My name is Tanya Elisabeth Wolfe, and for fifteen years I've been a cop.

I got my start in the military, where I went to basic training and then on to Military Police School the summer after I graduated from High School. After that, I made my weekend drill at the Marine Corps reserve center in San Diego and headed off to college. Four years later, I graduated with a degree in Police Science and entered into the family business... After all, there have been ay least two members of the Wolfe family serving on the SDPD since before the turn of the 20th century.

I did all the usual rookie things, starting off in Patrol with a hardass Partner who made a point of not giving me any slack just because I shared a common last name with several members of the Department brass. I spent about two years learning my trade in San Diego, before some fanatics flew jet airliners into the World Trade Center and stood my world (and a lot of other people's) on its ear.

The fun began for me when my reserve unit of Military Police was mobilized in the run-up to the Afghanistan invasion. I was a very junior Sergeant when the Corps put us on "Passage Security", a fancy term for small groups of MPs and Grunts in Hummers occupying roadblocks or otherwise trying to keep the Afghan supply arteries flowing from Bagram outward. One my various deployments, I did variations of guard duty and other stuff that was less fun/exciting. All told I did three tours with the reserve before an especially bad day at the office (some fool drove our MRAP a little too close to an IED) put me in the hospital for a month and saw me medically discharged "with the thanks of a greatful nation". I don't want to talk much more about that, because between me and Jose Cuervo - I'm trying to leave all that stuff behind me.

Between tours to the Sandbox, I stayed on the Job in Diego. I made rank on-time and based on the recommendation of my retiring partner, wrangled an assignment to the Tactical Patrol Force as a Corporal. TPF was something a little more aggressive than normal Patrol, as it was funded by a Federal Anti-Crime Grant and targeted at especially high-crime areas and hotbeds of gang activity. TPF didn't patrol, they went looking for trouble; and the result was a substantial drop in the crime rate in whatever areas we were assigned to saturate.

Of course, when you have a group of people like TPF recruited who are turned loose on the streets and told essentially to clean them up Malcom-X style (by any means necessary), you have a recipe for cops who do things that are just as "questionable" and the gangsters we were supposed to be fighting. Pointedly; it becomes a war - and real War has no rules.

If we needed a warrant, we made damn sure that what we were after was found on the premises (even if we had to put it there ourselves). If some banger got in the way of a bullet, the body was always found to be armed and was generally in possession of some controlled substance (altho that crusading radical Priest who got tagged 10 times while threatening an officer with a shotgun and who had half a kilo stuffed in his pants kind of surprised me). Informants talked or Bad Things tended to happen to their loved-ones, and more than one Person of Interest (upon whom we had only a sketchy case) decided to get themselves shot to death by "resisting" during a routine traffic stop. TPF had its benefits too; we got handed a lot of search and seizure assignments whereby some critter's cash-stash diminished considerably by the time it hit the evidence lockup.

Some people might call that "corrupt", others might call it "effective community policing" - I suppose that would depend on whether some critter ever raped your sister or your kid ever got Mushroomed by a stray bullet when the gang-bangers came out to play. Thing was, we were VERY effective on paper - and the Good People of San Diego wanted us to be effective. So long as the collateral damage happened to someone they didn't much care for - they really didn't give a damn.

Anyway, after tour #3 to the Middle East, I came home banged up. The Corps bade me a professional farewell and after six months of therapy, I rejoined the SDPD. I had my time in for Sergeant and was about two weeks from pinning it on, when things took a turn for shits-ville.

While I was gone, TPF went through an expansion. Unfortunately, this meant taking on officers from Patrol who were not as completely vetted as we old hands. Before, we always tried to draft cops who Understood what was at stake, that we were at War with the scumbags, and that in War - bad things happen. Unfortunately, we got some young Crusader of an officer who took exception to an incident I was involved with. He went immediately to IAD, and I got a fast trip onto the Hot Seat.

My story was that I was meeting with a Confidential Informant. His story was that I was extorting sexual favors from a young latina prostitute in exchange for keeping her and her gang-banging brother out of lockup. Without admitting guilt, I can allow that it looked kind of bad.

I had fifteen years in - my military time counted - and I had several highly placed family members on the Department who didn't want a scandal. I got Retired with an official form-letter of thanks -and was "sharply counseled" by my Uncle Karl to relocate elsewhere. The paperwork shows that I left on good terms, but cops talk - especially when the gossip is really, really juicy.

I spent about eight months just travelling with my Windstream hitched behind my new jeep. Eventually, when the boredom got to be too much to tolerate, I started looking for a police department with a need for experienced officers and very low standards. After a couple of strike-outs, I handed a job in Hathian and reported for duty here in the Louisiana "Crack Den".

It sucks to be starting over at the bottom, but I truly believe that there are only three kinds of people in this world; Cops, Criminals and Criminals-Who-Have-Yet-To-Commit-A-Crime. I know where I fit into that, even if the Brass gets a little confused about it.