I am the daughter of a now-retired Police Lieutenant. My father started the academy the month I was born. Needless to say, I have known law enforcement all my life.

After high school, I became a police dispatcher. I later began working in the jails until, finally, I was able to attend the academy. Life, however, had different plans for me and instead of becoming a police officer, I married one.

During my childhood years, my father’s department lost nine officers. That is an average of one officer every other year. His department had only between 1000 and 1400 officers; nowhere near the size of NYPD who has over 35,000. Countless officers in his department were injured. And some would never be able to fully function again. My childhood memories include caring for one such officer. The devastation that accompanies this calling was always with me throughout my childhood years.

Since childhood, I have attended more funerals than I can count. I have sat in hospital rooms praying for miracles. I have seen more than my share of riots and protests from the 1980s to present. I have seen scandals and controversies, as well as the heartbreak that accompanies them. I have even had my own heart broken by the calling and rebuilt it from the ashes.

Over the past few weeks, I have found myself pondering whether or not this job is truly worth the risk anymore. I wondered if it was time for my husband to pursue a safer career instead. But I know I would still choose this path, this man, and this calling. I would choose the risks and the rewards, the heartbreak and my thin blue line family. Having seen massive changes over my lifetime, I can tell you without a doubt that law enforcement officers are resilient and adaptive. Unlike most professions, they are required to make split-second decisions to protect those they were sworn to protect.

But there is one thing that I believe the law enforcement community could improve, something I do not believe has been addressed until now. And that one thing is our ability to quickly shame our own.

When scandals and allegations strike, we are quick to throw our brothers and sisters in blue to the wolves. In a generation defined by the instant gratification of social media, we are quick to judgement and criticism before we know the facts. We condemn based on rumor, and although we preach the need for due process, we seldom afford it to those we judge. Time and time again I view family pages, support pages, spouse pages, and even postings in the halls of our departments, only to find them filled with opinion and judgement while extremely short on fact. At some point, we have all been drawn to offer our knee-jerk reaction to a story without taking the time to learn the facts. In one recent example, extreme condemnation was levied at a department and certain officers within the department. The reactions, much like the story itself, insinuated that the officers were criminals and murderers, just another pile of bad apples to be thrown out. If one took the time to look deeper, to perform due diligence, these same critics may have realized that these officers did nothing wrong. My heart broke as I realized this could have been my husband, your husband, your wife, your child. Any officer across the country could have found himself in their place. Their very lives, and the lives of their families are now threatened because of circumstances over which they had no control. And their own thin blue line family, those on whom they can always rely, have been quick to criticize as well.

If the past few weeks can teach us anything about our social media-driven society, it is that not everything needs comment. Not every Chief, Sheriff, Officer, or spouse across the country needs to offer an opinion. And instead of throwing gasoline on a growing fire, we should offer the same due process in our social media use that our justice system offers in a court of law. We should engage in thoughtful conversations about change without feeling the need to offer our own instant judgement. We should take stock of the fact that we may not know the truth of a situation before we criticize those who were involved. Unless we were in their place, we could not possibly know their every thought, their every fear, or their perception of the threat that faced them.

We should collectively decide whether our comments really contribute or whether they are simply adding fuel to the ever-growing fire. We should realize that our comments may be fueling a fire that could ultimately rob a child of his father, a wife of her husband, a parent of their son or daughter. A poorly considered comment may one day rob me of ever hugging my husband again. We need to ask ourselves if our comments are worth the cost. Was our own rush to judgement really any different than the mob mentality our family holds the line against? I pray always that the comments of my own thin blue line family do not cause my city to burn one day.