancer, think how hard our lives would have been while my dad is sick and when he has chemo or admitted into the hospital. What a life we would had!

As I grew up, I realized how truly serious it was being a police officer. Soon after the accident, Mom retired to take care of us and Dad remained a full-time officer. There were the snipers attacks in October 2002 where police officers were getting killed right and left. The thought of Dad being murdered by them might have entered my mind once or twice. After the attacks, I watched the news and read the newspapers more. There was usually stories about police officers being killed by bad guys. Anxiety peeked over me. What if a bad guy killed my dad or what if my dad was killed by a drunk driver like his close friend was? I started to form nightmares about my dad dying in the line of duty and having to bury him. So, when I saw my dad at school waiting for us at recess to say hi to us, I always felt relieved. I felt more relieved when I saw my dad coming home or seeing my dad’s police car without a black cloth draped over it every day because this means that my daddy is here, safe and sound.

I even had to encounter some of the things that my parents went through. When I was between the ages of six and eight, there was a crazy old woman next door to my house. From my room, I had to experience my mom wrestling the woman down because she was attacking my mom. As my siblings cheered my mom on, I was sobbing because I was so scared that my mom was going to be being murdered by her. The first thing I did when I saw my mom was hug her and tell her how much she scared me.

My dad retired in 2013. I am now relieved more than ever that my father survived with police work, now that it is dangerous more than ever to be a police officer with increased crime and bad guys going after them more frequently. But, my worrying hasn’t ceased. My brother hopes to join the criminal justice field and one of the careers he’s considering is a police officer like our parents. I prefer that my brother doesn’t do a dangerous job like police work. I don’t want to worry about him too.

So, yes. Blue lives do matter. It doesn’t matter what your beliefs are about officers. Think about their families. Like the victims of police brutality, imagine who they would leave behind. Imagine how it would impact their families. They would have broken hearts and grief and they would need help from loved ones. They would lose a husband/wife, father/mother, son/daughter, cousin, best friend etc. Anything can happen out there. A police officer can die in anyway and be killed by anyone. I can’t fathom the thought of losing my parents and possibly my brother to police work and criminals.

Two years ago, as I was on my way home in Annapolis from a nice dinner, a man was in downtown Annapolis with a banner that says, “Blue Lives Matter” and he was yelling that. So, the man who was holding a Blue Lives Matter banner in Annapolis, thank you for letting my dad shake your hand and thank you for standing up for my family.