Being believed depends on who you are.

“Who disagrees with this statement: I believe what a police officer says is true because a police officer said it.” I was in a jury pool fielding questions from a prosecutor designed to weed out the undesirables from the final twelve. I immediately disagreed with the statement he posed and so I raised my hand.  I was the only one who did, and this was significant because I was the only potential juror married to a police officer. In addition to that, I was the only one who had worked closely with the police as a former Child Protective Services (CPS) social worker for ten years, including the two officers who had investigated the crime in question.

You might assume that I would trust the system more and not less, but my personal and professional history had actually turned my rose-colored glasses a hazy shade of gray.  What really tipped the scales was when I was investigated for child abuse two years after I stopped working for the state.  My worlds collided in the worst conceivable way when the police and CPS came knocking: I was a former CPS social worker now being investigated by my former agency and the wife of a detective being railroaded by a detective.  What followed was a series of events so outrageous that I couldn’t avoid a change in perspective.

By the time I was sitting in the jury pool with forty-nine of my fellow citizens, I had already learned the painful lesson that in the system, being believed depends more on who you are than it does on the truth you may or may not be telling. Police and social workers get to portray people and families in whatever way they see fit. You have the client’s version of reality on one side and the officer or social worker’s on the other, and they aren’t always going to match. Who are most people going to believe: the police officer or the suspect? The social worker or the drug addict who had her kids put in foster care?

Imagine you are standing in front of a woman in her trailer that smells like cat urine with her five unclean kids.  She’s missing teeth and misuses adjectives. You see cigarette butts in the ashtray and cockroaches on the wall, and you ask her why she’s on the Child Abuse Registry for causing a spiral fracture to a child’s arm. She answers, “The lead investigator on the case didn’t ask the right questions to the right people and misrepresented facts in his reports to make it look like I caused the injury when I didn’t. The doctor from the best children’s hospital made wild guesses about the injury, and everybody believed her. CPS put me on the Child Abuse Registry for hugging the child when their own medical expert said this couldn’t have caused a spiral fracture.  When I appealed it, CPS didn’t give their doctor all the available information so that they could win the appeal.”

Would you believe her? Probably not. Nobody is going to believe someone like her over a police officer or a social worker or a doctor.  The story sounds unbelievable when an uneducated woman in a trailer is telling it, because how could a woman like that be right and all the professionals be wrong? 

But it’s not her story—it’s mine.  You’re more inclined to believe it now, aren’t you? Beyond the fact that I have reports from the doctor, the police officer, and CPS to prove my claims, the story is believable because I’m believable. I check all the privilege boxes—I’m white, middle-class, articulate, educated—but the things that really set me apart and increase my credibility are that I’m a former CPS social worker and I’m married to a police officer. When someone who is a part of the system uses insider information to criticize the system, people pay attention.

Most of the people involved in the criminal justice and child welfare systems look like the woman in the trailer park. They don’t look like me and they can’t defend themselves like I can. The sad reality is that even though what I say about my own case is true—and an Internal Affairs officer agreed with me–even I couldn’t convince anybody who mattered that I was right.  I could clearly articulate where the investigation went off the rails because I used to do the job, but I was a suspect now and my words carried less weight than they did when I was on the other side of the table.

If you know that most people are predisposed to believe you no matter what you say, then what is stopping you from saying whatever you want?  I was armed with ten years of experience that helped me navigate my interviews better than most suspects, but it didn’t insulate me from being a target of the detective’s imagination.  I told him, “I took the kids to a Christmas tree festival that morning. Nobody was injured and nothing was out of the ordinary.”  He responded, “No, you broke her arm at the Christmas tree festival because you got mad at your own child for running away from you.”

It’s otherworldly to sit across from an individual who has the power to arrest you and listen to them weave together a tale that did not happen.  His theory was unnerving, mostly because it wasn’t true in any way, but also because he believed it wholeheartedly despite it making no sense.   He took bits and pieces of my lived experience, shook them up together, filtered them through his perspective, and then arranged them in an imaginary configuration that was dismissive of reality. There was nothing I could say or do that would have convinced him otherwise. The crime I was accused of carried with it a 36-month prison sentence and a healthy dose of public humiliation. I narrowly avoided this fate only because the child’s family didn’t want me prosecuted, but not for lack of effort on the lead detective’s part. 

When I tried to defend myself, the officer said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years,” but all that experience didn’t make him immune to inventing his own truth.  If anything, his years of experience emboldened him to believe his own hype.  Social workers and police officers (and lawyers and judges) have the tendency to believe that they are all-knowing because they’ve seen it all. They know how a case will end because they’ve seen this one already. The narrative is whatever they say it is because they are The Ones Who Know. When you are used to dropping the hammer and saying, “This is how it is because I say that’s how it is,” sometimes you can’t recognize that your version of reality isn’t how it is at all.

It’s tempting to think this is a one-off, but it’s not.  I now work as a therapist in a children’s psychiatric hospital, and I listen to stories of case managers making decisions so outrageous they must be true because nobody could make something like that up.  The thread woven throughout our common experience is this: Once they think it’s you, it’s you even if it isn’t you. If they conclude you abused a child, you did.  If they determine you’re an unredeemable drug addict, you are. If they say you don’t get to keep your kids, you don’t.  And once they decide, it’s an uphill battle to convince them otherwise. 

Read the comments section of any news article covering interpersonal crime and you’ll easily pick out the people who have rushed to side with the narrative created by the system.  They are the people calling for vigilante justice or admonishing the defendant to rot in hell. We are playing a dangerous game when we always default to the professionals as the truthsayers and never hold space for a contradictory narrative given by the defendant. It’s not melodramatic to suggest that lives can hang in the balance.

I wasn’t chosen for the jury, which means the defendant was judged by individuals who all believe what an officer says because an officer said it.  Police officers, social workers, and doctors aren’t always wrong, but it’s our responsibility to remember that sometimes they are.  We are all fallible human beings. Let’s allow that hard truth to guide us to respond with open minds instead of immediate condemnation.