Before the door

I spent twelve years as a police officer at the DeKalb County PD, in metro Atlanta. Six of those were in Vice and Narcotics. Like a lot of cops in those days, I'd served in the military, and in that era (70s) it tended to shape how we saw the job.

When I started, I figured the job was mostly about catching 'bad people'. That turned out to be a gross over simplification. Yes, there are some truly bad individuals and I arrested several, but they were the exception. Most of what we dealt with looked like crime on paper but had little to do with character. It was addiction, prostitution, petty crime and being broke. Folks doing desperate things because they'd run out of better options. 

What I figured out, slowly, is that none of this was new, and none of it was going to change on account of me. It had been this way a long time, and it was going to stay that way. Parts of it, the actual helping people, I still miss. But the remainder, the part that fed the revolving door of the criminal justice system, I do not. It was time to move on to something else.

Then a lot of years went by.

My wife and I came to Asheville in 2020, and I settled into a comfortable and quiet retirement on the south end of the city. I'm not any good at sitting still. I hiked a lot, gave a little, volunteered a little, and that was about it, until Helene. I don't really have the words for what that storm did here. If you were around for it you don't need me to explain, and if you weren't, I'm not sure I can. I was on our HOA board when it hit, and the cleanup ate up every day I had right through to the end of 2025. When my term finally ended, I was a retired guy with a lot of energy and nothing in particular to point it at, looking every day for some way to try and do a little good.

One day a neighbor told me about Meals on Wheels, and I rode along on a couple of routes. Around the same time I ran across Homeward Bound and started reading up on something called Housing First. It was the numbers that drew me in initially. Then I went and met the people at Homeward Bound who were actually doing the work, and that's when I knew where I wanted to be, needed to be.

None of what I saw at the AHope day center, or out on those Meals on Wheels routes, was new to me. It was the same problems, the same people I'd seen for twelve years on the job, over forty years ago, just in a different uniform: people in real trouble, and the rest of us wanting to ignore it, or avoid it, or fix it with a tool that was never going to do the job. The difference now is there are people and methods here willing and able to improve it. End of the day, this isn't some new notion I picked up in retirement, no epiphany or reckoning. Turns out it's just something I figured out a long time ago, from the other end of the equation. This is just the first time I've chosen to try and do something about it. Will you?