Day 8 of our holiday blog-a-thon is a tribute to those who have to work on the holidays, especially all manner of public servants. This excerpt from Daniel P. Smith's, On the Job: Behind the Stars of the Chicago Police Department, looks at Beth Russell, balancing her roles as a police officer and a mom.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Christmas Day in Rogers Park, the far North Side neighborhood brimming with diversity and character, placed Beth Russell in a 24th District beat car, awaiting the opportunity to head home for some Christmas dinner herself. “Everything’s quiet before Christmas dinner. It’s only after that the shouting starts,” reminds Russell.
Responding to a call of a man sitting alone on a park bench, Russell arrived at the neighborhood park to see the older man battered by the cold—blue cheeks and slumbering words. “All he kept saying was, ‘I used to live around here,’” says Russell. “But we couldn’t find anyone who knew the man.”
Pulling out his wallet for identification, the man displayed an address in Glen Ellyn, a distant western suburb with upper-class roots. Police surveyed the area looking for a car with a Glen Ellyn sticker and soon landed upon a purple Ford Fiesta in immaculate condition. As it turns out the man, who suffered from dementia, had escaped to Rogers Park in a dreary haze.
Chicago Police called the Glen Ellyn Police Department and said they would be bringing the man back to his home address. And off Beth Russell and a colleague went, both missing their Christmas dinners, Russell tucked in behind the wheel of the purple Ford that followed her colleague and the elderly man in the Chicago squad. When they arrived at the man’s Glen Ellyn home, a suburban officer waited outside, and the police escorted the man upstairs. They found his personal phone book and called his caregiver, who abandoned her own holiday gathering to be with the man.
“There was nobody there for that man, but the police were there for him. We saved him from being a victim. And I didn’t so much mind missing Christmas dinner for that,” she says with a smile.
“You know what that guy kept asking me when we got him home? He kept saying, ‘Am I in trouble? Am I in trouble?’
“I could only look at him and say, ‘No, sir, you’re not in trouble. You’re home.’”
Separate Worlds
There are two distinct worlds many of Chicago’s officers inhabit: the world of cartoon-themed nightlights, pastel-painted walls, fresh milk in the refrigerator, and green lawns; and the world of urine-stenched stairwells, dented doors, and people staggering through their own human existence—some permanently and some only temporarily.
And, believe it or not, discerning which world is the “real” one can sometimes be a difficult task. Beth Russell’s one of the lucky ones; she’ll tell you as much—she noticed the challenge early and made the necessary distinctions.
At midnight, Russell may have found herself searching a home for drugs, with rodents scurrying past her feet and the stench of hard liquor filling the room. Hours later, however, she would arrive at her Northwest Side home and flick on a light switch to see her daughters snuggled in beds of freshly washed sheets. Their heads smelling of fruity shampoo, the girls wore matching pajama tops and bottoms. All Beth Russell could do was shake her head and wonder.
“Which world is the real one?” she’d ask. “Which one is real?”
Today, a cool October morning in 2005 that encourages full breaths of the city’s crisp air, Beth Russell sports a pink cardigan, polka-dotted socks, and a beaming smile. Her North Side condo is bright and inviting.
She offers the typical greetings and rushes toward the unit’s rear, saying, “This is what sold me.” She steps onto her fifth floor balcony and embraces a green landscape and open skies, an exception from the concrete that graces much of Chicago’s urban space. She inhales the calm autumn air and accepts the splash of light today’s sky delivers. She is both at peace and in her element—in her real world, at least the one she’s decided to make her real one. For her, it’s now a world with active grandchildren, white walls stenciled with ivy trim, and handmade sitting chairs carved from a Wisconsin tree.
The real world, Beth Russell was told among her first months on the job, is the one she lives in. That simple. And the real world she lives in calls her mom or grandma, not officer.
Throughout her 23 years at the Chicago Police Department, Russell has been committed to seeing that the distinct worlds she inhabits remain separate places. She’s a cop and she’s a mother, and although the two may touch, she has resisted the collision—the interminable depletion of humanity that has made too many iron-hearted at times and jaded at others.
That’s why Russell always washed her hands when she arrived home from work. A routine act with an unquestionable symbolism, Russell’s action survives as one of the simple things we do in life to convince ourselves that such a habitual deed can erase the day’s dirty work—like gurgling mouthwash to forget the presence of alcohol. Still, the hand washing served a necessary step for Russell, a chance to remove the worries of one world to concentrate on the demands of another.
“I didn’t want what had touched the street to touch my children,” she admits.
Beth Russell encountered the dual role faced by so many Chicago officers—that of parent and that of cop. An existence in two distinct worlds, urging the individual at the center to decide where one will stop and the other will begin.
“One thing I’ve found is that the same hands that will arrest someone are the same ones that cook and change diapers,” says Russell.
“When you’re a police family,” she continues, “you know that officer can get hurt, but you can’t let it consume your family life. By the same token, your family life cannot be part of your police life. It’s your job. Your family can’t play into it when you’re working.”
At home, Russell faced the reality and struggle of a household with two Chicago cops, her then-husband a cop working inside the detective’s division. Her new career required an uneasy adjustment for her two school-aged girls.
“It’s okay when dad was a cop, but not mom,” says Russell. “Their father had been a cop since they could remember, but it was more difficult to accept me as a cop because I was the center of their world. That transition from civilian mom to officer mom was a difficult one. I thought the girls were old enough to handle it, but I don’t know if they ever liked it. “I always felt that structure and schedule was hard on them. There was a time I was stuck on 4–midnight’s early on, and I remember calling and the girls would be crying for me to come home.”
To ease the adjustment, Russell would not discuss police work at home—“Well, only the silly stuff,” she concedes. “It helped them see some of the job.”—and demanded her husband do the same.
“Home was always for the little, curly haired girls. They got to talk, not us,” she says. Still, she cannot help but think her job influenced her own children’s lives.
“It’s a job that affects childhood. They were under the microscope more. I became strict and that was entirely because I saw what was out there. I was more aware,” Russell says. “Now, that the girls have grown up, they say I was hard on them, but they see it was for a reason. They have no desire to be the police whatsoever though. They do their own work from the heart.”
At 54 years old, Russell’s face is vibrant and young, with a smile that shines with grace and warmth. She’s reflective in her thoughts and has achieved the balance of motherhood and police work—placing each in its proper perspective, assigning each its necessary time and space.
Though her Chicago Police career began more out of inquiry than desire, Russell has nonetheless arrived at a job she loves, one that has made her a better person in so many ways.
“When I got into the academy, I told myself I’d give it a month and that if I didn’t like it, I’d quit. But this job’s been good to me,” she says. “In the old days if I had seen a fight, I would’ve run away. Now, I run into it because it’s instinct. I’m not afraid to take the initiative now; I have confidence in myself, especially in situations in which I would’ve been mush before.”
After taking the test in July of 1981, Russell entered the academy the following summer and was assigned in December to the city’s 20th District, which governs Chicago’s Near North Side. After six years of loving the work, she accepted a move further north to Rogers Park in early 1989, where she stayed for the next decade.
“It was the happiest time of my career being in a beat car,” she says of her first 16 years on the job. “You got that immediate interaction with people.”
In January of 1998, she took the sergeant’s exam and by July earned the promotion, soon after returning to the 20th District. Today, she serves as a sergeant in Area Three’s Detective Division, an area covering much of the city’s North Side.
“I love it,” she says of the work she was at first reluctant to embrace. “This job allows us to get into some people’s lives and, hopefully, make a difference.
“I always wanted to be a nurse, and in this job I get to put some Band-Aids on, heal some wounds, and give a shot of praise. It’s a good and worthy thing. You’re helping poor souls, sometimes even from themselves.”
Russell arrived at that realization early in her career—the idea that good could be done while she monitored the streets. Upon leaving the scene of a finished bar fight, Russell’s partner asked her why she had a frown on her face.
“I told him I should be home with my kids, not involved in this chaos. But he looked at me and said, ‘Think of all the people who’ve never dealt with the police. You can bring a different angle to it. There’s a lot of good you can do out here.’”
And so Russell carried that attitude with her. She began to discover that the same traits she developed as a mother—patience, understanding, and compassion among them—could also make her a good cop. (She even admits to activating her “mom” voice on occasion, the commanding tone that halts nearly all situations.)
When frigid winters descended upon the city, Russell remembers that many of the school crossing guards would call in sick, requiring Russell and other beat cops to fill the role. Working the intersection of Sheridan and Gunnison Avenues, Russell encountered a father taking his two girls to school, each of the youngsters clothed only in short-sleeved t-shirts. The father, who only recently arrived in Chicago with his family from Southeast Asia, told Russell through an interpreter he was going to register the girls at school. Russell sprinted into action.
“It just broke my heart to see them shivering like that,” she says. “I went home and gathered winter clothes my kids had outgrown along with some from neighbors and went to that crossing the next day with two shopping bags full of clothes.”
Other officers on Russell’s watch saw her actions and soon began bringing their children’s outgrown clothing to the school office.
“It gave me such great satisfaction,” says Russell. “I don’t know if that’s law enforcement work, but our job isn’t all law enforcement. You just try to make a positive experience somewhere.”
Still, Beth Russell could not, in her capacity as an officer, ignore the fact that she was also a mother—the instincts and realities of that world often emerging an asset in many dilemmas. Most notably, that motherly instinct, that sixth sense of pain and want, often aiding her police efforts.
On a Sunday morning in the 20th District, Russell arrived at a domestic dispute, often among the most uncomfortable cases cops encounter. A mother, traveling from her South Side home, trekked up to the city’s North Side with her two young boys to get money from the boys’ father. A dispute ensued and police were summoned. Russell arrived on the scene in a supervisory role to get conflicting stories from both adult parties. She noticed the boys, however, standing on the side, each trembling and tearful. She knew immediately that they had witnessed something.
“I keyed in on those kids,” she says. “I saw the terror in them. I knew right away they saw something that shook them terribly.”
In jittery speech, the boys told Russell that their father tried pushing their mother out the window. The boys, meanwhile, grabbed their mother’s pants to keep her from falling, an act that resulted in her pants falling below her knees and leaving the boys scared and embarrassed. Russell looked up at the ten-story building to see one window perched open without a screen. The father was taken into custody and a squad car drove the boys and their mother back to their South Side home.
“We could show those kids that there was justice, that we could listen to their story and try to make the situation right,” Russell says.
She refuses to talk of child abuse cases she has encountered throughout her nearly two-dozen years on the job. The most detail she offers of any instance regards one she encountered while a sergeant in the 20th District. She tells nothing of the kids’ condition, only saying that another officer told her at the visit’s conclusion, “Sarge, I thought I was gonna have to hold you back.”
As a mother, she can only imagine the horror the children experience, the tainted view of humanity they come to possess. All she can do, she says, is attempt to make the situation right at that moment, to provide some sense of order, calm, and comfort. Not at all that different from motherhood, the times she encountered with her own girls, journeys to find the proper footing in stressful circumstances.
At a Mother’s Day mass for police officers, Russell once spoke to attendees and said she’d had the honor of being a Chicago Police officer for over two decades, but the privilege of being called mother for much longer. She reminded everyone that while the pride of being a Chicago Police officer recedes with retirement, the pride of being a mother, a parent, could never be erased. She spoke of mothers and fathers only wanting what is right and good for their children, particularly in light of the negativity an officer sees.
“Being a mom was the tougher job,” she says today. Russell directs her eyes ahead, releases a breath, and confides, “I don’t think being a police officer made me a better mother. That’s the truth. It took me away from my kids.
“If I had a job in the private sector, I don’t think it would’ve affected my children so much. Our work affects our children. We’re a little harder on them. We ask more questions and it’s because we’re aware of the reality. But being a police officer did help me prepare the girls for the realities of the world. I think I taught the girls to be more aware, how to carry themselves, and they learned how not to be victims. Maybe that’s a scary thing, but it’s a very real thing. I certainly learned to cover more bases.”
Russell later tells of the pre-work ritual she shared with her girls. Again, one of those habitual things we do to convince ourselves that distinct worlds can inherit separate spaces. “Every day when I left for work,” she says, “the girls always knocked on my back to make sure I had my vest on. It was always that—a kiss and a knock on the back and I was out the door.”
Out the door and away from her real world. Hours later, she would return home.
Her shoes at the door.
Her hands over the sink.
Answering to mom.
