Editor’s note: This essay is part of “Stories from the Street,” a Police1 series featuring first-person reflections from officers across the country. These essays are about the lived experiences and moments that changed how officers think, lead and serve. If you have a story to share, we’d love to hear from you. Submit your story here.
I keep a cover shirt in my personal car. I always have. It is a long-sleeved, blue, faded, oversized button-up with the sleeves always rolled up. I’ve had it for years and years, and it is a necessary piece of my gear. All my pals have a similar shirt — flannel or plaid or denim. Often that shirt has remained a constant piece of their kit through changes in assignments, uniforms and ranks over the years.
Its purpose is clear to us in law enforcement and goes without saying. We put it on to cover our uniform, our calling, our profession. We don the shirt to hide who we are and what we do. We pull it on over our uniform to keep us safe, mask part of our identity, keep our neighbors ignorant of our noble profession, conceal our address and protect our loved ones from those who would wish us harm.
While sitting around a fire pit recently with several pals not in law enforcement, I asked them if they had ever heard of a cover shirt. These were educated men with professions in real estate, architecture and medicine. None had ever heard of the idea. When I explained how central and necessary the cover shirt is to the 21st-century law officer, how we use it to hide and conceal who we are, they were confused and befuddled. They found it hard to accept the idea of having a career and needing to keep it secret from those outside a small and trusted circle. They were as saddened hearing about it as I was explaining it.
It wasn’t always this way. Even in my early days of policing in the late 1990s, law officers could proudly walk out of their homes in full uniform and in open view of all their neighbors and head to work with a wave and a well wish. Officers could happily, and without worry, attend their children’s career day school festivities and answer adoring questions from students about our grand calling. In uniform, officers could routinely stop for a quick grocery trip on their way home without concern over a contentious encounter with an angry and ungrateful citizen. Unfortunately, at least for now, those days are gone.
The past 15 years have brought dark times for law officers in America. Defund the police. Anti-police riots. Social media venom. Doxxing of officers involved in critical incidents. High-profile prosecutions of officers. Politicians demonizing our calling. Ambushes of police officers. It has been a challenging chapter in the history of our profession.
However, the light is beginning to break through. Defunding the police has predictably failed and been reversed in many places where it was attempted. Anti-police social media venom has begun to wane. Clear-thinking Americans have begun to speak out boldly in support of their law officers across the nation. Politicians and activists who advocated aggressively against law enforcement have become increasingly marginalized. Police ambushes are down. Blue line stickers and flags adorn more vehicles and homes. In many communities, officers who once felt isolated are again hearing simple words that had become rare: “Thanks for what you do.” Times seem to be changing for us, for the better.
I dream of a day without cover shirts. Perhaps in coming years, a generation of young officers will enter our noble trade, and their training coaches won’t even mention the need for such a garment. I can imagine a young rookie inventorying their police car under the close eye of their training officer, finding a crumpled oversized plaid shirt in the trunk and asking, “Boss, what is this?”
He’d answer happily, “Oh don’t mind that. That’s something we used to wear.”
For now, I’ll keep my old, faded cover shirt, but with hope and optimism of one day balling it up and tossing it forever into the trash. Knowing my temperament, I’ll likely light it afire in celebration or bury it. Maybe one day a cover shirt will sit on proud but archaic display in police museums across America, right alongside the Polaroid camera and revolvers.
Hang on to your cover shirt, at least for a time, and let’s hang on to the hope that it may one day soon become extinct.
