Good cop, bad cop, and the Starbucks incident

I married a cop.

Well, he’s a retired lawyer now, but he was all cop when I met him. And as a young reporter at the time, I learned a great deal from this police supervisor and SWAT team commander that would prove useful in my career as a journalist.

I learned that — while relatively rare— there are bad cops, poorly-trained cops, power-hungry cops and careless cops. I even covered a case in Florida in which an auxiliary police officer turned out to be a serial killer. He shot the tires of women’s cars as they traveled on desolate Florida roads at night, did unspeakable things to them, cut their bodies into pieces and buried them in 30-gallon drums in the orange groves of Indian River County. I spent many days reporting from those groves as police dug up remains.