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SWAT-cop-turned-nonprofit-founder Renae Griggs shares with Idealist.org how she became a social entrepreneur and offers some advice for others with similar goals. Griggs was previously a Truman Scholar and an Echoing Green Fellow, and is currently an Ashoka Fellow. She is the Founding Director of the National Police Family Violence Prevention Project, an organization that promotes strategies for police and their families to lead safe and healthy lives and careers. She was interviewed for Idealist by Rory Van Loo.

There were no cops in my family, but for as long as I can remember, I had this desire to help people. The only exposure to policing I had was watching this old TV show with my dad. I just thought, "Here are people experiencing horrific events in their lives, and these other people doing everything they can to help mitigate and find some kind of justice." So it was about seeking justice and trying to be a source of strength and hope for people who were going through hard times.

When I started it was the mid-1980s and women weren't particularly welcome in the profession at that time, but I didn't realize that. I never considered myself a woman who was limited by her gender—until I got into policing. It was a culture shock for me that there were people who definitely thought I didn't belong there because I was female. But once I got into situations that tested my courage and character and rose above them, I became respected despite my gender.

Later, my gender became an asset, because the men I worked with realized there were things about them that also made them deficient in dealing with some issues. There are women in policing who object to that idea and don't appreciate the fact that in the early days we were often relegated to working sex crimes and child abuse and things that were thought to be more appropriate for women. I didn't view it that way—I felt men and women could complement one another. I was a member of the SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics] team, so it's not like I was relegated to this role that I could only play as a woman, but I certainly tried to break down barriers.

"What was clear to me is that there really wasn't a black and white: Everything was gray."

The toughest part was actually an ongoing situation. I felt like I was playing a primary role in a system that was dysfunctional and that very often revictimized victims and was sometimes so unforgiving that it did not consider certain variables in the lives of the offenders. I came to feel like a cog in a wheel that was perpetuating these problems instead of solving them.

One of the things I tried to do in my job—and this was hard because we are acculturated to draw a distinct line between us and them, the good guys and the bad guys—was make my work all about the truth. What was clear to me is that there really wasn't a black and white: Everything was gray. But I was working in a system that had such rigid standards, and so we treated every victim with the same template and we treated every offender with the same template, which I thought was inappropriate.

If you have someone that is victimized, say a rape victim, sometimes going ahead with the prosecution is not the best thing for her. What she needs to do is heal from the trauma. But there was always a lot of pressure to get rape victims to press charges. I was pressured to do things that I didn't feel right doing, and so I found myself bucking the system. With the offenders, it was unheard of for a police detective to be able to see things from the perspective of the bad guy. But I did that—there were times when I would go to a judge on behalf of a defendant, and I would try to work with them and their families.

I became very cynical and filled with anger. This shocks people, but the anger came from feeling like I had no control. People say, "You have got to be kidding me, you're a cop, and you can take people's liberty away." But people lose their lives on a daily basis, and you desperately want to keep that from happening but you're a day late and a dollar short so many times. One example: When I was still a rookie, I drove up on a shooting death of an 18-year-old, and I had to face this kid's family and say that if I'd only been there 30 seconds earlier I could have prevented it. People always say, "Where's a cop when you need one?" We want to be there, and very often it's just impossible. That wears on you.

But we police can't express ourselves emotionally, we can't acknowledge those feelings—and so they turn into anger and frustration, and you feel hopeless and powerless to do anything. And then apathy and cynicism come in. It's this vicious cycle: You want to make a difference but you're only one person and you're continually responding to things that have just happened, so you can't do anything about it.

Also, because of all the trauma I never dealt with, I had post-traumatic stress symptoms. I had nightmares every night, like many cops do, and thought it was normal. Your family life is impacted—you disconnect from people. As a homicide detective, I was around death constantly. In order to deal with that I had to objectify people. To me, the human body became evidence. I had to objectify so that I could look at a body at an autopsy and say, "No, it is not a life but a piece of evidence." That moved to objectifying everyone in my life. I became emotionless and disconnected from my humanity. It's a common experience.

Being a police officer completely changed me. It twisted my character to the point where I did not recognize myself, and then I loathed what had happened to me. I couldn't stand myself. That's a really hard way to live. I didn't understand—I was never warned that this may happen, that this is how this job is going to impact you; I didn't know where all this was coming from. I thought it was an inherent flaw I had that made me incapable of doing my job. It was great ammunition for me to beat myself up, to the point of nearly killing myself over it.

I was sitting in my car with my duty weapon poised between my teeth and my finger on the trigger. A couple of things saved my life: One is that I was sober. If I had been drinking, I probably would have done it because drinking would have broken my inhibitions; most police officers who commit suicide are drunk at the time. The second thing is that in that moment there was still a tiny ember of hope inside me. For years, I had completely shut off emotionally so I didn't know how to cry. And I felt a tear fall down my face and that startled me. Another tear fell, and another, and I thought, "Wait a minute, I can still feel." It was a real awakening for me because I realized that inside of me was still that person that I thought had died, and I desperately wanted to get her back.

If I had been given the tools to take proactive steps to deal with those issues on a daily basis and not let them pile up for years, I probably would still be on the job. I left prematurely like a lot of other people who love what they do and are good at what they do. We're left with a police force consisting of people who've been tattered and torn and not given any help to make it through their careers. Those are the people that are left, the people with the experience and expertise to do their jobs—but they're beaten down. Those are the cops that people see every day who present this negative attitude that makes many people feel the way they do about police. With just a few proactive steps, I think we could completely turn this around so that everybody wins. The public gets a police force that's responsive, caring, compassionate and prepared, and the police get a chance to have a career without having it destroy their lives.