A police officer’s story, and a province on the edge of forgetting its own humanity
By: David Marentette
When I was a young police officer in Surrey nearly twenty years ago, I learned how quietly a person’s heart can shut down without anyone noticing. The work was relentless. File after file, shift after shift, until the people in front of me risked becoming tasks instead of lives.
One night, I was proudly proclaiming my arrest and charge record, thinking those statistics meant I was a good cop. A colleague pulled me aside. She had wisdom and empathy and carried power with her presence. She bluntly told me I had stopped seeing the person behind the charges and that I was merely typical of a young twenty-something male in policing. It stung. It also saved me from becoming someone I never wanted to be.
“I had stopped seeing the human being behind the charges.”
The message did not fully land until a few weeks later, when I arrested a woman in a high-traffic sex work area. She was exhausted, afraid, and barely holding herself together. Something in me, maybe humility, maybe the echo of that earlier confrontation, made me drop the defensive posture I had absorbed from police culture. When she admitted she was working, I asked her a question I had never asked anyone in that context.
“Is there anything I can do to help you get out of this line of work?”
She told me the truth about her life without hesitation. She had been pushed into sex work as a child by a mother swallowed by poverty. Abuse had been normal long before she ever had the chance to resist. Her entire life had unfolded inside circumstances she did not choose and could barely understand, let alone navigate.
“This is what I was born into. I never had a chance.”
Her grief hit harder than any training ever could. She said she was hungry and needed only a few more hours of work that night to feed her kids. I drove her to McDonald’s, bought meals for her and her children, and asked her to take the rest of the night off. One night. One night of “normal”. It hurt that she was suspicious of my intentions initially, but given the history between law enforcement and sex workers, I can hardly blame her.
Years later, long after I had transferred across provinces, a letter from her found its way to me after bouncing through several RCMP detachments. She wrote that the night she was treated with dignity gave her enough stability to make small changes. She reduced her substance use. She worked on her health. She rebuilt her life in small, defiant increments. Eventually, she got an entry-level retail job. Nothing glamorous. But she was proud and, painfully, even now, she credited me for making it possible.
“The night I was treated with dignity gave me enough stability to make small changes.”
It broke me to read that, because the truth is, I did not save her. She saved herself. I treated her like a human being for one evening. That should not have been remarkable. It should be the standard of a society that has not lost the plot.
And right now, in Alberta, I fear we are losing it.
The real crisis: we are becoming people who no longer see each other
The crisis in Alberta has nothing to do with politeness or communication styles. Something deeper is shifting, something dangerous. We are watching what happens when a society stops recognizing the humanity of people it disagrees with. When resentment becomes political currency, moral drift follows. Suffering becomes easier to ignore. Cruelty starts masquerading as strength. Leaders who use fear as fuel get rewarded for the damage they cause.
“When resentment becomes political currency, moral drift follows.”
You can see it everywhere. People are turning into symbols instead of neighbours. Rights are being reframed as threats. Fear is being deployed strategically, not accidentally. Institutions that once held communities together are being hollowed out, leaving them barely functional.
This is not a typical political disagreement. Comparative research on democratic backsliding shows that when democracies move in this direction, they often slide faster than anyone expects, and the warning signs tend to look exactly like this (Bermeo, 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019).
Alberta is not immune.
What Alberta is allowing itself to become
The use of the notwithstanding clause against trans children is not leadership. It is harm disguised as policy. Overriding Charter rights before they are even tested in court is not a strength. It is political fear dressed up as decisiveness.
Many people believe these policies are about protecting kids from quick or irreversible decisions. But a substantial body of research shows something very different. Transgender and gender-diverse youth face far higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide attempts than their cisgender peers (Veale et al., 2017; Kingsbury et al., 2022). Studies from Canada and abroad consistently find that trans and gender-diverse youth are several times more likely to report suicidal ideation and attempts than cisgender youth, and recent population-based Canadian data show markedly higher risks of mental disorders and suicidal behaviours among transgender and gender-diverse people compared to cisgender Canadians (Eccles et al., 2024).
Evidence also shows that affirmation from family, schools, and healthcare providers is strongly associated with better mental health and lower suicide risk. Access to gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and hormones when clinically indicated, is linked to reductions in depression and suicidality (Tordoff et al., 2022; Turban et al., 2020). Major clinical guidelines, including the Canadian Paediatric Society’s peer-reviewed position statement, endorse an affirming approach to care as evidence-informed and protective of health (Vandermorris & Metzger, 2023).
This is not caution. Restricting care for trans youth is associated with demonstrably worse mental health outcomes (Tordoff et al., 2022; Turban et al., 2020).
In twenty years of policing, I have never dealt with a trans person harming a child. Not once. They are not the risk, not to us, not to our way of life, not to our beliefs, and certainly not to our children.
“Decades of data show something important: trans-inclusive policies do not increase public safety risks, and trans people themselves are far more likely to be targets of violence than the source of it.”
Research on jurisdictions with gender identity nondiscrimination laws finds no increase in public safety incidents after those laws are introduced, including in settings like public restrooms that are often used as fear-based talking points (Hasenbush et al., 2019). At the same time, studies show that transgender people experience much higher rates of harassment, assault, and other victimization than the general population (Stotzer, 2009; Flores et al., 2021).
Meanwhile, if you actually want to know who statistically harms children, decades of criminology give the same answer every time. The perpetrator is most often a cis-gendered man already in the child’s life: a family member, neighbour, coach, religious leader, or someone in a position of trust (Finkelhor & Ormrod, 2000; Finkelhor et al., 2009; Ferragut et al., 2021).
If I suggested legal restrictions on rights for men in the home because of those statistics, people would be outraged, and they should be. So why are we doing it to trans people when the numbers do not point to them at all?
“If we would not impose blanket restrictions on men despite the data, why are we doing it to trans people when the numbers do not point to them at all?”
Public healthcare and education in Alberta are not being reformed. They are being replaced. Underfunded systems are deteriorating while private, subscription-based clinics and virtual platforms fill the gaps. People with money get timely care. People without cash wait.
Health policy research in Canada has warned that increased private financing and two-tier arrangements tend to erode equity, strain the public system, and fail to solve wait-time problems (Lee et al., 2021; Marchildon, 2022). In other words, public healthcare only looks broken because our leaders are breaking it, politically and financially.
“Public healthcare only looks broken because our leaders are breaking it.”
At the same time, imported American-style political tactics, including heavy donor influence, manufactured outrage, and culture-war narratives, are taking root. Comparative democracy research has shown how these kinds of strategies corrode trust, polarize communities, and set the stage for democratic erosion (Bermeo, 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). These are not Canadian traditions. They are tools that fracture communities.
This is the kind of political environment where empathy becomes optional and cruelty sneaks in while people insist it cannot happen here (Bermeo, 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019).
Why seeing each other matters now
My father, a retired Major in the Canadian Armed Forces, studied the Second World War in great depth. Growing up, I read some of the thick grey anthologies he kept on the shelves. They were not stories about monsters. They were stories about ordinary people swept into fear, instability, and promises of certainty.
Cruelty rarely arrives with a shout. It creeps in when people feel afraid, unheard, or desperate.
“Cruelty creeps in when people feel afraid, unheard, or desperate.”
Modern psychology echoes these warnings. Under threat, our brains narrow their focus. Fear sharpens in-group and out-group lines, and empathy for those on the “other” side falls. Studies in social neuroscience show how group conflict can blunt empathic responses to people we perceive as opponents, especially when politics or identity are involved (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014).
That is the climate where rights get removed quietly, extremist groups grow, and vulnerable communities become political tools instead of people.
Seeing each other is not naive. It is protection, and it is one of the last brakes a society has before cruelty becomes routine.
What my career taught me
I have seen what happens when people are not seen. Conflict sharpens and trust erodes. Trauma compounds while pain spreads through families and communities until it feels inevitable.
I have also seen what happens when someone is seen clearly for the first time. Their shoulders drop. Their defensiveness loosens. Possibility appears where none existed. Humanity returns to the room.
That is not idealism. It is the lived reality of policing and counselling. It is why I still believe, stubbornly, that seeing each other matters, even when everything feels like it is moving the other way.
Where Alberta goes from here
We cannot fix Alberta’s political climate overnight, but we can refuse to become a province that treats people as disposable. The work starts close to home.
It looks like refusing to forward propaganda even when it matches our frustration. Something I am certainly guilty of. It looks like checking facts before sharing posts designed to spark anger. Guilty again. It looks like asking who benefits if I believe this every time a politician tells us who to fear.
When harmful claims arise, we answer with simple truth rather than silence.
“Silence has always been a gift to people in power.”
When rights are threatened, we sign petitions, show up at town halls, write to MLAs, support community groups, and vote like people’s lives depend on it, because they do.
When leaders try to fracture communities, we refuse to sort ourselves into enemy camps on command.
And when we face people we disagree with, we engage without turning them into villains, not to appease them but because persuasion only works when someone does not feel hunted.
As a veteran police officer, I can tell you that most crime I have seen comes from poverty, desperation, untreated trauma, and the expectations placed on men who were taught their pain should only come out sideways (Anda et al., 2006; Courtenay, 2000; Kramer, 2000).
Seeing each other is work, daily work, but it is the only thing that prevents a community from collapsing into cruelty disguised as policy.
The point of all this
I learned early in my career what happens when ego replaces empathy and when efficiency replaces humanity. I have seen what happens when we stop seeing people as people. I have not forgotten it, and I see those patterns rising again in Alberta.
The loudest voices will not save this province. The angriest ones will not either. Seeing each other might.
“Seeing each other is the only thing that keeps a community from collapsing into cruelty disguised as policy.”
If seeing one woman clearly for one night helped her rebuild her life inside systems that failed her, imagine what it could do for a province trying to hold itself together.
If you are someone who has been pushed to the margins, whether you are trans, queer, racialized, a woman fighting to be heard, or someone who is exhausted, you are not powerless. More people across political backgrounds are seeing the cruelty for what it is. Information is spreading. It feels slow, I know, but the Canada I believe in eventually stands up and says, “I got you”.
If you are still here, still insisting on your humanity, that is resistance in its purest form. You are proof that cruelty has not won. You deserve to be seen fully and without conditions.
Agreement is not what keeps people safe. Protecting each other does. And we protect each other by seeing the person in front of us as human, hurting, resilient, and worth defending.
My country should not need this reminder. But here we are. It is not too late. There is still enough humanity here to turn this around.
Democracy cannot survive if we stop seeing each other.
References
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