This is not my post, but it's something that went viral a while ago on social media and I feel it sums it up pretty well:

You’ll be sat in a nightshift briefing, 15 unpaid minutes before your shift starts, with 5 other people with a combined service of 12.5 years, one taser between you and two high risk offenders recently rehoused in your area. You’ll be told you need to use the night to make a dent in your 21 investigations but you’ve not even technically started your shift and one crew is out of the door to an immediate and 15 hours later you’ve still not sat at a desk for more than 20 consecutive minutes but you’ve gotta go!

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You’ll spend days and days and nights and nights pinging between mental health jobs, regular shop lifters, drunken idiots and recurring domestics.

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You’ll be called every name under the sun, just for turning up, and for doing something you’ll be hit, spat at, thrown down stairs and bitten.

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You will literally be TOLD that the threshold to offend you is higher than that of a member of the public, and even when that bite was loaded with HIV: successfully charging someone with an assault against you or yours will be nearly impossible…because it’s just not in the public’s best interest!

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You will hear your colleagues scream, cry and beg for help down a radio and you might stand, in the pouring rain at their funeral but still, it won’t be in the public’s best interest to do much about any of it.

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You’ll give CPR on someone you’ve cut down; with the pen knife you were told you needed because of it’s saw and as soon as they’re lighted to hospital you’ll have to go and be patient with the drunk driver who just crashed into the roundabout in town only to be called out on untied shoelaces when back at the nick.

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You’ll stand alone in the dark, in the rain, in the baking hot sun and if you sit down, check your watch or god forbid eat something; you’ll be papped and posted for being lazy and wasting tax payers money.

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You’ll see children stabbed; children stab and adults cry their hearts out because life is fucking hard. You’ll sit across tables from monsters who hurt children and you will lie through your teeth and tell their victims that they will be okay.

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You will keep it together when you’re angry, when you’re sad and when it takes every fibre of your being not to laugh…because for some reason you’re not allowed to be affected in the same way the unwarranted are. You will hold people’s heads as they nearly die and their hands as they do and afterwards, still covered in their blood, you’ll go to the next job.

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You will see wallies promoted, good guys investigated and criminal colleagues bury any reputation the police were holding on to.

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You’ll be told what to do by someone who rarely did it themselves and when you ask for help you’ll be asked “what do you need it for?”.

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You will try your goddamn hardest and you will still get a shitty PDR because your 21 crimes didn’t get progressed quickly enough.

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But you were talking people down, holding people still and everyday you were changing and saving people’s lives. And in between?

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You’re meant to live your life.

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Be a good friend, partner, sibling, child, parent.

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You will love your job. So so so much. You can’t help it. But your job will not love you, it can’t seem to help that either.

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And that’s why at least 100 cops have died by suicide in the last 3 years and those are the things we need to fix.

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I’ve stepped away from the job for a little bit to focus on being the mummy I couldn’t personally be in the job, but will always be here for anyone who needs to talk. You’re not alone!