Episode 14 W/ Mel McLachan

When you go to work each day as a police officer, I guess you never know what adversity you may come across and what situation you'll have to respond to.

And that can be, as you said, anything from murder to, I'm imagining, terrorism, as we've seen in recent times.

For most of us, me included, when we see acts of terrorism, whether it be Bondi last year or something else, most of us would think, how could someone possibly be capable of that atrocity? Or why would someone sell large quantities of drugs to damage the health and well-being of members of the community.

But when you scratch the surface, can you understand how some of these people who are involved with crime have ended up where they end up or how much of it is a conscious decision to be evil?

Yes and no.

Like, I mean, every crime has different elements to it.

Like you have crimes of opportunity, you have crimes of intent, you have crimes that are based on belief and religion and all of those things.

So I think it's pretty hard to just scratch the surface and be able to say, well, this is why it's happened.

But you also have to take other things into consideration.

You've got to take environmental things into consideration, upbringing, socioeconomic status.

There are just so many factors that you have to look at to go, OK, well, this is why that's happened.

And it's really hard, especially with the acts of terrorism and stuff, because you can have... regular everyday people who showed no signs of anything for their whole life and then all of a sudden they might have found a new belief or a new friend and it's taken them down a different road so it's yeah you can't say okay well this happened because of that like there's just so many factors.

I think

that's like a really scary thing even as being a mum you know now and you hear so many stories and I watch a lot of crime documentaries and I'm just...

I'm always shocked at how normal some of these people look and how normal their lives were and they have normal jobs and they had friends and, you know, you think, do you really ever know anyone? Yeah.

Like, do you find, like...

With your background, like do you have a harder time trusting people who they say they are? Yeah.

I always, people will tell me who they are or they'll say they've done this or they've done that and there's always a part of me that's like, is that who you really are and is that what you really did? And I have a really bad habit of looking further into people to go, okay, well, I don't believe that.

So I'm going to make sure that I can believe it.

So I do have some trust issues and it's something that I've had to work really hard on after getting out of the cops and after everything that I went through.

Cool.

So what was that

turning point, I guess, for you to make a decision to step away from the police force for good?