The Thing You Wouldn’t Expect Me to Learn At An Undercover Cop Workshop

This past Thursday, September 26, Kate and I crashed/surveyed a workshop ARWA held presented by Detective Dave Sweet, a member of Calgary’s Police Service. Right now he works in the homicide unit, but over his career as an officer he worked his way through the ranks of the drug unit, two years of which he spent undercover.

Before you start getting lustful images of James Franco in dreads (they might be dreads on a pasty white guy but it’s still James Franco) or Vanessa Hudgens in a bikini, whatever your flavour, it’s a sad reminder that real crime isn’t sexy. After learning about Det. Sweet’s bag of dirty clothes, i.e.: clothes that were NEVER washed, that he worked the streets in and his wood-stain hands, I decided I was happy to be a law abiding citizen. Because that’s just icky.

Regardless, Det. Sweet knows his stuff, even though he claims it’s dated because he was undercover in 2005/2006, but it’s still informative beyond imagining and the bare bones of how to be an undercover never changes. It’s street lingo and slang that changes a lot and changes fast. As useful and practical those words are to a writer, I digress.

Now, I bet you’re sitting there thinking, “Here she goes. Another writer’s going to spew a bunch of stuff at us on how to make our detective stories better because her source is the best, stuff we can see on CSI, Law & Order, every other crime show on the planet… *insert yawn.” I’m not! Even though a few stories Det. Sweet told may make it into a manuscript or two in the future.

As informative and interesting as the presentation was, I’m not going to write out a summation of my notes. What I want to share is something that struck me at the very end, something so simple that Det. Sweet’s asked of the group of writers that never really hit me before. After sharing his personal experiences, many about how his home life was extremely disrupted by his time undercover, this man who has put his life on the line to work at cleaning up the underbelly of a city the size of Calgary put his head down shyly and asked us to portray guys like him authentically. Good cops who have to successfully turn themselves into guys they wish didn’t exist. It’s cold hard bullshit if anyone thinks that developing an alter ego like that doesn’t affect you. And he said under no circumstances do undercovers ever do drugs or anything else criminal that all movies like to portray. There’s definitely the psychological drawback of spiraling into the dark side, but at their core these people are cops, devoted to law and order.

That’s it. That’s all he asked of us after sharing so much. And it really struck me.

Writing fantasy gives you a lot of room to maneuver and a lot more leeway about representing real life “accurately,” but human emotion and experience is kind of what we’re all trying to translate as writers, right? And that never really changes. I think Det. Sweet’s request is important for all writers too though, because I think sometimes we forget that there are actually people out there that do some of the jobs we write about –and they read! Even the jobs we largely “make up.”

Det. Sweet’s request made me want to initiate a challenge to myself, to write professions like his as authentically as I possibly can. To take the time and research it and do it right. Because he would appreciate it, and everyone else like him would too. Not only that, they’d get a heck of kick out of it. I also think this extends to any kind of person who is generally stereotyped. I want to make better people and characters, and I know it would be appreciated.

So take the Sweet Challenge (didn’t that work out great?!) if you want, I am.