That Lonely Section of Hell

by Lori Shenher

  “Uncorrected. My right was better than the standard, but my left was a little lower, so I failed. They’re both twenty-twenty with my contacts and glasses.”

  “Did they have you keep your contacts and glasses off for forty-eight hours before the test?”

  “No.” I’d never heard of this possibility before. I’d felt disappointed not to have been accepted by Calgary but hadn’t pursued it.

  “Okay, well, we can deal with that after you submit your application, but you’ll want to get an answer on that before we go any further.” She pushed the envelope toward me across the counter, seemingly a reward for my answers. “When can you have your application in?” I was surprised at the speed with which this all seemed to be moving.

  “Well, I’m living in Edmonton right now, so getting back here to submit it might take me a couple of months,” I said, hoping that wouldn’t be a problem. She held up a palm to me.

  “Hang on a sec.” She walked away from the counter and disappeared into an office. I heard low murmurs of conversation I assumed were about me. She returned in less than a minute.

  “Okay, Sergeant Day has agreed you can send your application in by courier to save you the expense of traveling back.” She gave me a meaningful look. “Sooner would be better.”

  I WAS BACK in my rented room in Morinville before eight that evening. My friend and landlord Ted turned the TV channel to COPS that night, kidding with me that I should see what police work was like before I embarked on this career. In the episode we watched, members of the Las Vegas PD dealt with a very drunk older homeless couple that was causing problems in a restaurant a few blocks off the strip. The two young policemen tried valiantly to speak respectfully and offer reasonable alternatives to the drunks, but they would have none of it. As the situation escalated into a power struggle in which the police tried to get the two to leave the Denny’s and they refused, the show went to a commercial.

  “You know,” Ted said, “that is a job where there’s just no way to look good, no matter what you’re doing.” I’d been thinking the same thing, and I knew he was right. “Except if maybe you’re riding a motorcycle or a horse in a parade or letting kids dunk you in a dunk tank at a fair.”

  The remainder of the show did little to improve my view of policing, but I hoped my experience would be better.

  On February 14, 1991, Ted; his wife, Louise; their huge German shepard, Max; and I left Morinville for Vancouver, along with all my worldly possessions, so that I could write the entrance exam and go through the whole application process—though I was not at all certain that I would take the position if it was offered. We drove all night and on the afternoon of February 15 rolled up to the house I would be sharing with an environmentalist couple and a doctor. I continue to observe February 15 as the date I officially started my new life. It was one of those gorgeous dry February days that I would learn to welcome as precious gifts after the gloom of November, December, and January in Vancouver, and after unpacking and meeting my new housemates, I celebrated with a long run in the gorgeous rain forest of Pacific Spirit Park. Breathing in the fragrant rain forest air, I felt as though I’d come home.

  The following week I wrote the entrance exam, and a couple of days later I met with Recruiting Detective Chris Beach so that he could give me my mark.

  “Lori, this is the highest mark I’ve seen in my time here,” he said. “It may be the highest we’ve had.” He smiled at me, a dead ringer for the actor Tom Skerritt. “Let’s get you into the city doctor for an eye test before we do anything more, okay?”

  I passed the eye exam with flying colors, pleasantly surprising the doctor and myself, thanks to forty-eight hours of enforced farsightedness without glasses or contacts. I was working at a local running shoe store, and it hadn’t been easy selling shoes that weekend sans sight, but my employers understood my mission.

  In my interview with Sergeant Murray Day, I had to weigh how much personal information I should share and how much I need not. Since arriving in Vancouver, I’d managed—as usual—to put my issues of gender identity and sexual orientation on the back burner and busy myself with the matter of making a living and forging my future. But I did not want to be caught in a deception and had a strong desire to be completely transparent and forthcoming. As I answered question after question without emotion or elaboration, I felt little rapport building between the two of us. I assumed he was trying to be objective.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked, clearly uncomfortable.

  “No,” I answered.

  “When was your last boyfriend?” I didn’t want to discuss the three or four guys I’d dated—even that word was a stretch for most of them over the past eight or so years. My love life had consisted largely of my getting drunk enough with my friends to forget I might want a love life one day, with the occasional ill-considered drunken trysts with guys thrown in.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say any of them have been at all serious,” I offered.

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, I guess I just haven’t met the right guy.” I shrugged, wincing inside at my answer. “I was traveling a lot for my work.” He gazed at me over his reading glasses for a few seconds. I am so done, I thought. Fortunately, he moved on to other areas, such as my education, work history, and family background.

  “Okay, I think we’re just about done here,” he said, leafing through his papers. “Let’s see. Have you ever been depressed?”

  “Well, I think I had some depression as a teenager.”

  “Have you ever seen a psychologist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you elaborate on why?” He looked up over his glasses again.

  “I’ve had some issues about, you know, my femininity, I guess you could say,” I said, wondering if that was sufficient but feeling somehow it wouldn’t be. “I just went to talk to someone about not being your typical girl, you know, I like sports, I like jeans.” I stopped myself before I became a total after school special, knowing how painfully inadequate an explanation it was without getting into a dissertation on gender theory. He nodded. I imagined he had never had a conversation like this before, and I wasn’t prepared to blow this poor man’s mind.

  “And how are you now?” he asked. “Do you still suffer from depression?”

  “Nope,” I said. “I feel really good. I think I’ve worked it out.”

  “Any medication? For the depression, that is?”

  “No, never.”

  “Okay, good.” Clearly, he very much wanted that to be my answer, and I was happy it was true. “Detective Hawthorne* will handle your file.” He rose and motioned for me to follow him. He led me into an adjoining office, where a forty-something-year-old woman with blunt, dark bobbed hair, wearing a navy-blue blazer and skirt sat at a desk talking on the phone. She finished her call quickly. Sergeant Day introduced us.

  “Detective Hawthorne, this is Lori Shenher.” He gestured to me. Detective Hawthorne rose from her desk and we shook hands. “Thanks for coming in. I’ll leave you to Detective Hawthorne,” he said to me, looking much more comfortable than he had been in our interview. He exuded relief.

  If Detective Beach and Sergeant Day had given me the impression they thought I was an excellent candidate, Detective Corrine Hawthorne seemed determined to let me know I was nothing special. She needn’t have worried about that: throughout the recruiting process I had felt like an imposter waiting to be exposed. She shut the door and sat down at her desk, looking me over.

  “Women on this job have to work much, much harder than men to be respected,” she began. I listened keenly. “We have to conduct ourselves as professionals at all times. If we don’t act like professionals, dress like professionals, work like professionals, no one will treat us as professionals. Do you understand?” I nodded, suppressing a gulp, trying to ascertain whether I had done something unprofessional in the last two minutes to draw her ire. I soon realized this was just how she was. I remembered my father’s definition of a pro
fessional as someone who worked until the job was done, not someone who stopped when the whistle blew. In his world as a school principal, overtime pay did not exist. I decided to keep this gem to myself.

  “Whenever you come here, you will dress in business attire. Whenever you call this office, you will identify yourself immediately and let the person on the phone know I am handling your file. Do you understand?” She raised her eyebrows. I nodded vigorously, beginning to think this could be some kind of joke. It wasn’t.

  She went on to explain the next steps: the Police Officers’ Physical Abilities Test (POPAT) and the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC) Recruit Level Assessment. I worried I wouldn’t be able to remember all the acronyms. Would there be a test on those? She led me out of her office to the front counter, where she instructed the clerk to schedule me for each test.

  The physical testing for applicants consisted of three components: a timed twelve-minute run known in the athletic world as the Cooper test or Cooper run; two pool tests, including a fifty-meter swim followed by a submersion exercise where you were required to retrieve a rubber brick from the bottom of the diving tank, which was probably about fifteen or twenty feet deep; and then the POPAT. Surprisingly, many people fail to retrieve the brick and their policing hopes are dashed.

  The POPAT is a circuit performed indoors where—one at a time—participants complete six laps of what can best be described as an obstacle course that includes a gap jump, stair climb, and push/pull station designed to simulate dealing with a noncompliant man of medium weight. The entire process must be completed in less than four minutes and raises subjects’ heart rates to an anaerobic level to test their ability to function under cardiovascular strain. After a brief rest, they are required to carry a one-hundred-pound bag a distance of ten meters and back, a task designed to simulate carrying an uncooperative person to the wagon, away from a protest, or something similar.

  As a keen athlete all of my life, I felt fairly confident I could pass all of these tests, but I trained hard for the run because not only did I wish to pass, I wanted to be competitive. For several weeks beforehand, I ran weekly twelve-minute runs as fast as I could on a treadmill at an incline in addition to longer runs. When I arrived at the Brockton Oval in Stanley Park on that cloudy March morning, I felt as ready as I would ever be.

  When the run began, I was shocked by the pace of the other fifteen participants—twelve of them men. How could I have so seriously misjudged these people when I’d assessed their fitness while watching them warm up? They were killing me after only four hundred meters, and I knew I was fit. How could they be smoking me like this?

  I decided I had no choice; this pace would finish me if I maintained it. I forced myself to adjust to a less painful pace and accept my position in dead last place. But, one by one, I began to reel them in as I sprinted toward the final few hundred meters. As I raced to the finish line, I calculated rightly that I would finish third, mere seconds behind two fit guys. My time was just under nine minutes, which had been my goal, even though anything less than twelve minutes was a pass. I watched many of the people who had blazed around the track ahead of me walk over the finish line, out of breath and unsure of what had just hit them.

  The rest of the day went well. I had no problem with the swim and retrieving the sunken brick, and I completed the POPAT, though the latter confirmed for me that I had to work on my upper body strength for the push/pull portion if I were to improve my time and confidence. Later, I learned I was the only one hired from that day.

  A few days later, Detective Hawthorne called me.

  “Lorraine, it’s Corrine Hawthorne,” she said. The “Corrine” threw me, since she had always called herself Detective Hawthorne when we spoke, and her voice was unfamiliar because it sounded so chipper and non-threatening. “I have excellent news for you.” She took a long dramatic pause, and I wondered if she thought I was an idiot and really couldn’t see what was coming next. I played my part and waited, determined not to ask What, Corrine? What could this excellent news possibly be?

  “I’m very pleased to tell you we have decided to hire you, and you will be starting in the coming academy class next week.” There was no hint of a job offer; this was a proclamation, and I imagined that no one ever turned the job down. As a backup plan, I had been considering a job coaching basketball at a local community college, but I thought the choice would be made for me. I pondered what words to use to accept and wondered if I even wanted to. There was so much about coaching basketball and working with young people that appealed to me. The college job was mine if I wanted it. Still, something stopped me from turning Detective Hawthorne and the VPD job down.

  “We’re expecting very big things from you, Lorraine,” she said. I realized she was still in the midst of her speech and I wasn’t expected to respond or actually accept. “We know how smart you are—your scores have been exceptional, some of the highest we’ve ever seen—and we know you won’t disappoint us.”

  “Thank you,” I managed. I had been so sure I would be bounced from the process along the way, it never occurred to me I’d have to decide whether I wanted to work there. Saying nothing felt easier than saying no, and that was that. This was my mind’s first betrayal of the gut that had served me so well to this point in my life. It felt so strange, talking like this to my new best friend, who was so sisterly and gregarious, when just days before she had been harsh and suspicious of my abilities and motives. I understood that her change from the humorless, stern, hard-assed cop I had come to know meant that I was in. I was no longer an asshole in her mind. I was one of them.

  2

  Paid to Play in the Strike Force

  • • •

  “As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

  RICHARD GRENIER, WASHINGTON TIMES

  IN NOVEMBER 1991, on my graduation from the police academy, the VPD assigned me to a patrol unit on the Downtown Eastside. Shootings, break-ins, robberies, stabbings, suicides, and sexual assaults filled the hours of my shifts. In 1993, I was pulled from my squad to work a special assignment with the now-defunct Prostitution Task Force (PTF), a two-man unit given the dual assignment of identifying Downtown Eastside sex workers and conducting undercover “John Stings.”

  I posed as a sex worker two nights a week for six months, standing on the cold streets between six and ten hours at a time, making verbal deals with men to exchange sex for money. Over that rainy Vancouver winter, my life was threatened, objects were tossed at me from cars, I was nearly abducted at gunpoint, and I endured the less dramatic indignities of shivering in a too-short dress and suffering in high heels. I did not know the pain of drug withdrawal, addiction, loneliness, hunger, spousal abuse, or sleeping rough that other sex workers deal with, but still, I felt miserable. In 1994, I was assigned to a patrol unit on Vancouver’s west side, where I remained until the Strike Force beckoned.

  In early 1996, I began working for the Strike Force, the VPD’s elite surveillance unit. The Strike Force of my era was the police department’s answer to Lord of the Flies; although a reputation as a team player was the number one quality needed for admission, once inside, many operated as though success could only be achieved off someone else’s back. I had expected a cooperative, collegial atmosphere where we all united in our common goal of catching bad guys, but our leadership consisted of manipulative types striving to make names for their own protégés. Like handlers in a dogfighting ring, they touted their “guy” as “the best foot” or “the best driver,” as though those faux titles held any meaning or relevance in the real world.

  Those who didn’t aspire to these artificial distinctions often found themselves targets of the leaders, who would sniff out any perceived weaknesses in the others. Still, there were some great people in the Strike Force, and we formed bonds over the intense work and the hard celebration after we’d put our targets in jail. There
weren’t many bullies, but they wielded an inordinate amount of influence over the rest of us. As a result, the work suffered and professional development was slower than it should have been.

  Surveillance is heady stuff that involves high-risk driving, skulking around in the darkness, and rubbing elbows with lowlife thugs and big players in the crime world, all while trying not to be identified as a cop. I loved it. I had loved hide-and-seek as a kid, and as far as I could tell, this was just big-boy hide-and-seek, a kind of capture the flag with cocaine and automatic weapons thrown in for good measure. I couldn’t believe I got paid for doing this.

  Surveillance came easily and naturally to me. I kept a low profile and avoided being targeted as someone the others would try to force out of the section as incompetent. I watched as others—mostly men, because they made up the majority of the Strike Force—were taunted, criticized, and bullied if they showed an iota of weakness or need for mentoring. Strangely, in my time with the Strike Force I didn’t see any women bullied, probably because there weren’t many of us and each squad had to have at least one female member so that the men would have a woman to drink with in bars when doing inside coverage on targets. It also seemed that the women who made it into the Strike Force were capable, socially functional, and decent-looking, so I expect we were deemed easy to have around.

  I came onto the Strike Force with the highest ranking in the 1996 Surveillance Tactics and Resources (STAR) course. Several of my closest friends took the course with me, and these were the most fun three weeks of my career. One evening, during one of our regular mock training exercises, we were told our targets planned to do a break-and-enter of a commercial building somewhere in the Lower Mainland. We knew little more than what the men’s faces looked like, where they lived, that they had criminal pasts, and what kind of vehicle they drove.