As public safety professionals, many of us go through our entire careers wondering whether we truly made an impact on the lives of those we encountered. We are rarely offered the certainty of knowing a life was saved — either literally or figuratively. Our successes are often measured by what doesn’t happen: accidents avoided, harm prevented, crises that never come to pass.
Because of this, our impact can often feel abstract rather than tangible, existing more in theoretical terms than in identifiable moments. Yet within that quiet space, it is often the smallest, most human actions that carry the greatest weight. Sometimes, we don’t realize the difference we have made until long after the moment has passed.
My own career in a city police department is a perfect example. As a new supervisor, I was assigned to what was known as the “dinosaur squad” on day shift. These were tenured officers who knew the job well. They had been there, done that, and they preferred the quieter days to the chaotic nights. Many were experienced and capable, some close to retirement, content to do the job by the book — no more, no less.
One day, while reviewing calls for service, I came across a request input as a welfare check. A woman who lived out of state was trying to reach her estranged father. All she provided was a name and a last-known address. She did not believe anything was wrong with him and was not actually concerned for his welfare. She simply needed help locating him.
The officer assigned to the call quickly pointed out, “That’s not my job.”
“Sometimes, we don’t realize the difference we have made until long after the moment has passed .”
Anyone who works in law enforcement knows many of the calls and tasks we are asked to handle are not technically part of the job description. But at the end of the day, we are problem solvers, and our communities look to us when they have nowhere else to turn. This is true across all public safety disciplines. Who else could this woman have asked for help?
The officer did respond to the address provided, an apartment complex, and quickly learned the man no longer lived there. He even checked with the apartment manager, who said she had never heard of him and didn’t know where he lived.
The call was closed without further ado. A simple notation in our online system documented the outcome: “Subject no longer lives here, confirmed by apartment manager. Caller notified. NFI.”
Many of us would have handled the call the same way. After all, the department had already gone above and beyond. But as I thought about this daughter wondering about the welfare of her father, I decided we could do more.
Running the man’s name through our systems, I quickly located a valid driver’s license with an address just a few miles away, just across the border of my patrol division. Though I already had a full case load, I decided to respond there myself. It wasn’t complicated or time-consuming. It simply required someone to care enough to take the extra step.
When I knocked on the door, a man answered. I asked if he was the person I had been looking for. He said he was, and I explained that his daughter was trying to reach him. He sighed, became emotional, and began to share his story.
Shortly after his daughter was born, the man told me, he and her mother ended their relationship. His former partner asked him not to have contact with either of them. He was young and believed he was doing the right thing by respecting her wishes. Over the years, he said, he’d thought about reaching out but chose not to, remembering the promise he had made. Though it made him nervous, he told me he would welcome a chance to reconnect with his daughter.
I provided him with his daughter’s phone number. He thanked me and we said our goodbyes.
Before I even left the apartment complex, I called his daughter. Although she had already been told we’d been unable to locate her father, I explained that I had, in fact, found him and shared her contact information with him. That was when she shared her story.
She grew up without her father and, over time, became angry that he had left. Now an adult with children of her own, she realized she might not know the full story behind his decisions. She wanted the opportunity to understand him and to have a relationship with him, and that’s why she reached out for help.
Reading this, you may think this is where the story ends. I reunited a daughter and her father and documented the call with both parties’ information in a case report. It was an ordinary decision, made with no expectation that it would ever resurface again.
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But no, the story continued.
Approximately six months later, I received an email from one of our agency’s investigative sergeants, who supervised the homicide unit and was also responsible for locating next of kin on death cases when responding officers were unable to do so. The email informed me the man I’d located had recently died.
As part of his investigation, the sergeant searched our records and found my case report, which included the daughter’s name and contact information. When he called her to make the death notification, she thanked him profusely. As it turned out, in the months before her father’s death, she had been able to speak with him, get to know him, and make peace with him. She shared how grateful she was for the time she had, however short, to finally connect.
That call became one of the defining moments of my career — not because it was dramatic, but because it was so ordinary. No, I didn’t pull anyone from a burning building or perform lifesaving CPR. I didn’t rescue a hostage or apprehend a notorious serial killer. I simply took a few extra minutes to be human.
In public safety, we often underestimate the impact of those moments. The phone calls returned. The doors knocked on. The problems that technically are not ours, but that no one else is equipped to solve. Often, it is these quiet interactions, not the high-profile ones, that shape how people remember us.
We may never know how many lives are changed by those small acts, or how many perceptions are softened because someone chose compassion over convenience. But sometimes, the difference we make is not in what we stop from happening, but in the connections we create and the dignity we extend … simply by caring enough to try.
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