Artist and poet Khalil Gibran wrote those words, which bring to mind my undercover days prior to my time in homicide.

 I imagine that, for some, there is a struggle with the whole notion of undercover police work. It involves trickery, deception, and, ultimately, breaking the bonds of friendship when the target of an operation goes to jail because of secrets shared in confidence with someone they thought they knew. I don’t know if this helps, but there are rules (laws) that police must follow. Trickery must pass a public shock test, meaning: would the public be shocked by the conduct of the trick? For example, filling a syringe with saline solution, injecting it into an accused’s arm, and calling it a truth serum would not pass this test. Neither would actions that violate a person’s sexual integrity, cause substantial damage to property, or place people at imminent risk. Police must also be able to pass a random virtue test, meaning investigators have to explain why a person was targeted in an undercover sting in the first place. There must be a justifiable reason to commence an operation. In other words, randomly selecting a person off the street and running with it to see where it goes wouldn’t pass the sniff test.

Knowing these rules exist will hopefully ease some minds, but perhaps it is the deception of the fictional friendship that is so offensive. The betrayal of trust is a serious social injustice that most of us recognize, and it goes without saying that undercover work creates situations where, in the end, trust will be betrayed. As a former undercover cop, I had to reconcile my social conscience with the knowledge that what I was doing was right, even if I felt terrible about it. I developed my own philosophy around secrets and trust, and today, when I speak publicly on this topic, I address my personal feelings about it.

I hope we all have a confidant, someone with whom we share what is too personal for general consumption. Someone we trust. When we share these private thoughts, desires, and secrets with them, it is either explicitly or implicitly understood that they are not to be broadcast to the world. If they are released, there is a sense of betrayal. Most of these cases are what I call good secrets and, for the most part, benign. Things like “I have a crush on that boy” or “I called in sick today to sit on a patio with some friends” are, in the grand scheme of things, not what I would consider a big deal, because, if kept, they would not harm another. When people breach secrets like these, I agree they are, in fact, snitching.

On the other hand, bad secrets are exactly that—bad. If kept, they will compromise someone’s safety. “I am scared to go home because my father hurts me” or “my boyfriend is committing armed robberies” are obvious secrets that compromise people’s safety and must be reported, even if doing so fractures the relationship. This is not snitching. It is being a courageous friend or a concerned community advocate. It is doing better and being better.

For parents or those with young people in our lives, this lesson may resonate more than we are comfortable with. While watching our children grow up, how many of us have been exposed to a bad secret involving a friend of our children or a parent of one? When this happens, it is uncomfortable, and in many cases, that discomfort will cause us to do exactly what we shouldn’t—nothing.

Today’s generation of children are routinely encouraged to come forward when they have heard or seen something they know is not right and to tell an adult. When they do, the buck stops with the adult they told. That could mean us. Whether we like it or not, it is our responsibility to take further action, though I suspect we sometimes don’t because sharing bad secrets can be scary. I have a story that sadly demonstrates my point.

When I was in elementary school, a classmate demonstrated behaviours daily that, as kids, we didn’t understand. We only knew something seemed off, but any adult, I am certain, would have seen some of these same things as major red flags. To be clear, I don’t have specific recollections of adults witnessing her behaviours (drinking, smoking, inappropriate humour). However, I suspect that among a bunch of hyped-up grade-six kids, rumours were likely rampant about her activities. For this reason, I believe some of her most concerning behaviours would have reached the ears of an adult in a position to address them at one time or another – but didn’t.

One such instance of alarm occurred when the young girl in this story stood in the middle of the school playground and allowed a line of boys to wait their turn to put their hands down her pants—an action that would signal to most adults that something was very wrong, deeply troubling, and symptomatic of a larger issue likely occurring at home.

On that day, I stood back on the sidelines and witnessed something I knew wasn’t right: a bad secret. I am not sure my eleven-year-old self knew what to do, and forty years later, I realize I likely did nothing—a regret I still think about often. You see, this young girl grew into a young woman who, in our Grade ten year, left our school and went on to support herself as a sex trade worker. In the early nineties, as we were all graduating from high school, she went missing and was found murdered on the outskirts of our city a few months later.

Her cold case file still sits in the homicide office’s file room, a haunting reminder to me of the devastating consequences of failing to act on bad secrets when we receive them. We can all:

Do better. Be better.

If we are to live in vibrant, strong, safe communities, we must not turn a blind eye and pretend we don’t notice the swollen lip and black eye of the kid who just walked past. Truthfully, some of the saddest child murder cases I have investigated revealed witnesses (after the fact) who chose to ignore the black eye of the little girl they had seen playing in the front yard a week before her death, or signs they believed indicated abuse and neglect in a boy who looked gaunt and unwell.

As a police officer and while undercover, I received and acted on bad secrets. We all did. If someone was selling cocaine, I told. Why? Because not telling put the greater community at risk. Were there people I liked in this world? Of course. But that did not stop me from doing what was right for the community, and sometimes even for the subject of investigation. This is what doing better and being better meant for me every day.