Door-Knob Diplomacy: Trauma and police encounters

By Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

"When power crosses your threshold without consent, it isn't just the door that breaks — it's the illusion that you were ever meant to be safe inside"

A Fair Request

There’s a popular myth that when you're asking for help, the system just needs you to be polite, patient, and professional — and then everything will go fine.

And I, eternal optimist that I am, decided to test this myth in the wild.

I had a plan.

Not just a plan — a good plan.

A professional plan, even by the rigorous standards of "Trying Not To Get Emotionally Mugged By Institutions 101."

Here’s what I came up with:

• Meet the police officers at SafeLink: a neutral location, designed for exactly these kinds of sensitive interactions.

• Be accompanied by my social worker, Hanako, who could help moderate if things went sideways.

• Have all the evidence neatly organized, labeled, and ready to hand over.

  
  

This wasn’t some chaotic confrontation.

This wasn’t me barricading myself inside a house with a megaphone screaming about sovereign citizenship.This was me calmly setting up a low-conflict, low-risk opportunity for two officers to do their jobs without even the mild inconvenience of an awkward conversation.

All they had to do was show up.Just… show up.

I got to SafeLink early.

I sat quietly in the waiting room, rehearsing answers in my head.

I waited one hour.

Then two.

Then three.

The staff finished for the day. The lights clicked off.

They kindly let me sit in the room even after they locked the main doors.

I waited four hours.

Five.

Six.

Eventually, SafeLink fully shut down, and I found myself sitting on the curb outside, hugging my evidence folder like it was a teddy bear and I was the world's saddest raccoon.

At this point, I assumed I had been ghosted.

And honestly? It would’ve been the first time being ghosted by authority felt like an act of self-care.

Because — and I cannot stress this enough — I did not want police at my home.

My home, where the walls remember the knocks.

My home, where the sound of a loud bang on the door can still turn my blood to ice water in under two seconds flat.

All I wanted was to meet them on safe ground.

To be heard.

To be treated like a human being who deserved not to have a panic attack as the opening act of a paperwork exchange.

Apparently, even that was too much to ask.

Knock Knock: It’s Your Daily Existential Crisis

It’s 9:30 PM.

The witching hour.

Prime time for ghost sightings, bad decisions, and, apparently, unlawful home visits.

I was finally home after the great SafeLink Sit-In of 2025, exhausted, still hugging my evidence folder like it might grow legs and defend me.

I had just started convincing myself that maybe it wasn’t a total loss.

Maybe tomorrow would bring an email.

Maybe they’d forgotten.

Maybe things would still unfold like reasonable adults handling a delicate situation.

Then — BANG BANG BANG.

You know that very specific, bone-deep knock?

The one that doesn’t say “Neighbor here, mind if I borrow some sugar?”

The one that says “State Power has arrived to kick over your mental furniture”?

Yeah. That knock.

My heart immediately relocated from my chest to somewhere in the sub-basement of my body.

Time slowed. Vision narrowed.

Reality shattered into about five competing timelines — none of them good.

And before you ask: no, I didn't rush to the door.

I didn’t even peek through the peephole.

Because I didn’t need to.

There’s a certain knock you just know.

And if you've survived it once, your body becomes a finely tuned barometer for how close you are to being legally gaslit again.

I cracked the door open a sliver and there they were: two constables, standing in the hallway, their body language making it clear that my comfort was somewhere below “loose gravel” on their list of priorities.

They started asking questions. Right there. Right then. Ignoring the fact that I had explicitly requested to meet at a neutral location precisely because home is not a safe space for me when uniforms are involved.

I told them calmly, clearly:➔ I am not comfortable speaking at my door.➔ I am giving you an evidence folder.➔ Please review it and contact me later if you need anything.➔ I closed the door.

Simple, right?

Respectful.

Boundaried.

You’d think this would be the part where trained professionals go, “Got it. Thank you. We’ll follow up.”

Instead, they persisted.

Questions kept coming, like a weirdly aggressive late-night game of 20 Questions nobody wanted to play.

I reiterated: I do not consent to this conversation. Please leave.

They hesitated.

They looked at each other.

And then, with the casual entitlement of someone mistaking your living room for a public bus stop —They twisted the doorknob.

They opened my door.

My door.

My home.

My supposed sanctuary from everything I had spent years trying to survive.

Without invitation.

Without consent.

Without even the basic courtesy of pretending to respect me.

And in that moment, standing there dumbfounded while two officers loomed just past the threshold of my trauma, it hit me:

It wasn’t that they didn’t hear me.

It was that they didn’t think they needed to.

My boundaries? Optional.

My safety? Inconvenient.

My humanity? Negotiable, depending on their mood and their shift schedule.

The Investigation of the Non-Investigation

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you hand a folder full of painstakingly gathered, labeled, highlighted evidence to a police officer, allow me to offer a preview:

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Unless you count elaborate excuse-making as an action verb, in which case, welcome to the Calgary Police Department’s thriving improv troupe: Excuse Jazz.

The officers did not open the folder.

They did not glance at the tabs.

They did not read even the cover page.

Instead, they launched into an impromptu concert of reasons why they allegedly couldn’t possibly re-investigate the matter:

🎷 "It’s already been investigated."Ah, yes. The sacred first investigation. That hallowed document produced by an officer who skimmed the situation like it was the terms and conditions on a free Wi-Fi network. Clearly unassailable.

🎺 "You didn’t give us contact information." Sure. Except for, you know, the part where I literally handed them a document with my email address, my mailing address, and a note explaining my phone line would be temporarily disconnected and restored within days. Small details. Easy to miss. Especially if you close your eyes, hum loudly, and pretend literacy is a state of mind.

🥁 "There’s no new evidence here." I watched — in real-time — as they rejected the concept of "new evidence" while physically holding the folder containing it. It was like watching someone stare at a sandwich, deny sandwiches exist, and then ask why they’re hungry.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so violently demoralizing.

Because make no mistake: they weren’t investigating anything.

They were investigating how best to justify not investigating.

The goal was never to learn the truth.

The goal was to protect the outcome that had already been lazily decided — that I didn’t need to be taken seriously, because someone, somewhere, once decided I wasn’t worth believing.

Some people get the presumption of innocence.

I got the presumption of irrelevance.

You Are Not a Reliable Narrator of Your Own Life

Here’s the part that stings more than the door handle jiggle.

More than the excuses.

More than the cold confirmation that professionalism is, at best, a seasonal offering.

It’s the realization that no matter how calmly I speak, no matter how carefully I document, no matter how many tabs, timestamps, or witnesses I offer —

I will always be auditioning for the right to be heard.

Because once someone in power decides you're “mentally ill,” it doesn’t matter how sharp your logic is, how thorough your evidence is, how excruciatingly reasonable you make yourself.

You are not a reliable narrator of your own life.

Not in their eyes.

You are, at best, a quirky side character in your own story.

A malfunctioning Roomba they are obligated to humor until you roll yourself back into a corner somewhere and stop being inconvenient.

They don’t have to engage with the facts you present.

They don’t have to consider the possibility that you might be right.

They don’t even have to pretend they're taking you seriously.

Because — and here’s the real kicker — it’s not their job to fix past mistakes.

Not when the original mistake can be laundered into Official History.

Not when the bias that tainted the first investigation becomes the gravitational force around which all future interactions orbit.

➔ "We already looked at it."➔ "Nothing new to see here."➔ "You’re the common denominator, and that’s suspicious enough."

It’s epistemic suffocation dressed up as administrative closure.

And when you point it out?

When you say, "Here — look — there is something wrong" —

you are not treated as someone doing the hard work of protecting truth, or fairness, or public trust.

You are treated as the problem itself.

At first, I thought what happened that night was a mistake.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized:

It was a metaphor.

Door-knob diplomacy in its purest form — and I had just been offered a crash course in why safety, for some of us, is a myth.

Door-Knob Diplomacy: A Metaphor for Mental Health Injustice

What happened that night wasn’t just a one-off violation.

It wasn’t just "bad apples" or "poor communication" or any of the other soothing fairy tales bureaucracies like to print on apology cards they never actually send.

It was a full-color demonstration of a larger, uglier truth:

➔ In the mental health system, respect is not presumed — it is rationed.➔ Safety is not guaranteed — it is granted conditionally.➔ And boundaries are not recognized — they are negotiable inconveniences, subject to revocation at any moment if your suffering gets too loud, too complicated, or too inconvenient to process without overtime paperwork.

Door-knob diplomacy isn’t just about physical thresholds.It’s about the psychological ones.The quiet ones you work for years to build up after surviving trauma —the ones that whisper,

"Maybe this time, my 'No' will be respected."

"Maybe this time, I’ll be treated like a full citizen instead of a malfunctioning inconvenience."

And just like that — twist —they remind you:

Your consent isn’t real.Your comfort is optional.

Your reality is negotiable.

All it takes is one quick turn of the wrist, and everything you thought you secured — safety, dignity, agency, swings open like it was never yours to protect in the first place.

Because when institutions mark you as "mentally ill," they don’t just question your complaints, they question your very capacity to know what happened to you.

They turn the process of seeking accountability into an endless game of Hide and Seek, but With Your Own Reality.

(And spoiler: they’re hiding. You're seeking. And if you find them, they just declare a new hiding spot retroactively and dock you points for "escalation.")

"Your Honor, my client couldn’t possibly have experienced what he experienced, because if he had, it would have made us look bad, and that’s simply not allowed under the Rules of Professional Pretend."

What the constables did that night wasn’t just a mistake.

It was the physical manifestation of a system that runs on presumptive disbelief —where the default setting is "prove you deserve our professionalism,"and the burden of proof is set higher if you ever made the mistake of surviving something messy.

Door-knob diplomacy is what happens when institutions stop even pretending they owe you basic rights.

It’s what happens when your trauma history becomes a hall pass for further violation.

It’s what happens when mental health stigma stops being a buzzword and starts becoming a structural operating principle.

And yet — despite it all — here I am.

Documenting.

Naming.

Laughing in the ruins.

Because if they think shaking the door handle is enough to evict me from my own reality, they really haven’t been paying attention.

Still Here

There was a time when nights like that would have broken me.Not just scared me — broken me.

There was a time when a loud knock on the door could fracture my sense of self faster than any weapon.

When being ignored, dismissed, erased — again — would have pulled me under, like a rip current made of paperwork and polite indifference.

But not anymore.

Because somewhere along the way, between the wrongful investigations, the willful ignorance, and the jazz-flute solos of bureaucratic evasion, I stopped waiting for them to validate my reality.

I started validating it myself.

I started realizing that professionalism isn’t a personality trait — it’s a marketing strategy.

That “due process” isn’t a guarantee — it’s a performance.

And that safety, for people like me, is not something the system hands out like lollipops at the dentist, it’s something we build for each other out of scraps and stubbornness.

The door-knob twisted.

The threshold was crossed.

The polite fictions shattered.

And yet — I’m still here.

➔ Still documenting.➔ Still naming.➔ Still laughing in the ruins, because if we don’t, the ruins start laughing at us.

You can try to erase me from the official record.

You can bury my evidence in "unfounded" stamps and poorly spelled incident reports.

You can train every new recruit to assume my credibility was foreclosed somewhere upstream.

But you don’t get to unlive what happened.

You don’t get to unwitness it.

You don’t get to make it small just because it’s inconvenient.

Because here’s the thing about people like me —the ones you think can be waved away with a casual shrug,

a closed file,

a turned doorknob:

We keep coming back.

We keep telling the truth.

You opened my door. So I'll learn how to live without walls.

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 Thick Thought Thumper Of The Week- The Lines I Drew

trauma and police encounters

trauma and police encounters