February 14, 2026 • 20 mins
Guest host Connie Willis and former Chicago police officer Kameryn Rein Schwarz discuss her career in law enforcement, the trauma and depression of being a police officer, and the burden that led her to consider suicide when her supervisor wouldn't offer her assistance.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Kytie Willis here. You can find me at Connie Willis
dot com. Sign up for my newsletter, see what's going on,
and join me because I like to do a lot
of active things and I'd love for you to be
a part of it. Alrighty, good music tonight, open lines tonight,
a lot of fun. But we're going to start it
out with Cameron rain Swartz, a former Chicago cop who
(00:27):
witnessed countless traumatic deaths and humanity at its worst as
you can imagine, specially Chicago cop Holy Cal so many
horrific events that she went down into the darkness but
then also came out into the light. So we're gonna
hear her story of what happened. Really nice lady, I
(00:47):
think you're gonna like her a lot. Let's bring her on. Cameron,
thank you so much for being here on Coast to
Coast AM and your first time too.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Thanks well, Connie, it's such a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so so very much.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Well, I know it's got to be tough for you
to bring this story up again. You lived it, you
didn't want to live it. Anymore. But then things turned
around and now you're kind of helping other people that
go down that low too. So instead of me just
talking vaguely, let's let you go ahead and do this
tell us because I know it's going to be tough
for you, but we're right here with you and we
(01:22):
appreciate that you're going to do it. By the way,
you can find her at Chicago cop sees the Light
dot com Chicago cop Sees the Light dot com. All
right there, Cameron, Because a police officer as you were
growing up, did you say, hey, I'm going to be
a cop. One day, I'm going to be this hero.
I'm going to save some lives.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Never I never had police in my purview at all.
Actually wanted to become a firefighter paramedic and made the
joke that God gives spiremen or God gives police officers
firemen so they could have heroes too. So it was
very anti police.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well how did you get into this thing?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You know?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
It was really uh, I mean people probably always say it,
but not my own, right, It's something maybe of God
or the divine. But moved to Chicago, tried to become
a Chicago firefighter that didn't work out. Uh, And then
had a friend of mine who sent me to a
personal development seminar and they talked about what do you
(02:28):
want to do with your life? And I said, well,
I want to help people, and they said, oh, what
are you gonna do? Be a big brother or a
big sister. And it was really a stroke some say
of genius, maybe some say of something else that I
just thought, you know what, maybe I'm going to become
a police officer and reduce the murder rate in the city.
And boy, I had no idea what I was signing
up for, especially in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But holy cow, well tell us about that. That's what
that's Uh, that's the reality I think, and I think
you do as well. Think that if you go down
deep and take people with you to that darkness, it
will not only relate to people and touch them, it'll
grab them too, especially with what you want to do
(03:10):
to say, Hey, now, this is how you can come
out of it. And the only reason you're saying it
is because you went into it. So what happened? What's
your story?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah? Man, did I go into it? And so the
person talking to you now is definitely not the person
who started the Chicago Police Academy. Had I have known
some of the things, I don't know if I would
have entered into that world. But I was a young,
impressionable California girl. I was twenty one when I applied
(03:41):
in twenty two when I started the academy, and had
definitely lived under a rock, was homeschooled almost my entire career,
and so when I started the Police Academy, I didn't expect,
I think, a lot of what that world had to offer.
And I grew up very quickly in the academy and
very very very quickly on the streets of the city.
(04:05):
And you kind of let me know, Connie, how you
want to navigate this story. But essentially I went from
this happy, go lucky, outgoing girl who could fake it
until she makes it to a girl who had lost
five friends in three years. I had a partner who
blew his brains out in the squad car, and we
(04:27):
just witnessed really the worst that humanity had to offer,
trauma on trauma on trauma on trauma that seemed like
it would never ever ever end, and it had a
significant toll not only on my life but those around me,
including my partner who unfortunately did take his life.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Why was this happening that they would take their own
lives when they're out there to save us along the way,
you know, I I wish, Yeah, I'm thinking that some
of them along the way.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, I wish the answer to that was easy.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I know.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
For me, I felt like I was a complete burden.
I felt that I was a detriment to the world
and the people around me, which is obviously was not
the case. I mean, I'm literally responsible for people walking
around still breathing today because of my actions. But I
think that we believe that we aren't doing enough. And
(05:31):
you know, Connie, it's not the ones that I saved
that I remember, it's the ones that I don't. And
so I had a huge toll on your life and
your psyche of Yeah, I mean, we can get into it,
but man, I will never forget the first time someone
literally got We went to a shooting and it was
(05:54):
this young kid. I mean, he couldn't have been more
than sixteen, and he was literally rabbing out my leg,
clawing as he's literally dying. And I used to be
a former EMT, and so I went to move his
head in a specific way and back in that time,
Chicago was really strict on if you could provide medical
care because they didn't want to get sued. And so
(06:16):
this is pre body cameras, and so I went to
adjust him. I had a field training officer at the time,
and the field training officer ran over to me and
told me I couldn't do that, and I said, but
he's dying. He's literally choking on his own blood. He's
grabbing onto me, and she said no. One physically pulled
me off, and he literally took his last breath there
(06:38):
staring at me. And it's just so unfortunate because kids
are killing kids and for no reason, no good reason,
territorial terse, you know, gang drama, gang violence, gang beefs.
And it just that one day we had fifteen of
those in one night. I just went from homicide to
(07:00):
homicide to homicide, death notification to death notification to death notification,
and gosh, it's a hard, hard life to go tell
parents that they've lost their kids and to watch those
kids die, especially for me. I signed up to do good.
(07:20):
I signed up to save lives, and I felt that
in some cases that I was taking them or or
I was allowing the beat them to be taken by
not doing everything in my power to help them.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
So you're watching this, how many years into it before
you started feeling like I can't do this anymore?
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Three? About three years in?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, about how long as how long is the academy.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
The academy was six months.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
And then three years after that. So in the six
months you're excited, You're like, Hey, I'm I'm gonna be
this hero. I'm gonna to help people. I'm going to
make things good. And then three years two damn that
was it.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Oh yeah, and it was I know exactly the shift
when I started. We got to be the police. We
literally got to you know, take names and go chase
down bad guys literally and physically and do all of
those things. And then it was the beginning of twenty
fifteen when the Lakwa McDonald shooting happened. It's a pretty popular, uh,
(08:30):
pretty well known shooting happened in the city. I was
working that night when that happened, and literally our lives
changed overnight.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
We the acl you came down the we got body cameras,
we got you know, oversight boards, we got civilian oversight boards.
There's now even oversight boards that regardless of your immigration status,
that you are literally making decisions of how police and
how policing get done in a city. And sanctuary city
(09:02):
laws came down and we are really strictly following those
and I very vividly remember one week we were literally
stopping bad guys on the street, patting them down and
arresting them if they had a gun on them to
the next week, now we have to fill out a
three page report just if we want to stop a
bad guy on the street. And it was overnight that
(09:23):
our lives changed, and that, honestly the lives of the
citizens of Chicago changed. And that is when twenty sixteen
had one of the worst gun violences in known to
this date. We had almost four thousand shootings and nearly
one thousand homicides in just our tiny liddle city. Oh no,
(09:49):
oh yeah. And so there was a point where someone
was getting shot every ten minutes and someone was getting
killed every seven hours. And anyone can look this up.
I encourage you to go to heyjackass dot com. All
of this is public information, none of this is me.
You'll see year to year stats. And the area that
I worked in to this day still leads in either
(10:11):
weapons were covered or homicides.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
And I know you're going to want some after hearing this.
This is an amazing story. We've got Stephen and Malachi
Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi, who's
eight almost nine years old now, was suffering with not
just one or two warts, but I mean as significant
outbreak of warts all over his body, so significant it
impacted his ability to really function.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to right.
That was Ty's book. Actually that got me thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
I'm not surprised.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
It is an amazing immuno modulator, and so I can
see that it would work. And so at what point
did you see that there was actually improvement It's really
going to work.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller,
and then going down to the with just little red monks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the wanner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna wow. That's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It's great to see.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I'm so happy and yes.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Confident, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
For instead have seen it that is blown away.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
TI, this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, this is awesome.
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Speaker 2 (11:44):
So how did what happened where you started getting obviously
that the real big darkness here is you You got suicidal?
Did you see that? Was that immediate at one point?
Did you just get that way or was it just
slowly rolling into darker and darker times where you were like, Okay,
I can't take it anymore, and then you had to
(12:04):
take it again. I can't take it anymore. Then you
had to take it again.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. I think it was death by a thousand cuts.
But I as twenty sixteen progressed and we got into
twenty seventeen, I started to feel like, WHOA, Like I'm
not doing so good and you want to know what,
you just suck it up, Buttercup, I'm in a male
dominated there's not a lot of females. I'm already trying
(12:32):
to match my male counterparts. I'm already trying to show that,
you know, I'm not a pansy. And so it's just
you can't talk to anyone about these things you're not.
I mean, the more gruesome the call, the more we
joke about it. There was a gentleman in our district
(12:53):
who was put through a meat grinder because he didn't
pay the local gang the street tax. Oh, the jokes
that came out of that. I won't even tell you
what that looked like or what I saw in that
were significant we've had. I mean, I probably shouldn't even
go into some of the more horrific calls that we
(13:14):
went to. And you know, we just joked, really inappropriate jokes.
But I started to feel like, eh, I think this
is really affecting me. I think I might need someone
to talk to, but there really was no one to
talk to. I remember one night I was a little
emotionally heated, and I had a sergeant who called me in.
(13:34):
He just really had a disdain for me. I think
he had a distain for a lot of the young
girls on the force, and he wanted to write me
up for something ridiculous. And I protested, and I said, no,
you're not going to do that. That that's not how
this event played out. I'm not going to receive this
written notice of punishment. And he told me that he
(13:54):
doesn't think I'm mentally same, and that I should give
him my taser because I am unsafe to have a taser. Typically,
if this is the case, if someone is deemed mentally
incapable of doing the job right, you take their gun,
you take their taser. They go see the watch commander,
and then it's decided, what do you do. He told
me that I should keep my gun and do what
(14:17):
I believe I should do with it that night to
make the issue go away.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
And that issue, wow, And.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
That was the first night I thought, you know what,
maybe I should kill myself. You know what, maybe he's right,
maybe I should go and eat my gun. And we
had already lost three officers in that district to suicide
since the time I had been there, And so for
the fact for him to say that, you know, if
I didn't have such disdain for him. I probably would
(14:47):
have done it, but I didn't want to give him
any more power than I had already given. But that
was really started to down here aspire for me, where
I was going home every night and putting my gun
under my couch cushion and going into my room and
trying to figure out what to do with my life
and saying something is wrong, like I need help, like
(15:08):
I'm afraid of this, and every morning would put that
gun back on my hip, would go unfortunately, present it
into several people's faces every night. I mean we're constantly
getting in foot pursuits, constantly clearing buildings. I mean I
had probably drawn my gun in and out thousands upon
thousands upon thousands of times and pointed it at people.
(15:31):
And man, I just all I wanted to do every
time I presented that weapon out was turn it around,
pointed at my face and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
You just wanted to ban gun. You just wanted to
stop it.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Just oh, just one hundred percent, just man, man, And
you know a lot of people, well, I will rephrase that.
There were certain officers who learned that if they killed
themselves while they were on duty. Unfortunately, a gentleman that
I worked with. We were court partners, So you have
partners that you work the streets with and then partners
(16:02):
that you go to court with. He was my court partner,
and he discovered that if he killed himself when he
was on duty, that his family would get a line
of duty death benefit. And after him, three other people
did it in less than ninety days, and the city
actually said we won't pay you out the line of
duty death benefits.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I think, do they do anything at all to to
help you guys when something happens, Do they say, Okay,
it's just had what let's let's meet for the next
three weeks, or anybody you can talk to. Nothing like that.
There's nothing, so you know.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I hear that. Maybe now in twenty twenty six, though,
making some pretty great improvements, although they've had the highest
suicide rate of any police department in the country. But
back in the day, back when I was working there, oh,
absolutely not. We If you ever got hospitalized suicidal ideations,
(17:01):
the state would take away your Foyer card, which allows
you to carry a firearm, and you would never be
able to be the police again. So nobody at all
was talking about this. We had the employee assistance program,
which a lot of corporations offer that were never used.
I ended up calling them one night because I thought
I was gonna blow my brains out and I literally said,
(17:22):
I think I'm gonna kill myself And I said, are
you gonna do it right now? And I was like yeah,
and they said, well, don't do that because you're important.
Because those are exactly the words I want to hear, Connie,
when I and no one was trained in trauma. No
one was trained and how to navigate these things. It
was you just shove it down into a hole and
(17:44):
you move on. There is no real psychological help for that.
And uh yeah, it was a very very dark place.
And this is on top of corruption, This is on
top of so many other things. My entire career there,
I was more afraid of the internal uh repercussions from
(18:07):
the Chicago Police Farm than I ever was afraid of
a bad guy on the street. And we're talking L's
thirteen gang members.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I still can't even believe that that guy was ridic
cooling you like that? What What was that about? What
I mean, why didn't that stop? Is there any internal
affairs either that was being a part of anything to
help you guys.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
You know there they we we had I a internal affairs,
but it was very taboo. I'm a girl, and if
I go and make a drop a you know, we
call it drop a case, drop a case on this guy,
or drop a number, right, because there's an I A
number that gets added, I could lose my job because
(18:54):
here I am.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
That they may not be true, and so I just thought,
you know, I love my job too much. This guy
is gonna get over it. After I left the police department,
another female police officer did file an EEO C complain
against him, so went completely out of the police department,
which had him become investigated. But as of today, I
went back earlier this year, and as it stands, he
(19:20):
is still in that position and still leading young police officers.
And I'm sure that there is very many other females
that have unfortunately come behind me, who have encountered with him.
Do I wish I maybe would have done something?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
I almost lost my job. Anyways, I almost lost my
life and I almost lost my job. Do I wish
I spoke up? I totally do, But you know, I
was just really afraid. They use fear they use intimidation.
It is a highly corrupt organization. There are amazing, amazing
people who work for the Chicago Police Department, and at
(19:57):
the same time it is unfortunate, incredibly corrupt. My locker
mate her husband went to jail for life for stealing
money from the FBI, and so there, it's just it's
probably worse than al Capone's era. And boy, if if
we had the hours, I could go into unbelievable stories
(20:20):
that you would think I'd probably make up.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Kytie Willis here. You can find me at Connie Willis
dot com. Sign up for my newsletter, see what's going on,
and join me because I like to do a lot
of active things and I'd love for you to be
a part of it. Alrighty, good music tonight, open lines tonight,
a lot of fun. But we're going to start it
out with Cameron rain Swartz, a former Chicago cop who
(00:27):
witnessed countless traumatic deaths and humanity at its worst as
you can imagine, specially Chicago cop Holy Cal so many
horrific events that she went down into the darkness but
then also came out into the light. So we're gonna
hear her story of what happened. Really nice lady, I
(00:47):
think you're gonna like her a lot. Let's bring her on. Cameron,
thank you so much for being here on Coast to
Coast AM and your first time too.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
Thanks well, Connie, it's such a pleasure to be here.
Thank you so so very much.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Well, I know it's got to be tough for you
to bring this story up again. You lived it, you
didn't want to live it. Anymore. But then things turned
around and now you're kind of helping other people that
go down that low too. So instead of me just
talking vaguely, let's let you go ahead and do this
tell us because I know it's going to be tough
for you, but we're right here with you and we
(01:22):
appreciate that you're going to do it. By the way,
you can find her at Chicago cop sees the Light
dot com Chicago cop Sees the Light dot com. All
right there, Cameron, Because a police officer as you were
growing up, did you say, hey, I'm going to be
a cop. One day, I'm going to be this hero.
I'm going to save some lives.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Never I never had police in my purview at all.
Actually wanted to become a firefighter paramedic and made the
joke that God gives spiremen or God gives police officers
firemen so they could have heroes too. So it was
very anti police.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well how did you get into this thing?
Speaker 1 (02:06):
You know?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
It was really uh, I mean people probably always say it,
but not my own, right, It's something maybe of God
or the divine. But moved to Chicago, tried to become
a Chicago firefighter that didn't work out. Uh, And then
had a friend of mine who sent me to a
personal development seminar and they talked about what do you
(02:28):
want to do with your life? And I said, well,
I want to help people, and they said, oh, what
are you gonna do? Be a big brother or a
big sister. And it was really a stroke some say
of genius, maybe some say of something else that I
just thought, you know what, maybe I'm going to become
a police officer and reduce the murder rate in the city.
And boy, I had no idea what I was signing
up for, especially in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
But holy cow, well tell us about that. That's what
that's Uh, that's the reality I think, and I think
you do as well. Think that if you go down
deep and take people with you to that darkness, it
will not only relate to people and touch them, it'll
grab them too, especially with what you want to do
(03:10):
to say, Hey, now, this is how you can come
out of it. And the only reason you're saying it
is because you went into it. So what happened? What's
your story?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
Yeah? Man, did I go into it? And so the
person talking to you now is definitely not the person
who started the Chicago Police Academy. Had I have known
some of the things, I don't know if I would
have entered into that world. But I was a young,
impressionable California girl. I was twenty one when I applied
(03:41):
in twenty two when I started the academy, and had
definitely lived under a rock, was homeschooled almost my entire career,
and so when I started the Police Academy, I didn't expect,
I think, a lot of what that world had to offer.
And I grew up very quickly in the academy and
very very very quickly on the streets of the city.
(04:05):
And you kind of let me know, Connie, how you
want to navigate this story. But essentially I went from
this happy, go lucky, outgoing girl who could fake it
until she makes it to a girl who had lost
five friends in three years. I had a partner who
blew his brains out in the squad car, and we
(04:27):
just witnessed really the worst that humanity had to offer,
trauma on trauma on trauma on trauma that seemed like
it would never ever ever end, and it had a
significant toll not only on my life but those around me,
including my partner who unfortunately did take his life.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Why was this happening that they would take their own
lives when they're out there to save us along the way,
you know, I I wish, Yeah, I'm thinking that some
of them along the way.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yeah, I wish the answer to that was easy.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
I know.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
For me, I felt like I was a complete burden.
I felt that I was a detriment to the world
and the people around me, which is obviously was not
the case. I mean, I'm literally responsible for people walking
around still breathing today because of my actions. But I
think that we believe that we aren't doing enough. And
(05:31):
you know, Connie, it's not the ones that I saved
that I remember, it's the ones that I don't. And
so I had a huge toll on your life and
your psyche of Yeah, I mean, we can get into it,
but man, I will never forget the first time someone
literally got We went to a shooting and it was
(05:54):
this young kid. I mean, he couldn't have been more
than sixteen, and he was literally rabbing out my leg,
clawing as he's literally dying. And I used to be
a former EMT, and so I went to move his
head in a specific way and back in that time,
Chicago was really strict on if you could provide medical
care because they didn't want to get sued. And so
(06:16):
this is pre body cameras, and so I went to
adjust him. I had a field training officer at the time,
and the field training officer ran over to me and
told me I couldn't do that, and I said, but
he's dying. He's literally choking on his own blood. He's
grabbing onto me, and she said no. One physically pulled
me off, and he literally took his last breath there
(06:38):
staring at me. And it's just so unfortunate because kids
are killing kids and for no reason, no good reason,
territorial terse, you know, gang drama, gang violence, gang beefs.
And it just that one day we had fifteen of
those in one night. I just went from homicide to
(07:00):
homicide to homicide, death notification to death notification to death notification,
and gosh, it's a hard, hard life to go tell
parents that they've lost their kids and to watch those
kids die, especially for me. I signed up to do good.
(07:20):
I signed up to save lives, and I felt that
in some cases that I was taking them or or
I was allowing the beat them to be taken by
not doing everything in my power to help them.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
So you're watching this, how many years into it before
you started feeling like I can't do this anymore?
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Three? About three years in?
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Yeah, about how long as how long is the academy.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
The academy was six months.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
And then three years after that. So in the six
months you're excited, You're like, Hey, I'm I'm gonna be
this hero. I'm gonna to help people. I'm going to
make things good. And then three years two damn that
was it.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Oh yeah, and it was I know exactly the shift
when I started. We got to be the police. We
literally got to you know, take names and go chase
down bad guys literally and physically and do all of
those things. And then it was the beginning of twenty
fifteen when the Lakwa McDonald shooting happened. It's a pretty popular, uh,
(08:30):
pretty well known shooting happened in the city. I was
working that night when that happened, and literally our lives
changed overnight.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
We the acl you came down the we got body cameras,
we got you know, oversight boards, we got civilian oversight boards.
There's now even oversight boards that regardless of your immigration status,
that you are literally making decisions of how police and
how policing get done in a city. And sanctuary city
(09:02):
laws came down and we are really strictly following those
and I very vividly remember one week we were literally
stopping bad guys on the street, patting them down and
arresting them if they had a gun on them to
the next week, now we have to fill out a
three page report just if we want to stop a
bad guy on the street. And it was overnight that
(09:23):
our lives changed, and that, honestly the lives of the
citizens of Chicago changed. And that is when twenty sixteen
had one of the worst gun violences in known to
this date. We had almost four thousand shootings and nearly
one thousand homicides in just our tiny liddle city. Oh no,
(09:49):
oh yeah. And so there was a point where someone
was getting shot every ten minutes and someone was getting
killed every seven hours. And anyone can look this up.
I encourage you to go to heyjackass dot com. All
of this is public information, none of this is me.
You'll see year to year stats. And the area that
I worked in to this day still leads in either
(10:11):
weapons were covered or homicides.
Speaker 4 (10:14):
And I know you're going to want some after hearing this.
This is an amazing story. We've got Stephen and Malachi
Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand. I understand that Malachi, who's
eight almost nine years old now, was suffering with not
just one or two warts, but I mean as significant
outbreak of warts all over his body, so significant it
impacted his ability to really function.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to right.
That was Ty's book. Actually that got me thinking about it.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
I'm not surprised.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
It is an amazing immuno modulator, and so I can
see that it would work. And so at what point
did you see that there was actually improvement It's really
going to work.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
Well, look, we really started to notice it around twelve weeks.
You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller,
and then going down to the with just little red monks.
The whole things are gone and we're talking about what's
you know one the size of the wanner. I thought,
no way, that's gonna wow. That's just been miraculous to
see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Yes, how wonderful.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
It's great to see.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I'm so happy and yes.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Confident, absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
For instead have seen it that is blown away.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
TI, this is awesome.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 6 (11:22):
Another amazing story. Why we're talking about Carnivora. Call them
to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now called
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That's one eight six six eight three six eighty seven
thirty five. Or visit Carnivora dot com c A r
niv O r A carnivora dot com.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
So how did what happened where you started getting obviously
that the real big darkness here is you You got suicidal?
Did you see that? Was that immediate at one point?
Did you just get that way or was it just
slowly rolling into darker and darker times where you were like, Okay,
I can't take it anymore, and then you had to
(12:04):
take it again. I can't take it anymore. Then you
had to take it again.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Yeah. I think it was death by a thousand cuts.
But I as twenty sixteen progressed and we got into
twenty seventeen, I started to feel like, WHOA, Like I'm
not doing so good and you want to know what,
you just suck it up, Buttercup, I'm in a male
dominated there's not a lot of females. I'm already trying
(12:32):
to match my male counterparts. I'm already trying to show that,
you know, I'm not a pansy. And so it's just
you can't talk to anyone about these things you're not.
I mean, the more gruesome the call, the more we
joke about it. There was a gentleman in our district
(12:53):
who was put through a meat grinder because he didn't
pay the local gang the street tax. Oh, the jokes
that came out of that. I won't even tell you
what that looked like or what I saw in that
were significant we've had. I mean, I probably shouldn't even
go into some of the more horrific calls that we
(13:14):
went to. And you know, we just joked, really inappropriate jokes.
But I started to feel like, eh, I think this
is really affecting me. I think I might need someone
to talk to, but there really was no one to
talk to. I remember one night I was a little
emotionally heated, and I had a sergeant who called me in.
(13:34):
He just really had a disdain for me. I think
he had a distain for a lot of the young
girls on the force, and he wanted to write me
up for something ridiculous. And I protested, and I said, no,
you're not going to do that. That that's not how
this event played out. I'm not going to receive this
written notice of punishment. And he told me that he
(13:54):
doesn't think I'm mentally same, and that I should give
him my taser because I am unsafe to have a taser. Typically,
if this is the case, if someone is deemed mentally
incapable of doing the job right, you take their gun,
you take their taser. They go see the watch commander,
and then it's decided, what do you do. He told
me that I should keep my gun and do what
(14:17):
I believe I should do with it that night to
make the issue go away.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
And that issue, wow, And.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
That was the first night I thought, you know what,
maybe I should kill myself. You know what, maybe he's right,
maybe I should go and eat my gun. And we
had already lost three officers in that district to suicide
since the time I had been there, And so for
the fact for him to say that, you know, if
I didn't have such disdain for him. I probably would
(14:47):
have done it, but I didn't want to give him
any more power than I had already given. But that
was really started to down here aspire for me, where
I was going home every night and putting my gun
under my couch cushion and going into my room and
trying to figure out what to do with my life
and saying something is wrong, like I need help, like
(15:08):
I'm afraid of this, and every morning would put that
gun back on my hip, would go unfortunately, present it
into several people's faces every night. I mean we're constantly
getting in foot pursuits, constantly clearing buildings. I mean I
had probably drawn my gun in and out thousands upon
thousands upon thousands of times and pointed it at people.
(15:31):
And man, I just all I wanted to do every
time I presented that weapon out was turn it around,
pointed at my face and pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
You just wanted to ban gun. You just wanted to
stop it.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Just oh, just one hundred percent, just man, man, And
you know a lot of people, well, I will rephrase that.
There were certain officers who learned that if they killed
themselves while they were on duty. Unfortunately, a gentleman that
I worked with. We were court partners, So you have
partners that you work the streets with and then partners
(16:02):
that you go to court with. He was my court partner,
and he discovered that if he killed himself when he
was on duty, that his family would get a line
of duty death benefit. And after him, three other people
did it in less than ninety days, and the city
actually said we won't pay you out the line of
duty death benefits.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
I think, do they do anything at all to to
help you guys when something happens, Do they say, Okay,
it's just had what let's let's meet for the next
three weeks, or anybody you can talk to. Nothing like that.
There's nothing, so you know.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
I hear that. Maybe now in twenty twenty six, though,
making some pretty great improvements, although they've had the highest
suicide rate of any police department in the country. But
back in the day, back when I was working there, oh,
absolutely not. We If you ever got hospitalized suicidal ideations,
(17:01):
the state would take away your Foyer card, which allows
you to carry a firearm, and you would never be
able to be the police again. So nobody at all
was talking about this. We had the employee assistance program,
which a lot of corporations offer that were never used.
I ended up calling them one night because I thought
I was gonna blow my brains out and I literally said,
(17:22):
I think I'm gonna kill myself And I said, are
you gonna do it right now? And I was like yeah,
and they said, well, don't do that because you're important.
Because those are exactly the words I want to hear, Connie,
when I and no one was trained in trauma. No
one was trained and how to navigate these things. It
was you just shove it down into a hole and
(17:44):
you move on. There is no real psychological help for that.
And uh yeah, it was a very very dark place.
And this is on top of corruption, This is on
top of so many other things. My entire career there,
I was more afraid of the internal uh repercussions from
(18:07):
the Chicago Police Farm than I ever was afraid of
a bad guy on the street. And we're talking L's
thirteen gang members.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I still can't even believe that that guy was ridic
cooling you like that? What What was that about? What
I mean, why didn't that stop? Is there any internal
affairs either that was being a part of anything to
help you guys.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
You know there they we we had I a internal affairs,
but it was very taboo. I'm a girl, and if
I go and make a drop a you know, we
call it drop a case, drop a case on this guy,
or drop a number, right, because there's an I A
number that gets added, I could lose my job because
(18:54):
here I am.
Speaker 5 (18:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
That they may not be true, and so I just thought,
you know, I love my job too much. This guy
is gonna get over it. After I left the police department,
another female police officer did file an EEO C complain
against him, so went completely out of the police department,
which had him become investigated. But as of today, I
went back earlier this year, and as it stands, he
(19:20):
is still in that position and still leading young police officers.
And I'm sure that there is very many other females
that have unfortunately come behind me, who have encountered with him.
Do I wish I maybe would have done something?
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:36):
I almost lost my job. Anyways, I almost lost my
life and I almost lost my job. Do I wish
I spoke up? I totally do, But you know, I
was just really afraid. They use fear they use intimidation.
It is a highly corrupt organization. There are amazing, amazing
people who work for the Chicago Police Department, and at
(19:57):
the same time it is unfortunate, incredibly corrupt. My locker
mate her husband went to jail for life for stealing
money from the FBI, and so there, it's just it's
probably worse than al Capone's era. And boy, if if
we had the hours, I could go into unbelievable stories
(20:20):
that you would think I'd probably make up.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern and go to Coast to coastam dot
com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
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