G. D. Wright: How my work as a family liaison officer helped me give a voice to victims through my writing
I’ve just spent a few hours digging through years of accumulated paperwork and files, searching for any and all documents relating to my time spent working as a Family Liaison Officer during my years of policing. Finding them and reading them brought it all back to me. Years may have passed, but it seems like only yesterday.
I joined Kent Police in 2003, a week after my 20th birthday, and spent every year of my service in various roles on the front line. It’s on the streets where you get to play cops and robbers, living out every young kid’s dream of driving cars with blue lights flashing and nee naws screaming, and chasing the baddies. Within the uniformed side of policing, there are certain roles and areas where coppers can specialise. This can be anything from central roles, such as Firearms Teams and Traffic Units, all the way through to the voluntary end of the spectrum – duties that officers take on in addition to their daily work. One of those is the role of Family Liaison Officer (FLO).
Just to give you a flavour of the role – a FLO is a police officer who is deployed in cases of fatal (or potentially fatal) road traffic collisions, a homicide, or ANY other incident where deployment is deemed necessary (including, but not limited to, stranger rapes, major disasters or an incident resulting in life changing injuries). The goalposts are varied, but my general advice to my families was that I was there to be their link to the investigation. And in many ways, that’s what being a FLO is. It’s just… there’s a hell of a lot more that goes with it.
I was deployed across both the crime and traffic spectrum and, over the years, worked on everything from fatal road traffic collisions all the way through to murders. EVERY deployment began the same – with the trepidation and nerves of intruding on someone’s private grief… And, do you know what, EVERY deployment ended the same – with the satisfied feeling of a job well done. It’s what happened in the middle that I think I should talk about though.
Grief is such a strange animal. Through my years of policing, I experienced everything, from a grieving mother slapping me square across the cheek for delivering a particularly tragic death message, through to being plied with endless cups of coffee and being apologised to for having been the one to deliver the same message in different circumstances. Put simply, no two people are the same. Everyone deals with grief in their own way, and to try to put a label or a cliché on it simply doesn’t work.
Let me give you an example. It is the one thing that sticks with me more than anything from my time working as a FLO. It was on one of my early deployments, involving a 16-year-old child who had died in a motorcycle accident, and I had been deployed to his mother and step-father. About two months had passed, and I can remember my exact question to her. I asked if time was helping. You know how it goes – the cliché is that ‘time is a healer’. Her answer, word for word, was:
‘Time doesn’t heal. That’s utter bollocks. All time does is let you get used to a ‘new normal’.’
Now THAT was something they didn’t teach us on any FLO course that I went on. It was a remarkably perceptive, totally insightful comment, with a marvellously appropriate use of ‘bollocks’ as well.
Honestly, I have got to say that those words have guided me more than any others as I’ve written my novels, particularly After the Storm, as it was such a vividly expressed view from someone who has been there, seen it, done it, and worn the mask of grief. Sure, we can all Google ‘grief symptoms’ and write a story from them, but someone who has lived experience of it, who has cried the tears and suffered the mental wounds? It’s them who know exactly how it feels and, when I’m adding meat to the bones of my characters, and layering them with emotions and feelings, it’s my families that I often think of.
I had to retire from the police when I was 29. That’s a story for another article (short story: heart blew up, died, came back, pesky heart disease diagnosed, still living), but the one thing I miss more than any other – more than the nee naws, the blue lights, the chasing the baddies – is getting a phone call in the middle of the night and being asked if I’m free to be deployed. The answer was never ‘no’, and there was a reason for that.
It was the one job in the police where you got to help people when they were at their lowest ebb, and see it all the way through to a resolution. Sure, you couldn’t change what had happened, but you could damn well do your best to help the family out of the fog of grief that would inevitably descend upon them. It’s a job like no other.
It’s little wonder that it’s one of the most sought-after roles in policing. Most coppers join the force to help people.
FLOing, quite simply, is the purest form of that.
After the Storm by G. D. Wright is published by Avon on 1 August 2024
