First day of probation: Fairfax Division, Bridgeview Police Department. My first Field Training Officer (FTO) was Troy Iverson, 5’6″ in boots, he had the kind of energy that screamed, I’ve been angry since middle school and nobody’s apologized yet.
Iverson didn’t like me. He didn’t like my degree. He didn’t like my “tone.” He didn’t like the way I filled out the daily observation report—too much writing. He preferred checkboxes and silence. I gave him prose. He gave me hell.
“You know college doesn’t make you smart, right?” he’d ask, every shift, as if he were still waiting for someone to disagree. “Some of the dumbest people I ever met had degrees.”
Iverson: That a class ring you’re wearing? Where did you get that ring from?
Smith: Yes, my parents bought it for my college graduation.
Iverson: Yeah, why do you wear it to work?
Smith: Oh, I don’t know, I always wore it. I never put much thought into it. Why?
Iverson: You know you can get that on eBay.
Smith: Oh, ok, I guess you can.
Iverson: Hey, where do you buy your underwear? There’s a Victoria’s Secret store right there. Is that where you buy your lingerie from? Oh, we have to go now, they’re going to have other officers relieve us.
I nodded the first few times. After that, I just stared straight ahead.
Field training with Iverson felt like a slow psychological experiment. He’d badger me over little things—whether I said “copy” instead of “roger” whether I asked too many questions, whether I didn’t ask enough. If I made a decision, it was wrong. If I hesitated, I lacked “command presence.”
Somewhere between the roll call sarcasm and the whispered radio corrections, I realized Iverson wasn’t just difficult. He was trying to fail me. And he wasn’t going to do it alone.
If Iverson was the insecure tyrant with a clipboard, Officer Whitney Wolfe was the quietly corrupt god of my probationary purgatory.
She didn’t yell. She didn’t badger. She didn’t need to.
On my first shift with her, she leaned against the squad car and laid it out plainly. “Look, I like to keep things smooth. You do what I say, things go fine. You don’t?” She smiled, slow and surgical. “Well, I write the eval. You connect the dots.”
That was her way of saying, I own your future here. It wasn’t a threat—it was worse. It was policy wrapped in charm, delivered with plausible deniability. If Iverson wanted to break me down out loud, Wolfe preferred to let me self-destruct while she held the pen.
She had rules. Arbitrary ones. Don’t ask questions on scene. Don’t interrupt me. Don’t radio dispatch unless I say so. Don’t take notes unless I tell you what to write. Don’t write too much. And always, always: Don’t try to be the smartest one in the car.
On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, after a late breakfast, we were driving down the street when Wolfe suddenly told me to stop a kid who was walking in front a High’s Dairy Store. I was puzzled and didn’t see anything unusual. Maybe Wolfe noticed something I missed, so I asked.
Smith: What’s going on?
Wolfe: He’s walking on my streets. Hey, you jerk! Remember me, you little punk? I’m going to get you for that!
Kid: Hey, sweetheart. I didn’t do nothing. I’m just walking, sweetie.
Wolfe: Yeah, you’re walking along my streets, dirtying up my house! Hey, you little shit, stop asking me questions and tell the dispatch we’re conducting a field investigation. Do you know where we are?
Smith: Uh, yeah. Central, 9-1 Adam, 10-60 with a 10-63 male, dark hoodie, blue jeans, in front of High’s on 125th street.
The funny thing is—I followed her rules. I tried. I bit my tongue until it bled. It didn’t matter. Every shift ended with some version of the same sentence in her debrief: “She needs to learn how to follow instructions without attitude. She has serious officer safety issues. She’s a liability”
In the back of my head, I started counting how many different ways they could say “officer safety issue and liability” without using the actual word.
The worst days were when I got both of them.
Technically, field training was supposed to be one-on-one. But rules don’t apply when the rule-writers are the ones breaking them. Sometimes Iverson would “drop by” to observe. Sometimes Wolfe would “ride along.” It was never random. It was always calculated.
That’s when the performance began.
Iverson would take the lead—loud, petty, full of manufactured urgency.
“She can’t even hold perimeter correctly,” he’d say, as if I weren’t two feet away.
“I don’t know what they’re teaching in college these days, but it sure ain’t tactics.”
Wolfe would nod, arms crossed, letting Iverson froth at the mouth while she played the calm, reasonable adult. The Good Cop to Iverson’s angry divorced uncle. But her silence was a sentence. She didn’t need to say much. Just jot something down in her notebook and make sure I saw it.
I was never quite sure who was in charge during those shifts. Iverson barked louder, but Wolfe moved the chess pieces.
Together, they worked like a tag team of psychological erosion. One hammered you from the outside. The other made sure you never stopped doubting yourself on the inside.
By the end of those shifts, I felt like a ghost in uniform. I went home and questioned whether I remembered how to walk, talk, or write a sentence. Everything I did was either “too much” or “not enough.” It was a moving target, and they were the ones moving it.
And worst of all?
They were building a paper trail. A clean, professional, bureaucratically perfect story.
One that ended with the sentence: “She just wasn’t cut out for the job.”
