If you take something that feels holy to you for granted then it stops being holy and sooner or later it certainly stops feeling holy. Never take something that awakens irreplaceable emotions and sensations in you for granted. Never mistake something sacred and rare for something commonplace. What is rare and valuable feels rare and valuable for a reason. Always cherish things and acknowledge them in their real multifaceted dimension and light. Always try, in your own way, to savour them and do them justice.
Detective Patrick Kennedy is best known for extricating a horrifying confession from one of history’s most notorious serial killers, Jeffrey Dahmer. He was the first person that broke through to Dahmer,
and one of the only people to do so in Dahmer’s short 34
years. A fourth generation police officer and a ten year veteran of the Milwaukee police dept., he’d been recently promoted to a detective in
the Criminal Investigation Bureau, an “elite
homicide unit”. Kennedy’s method of dealing with suspects was to kill
them with kindness, offering them cigarettes and coffee, and trying to
connect with them as people, to gain their trust and give them some
dignity. This was the key to getting through to Dahmer, and it
worked- Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession is known as one of the most thorough
and insightful confessions of all time. Plied with plenty of coffee and
hundreds of cigarettes over the course of six weeks,
Dahmer discussed the grotesque and often disturbing details of his 17 murders: drugging, raping, mutilating, and on three occasions, eating his victims. Kennedy describes this
experience as life changing, and he found himself surprised
at how much he connected with one of the most dangerous and cold hearted murderers in the last century. Working with Jeffrey Dahmer had a
massive impact on his life: six years sober at the point of Dahmer’s
arrest, Kennedy fell back into drinking. He got divorced and fell into a
depressive state. He says for one of his birthdays he had no telephone
and no TV, just a bottle of whiskey that he drank while crying alone.
However, the case ended up changing him for the better:
he quit the police department and went to graduate
school in 1999 to get his PhD in police education and training with the goal of changing policy in how the Milwaukee police force relates to
their city’s neighborhoods. A driving force for this focus was how the department handled the case of Konerak Sinthasomphone, a
14 year old disoriented Laotian boy who was handed back to Jeffrey
Dahmer hours before being murdered by him because of the rampant culture
of racism and homophobia,
Dahmer being the only other white man in an all-black area who convinced
the cops he and the boy were “lovers”. Kennedy wanted to do his part in
examining why racism and homophobia were so rampant, and investigate
effective procedures for preventing stories such as Konerak
Sinthasomphone’s. In fact, Kennedy’s contract for The Jeffrey Dahmer
Files, states that he receives no money from the award winning film, but
instead it goes to an athletic league in Milwaukee’s inner city,
because he wanted
“to try
to help stop something like this from happening again”. He also taught
Criminal Justice at the University of Wisconsin as well as Marquette
University in the hopes of passing along his priceless insight and
knowledge.
Tragically, Patrick Kennedy passed away on April
18, 2013; he was 59 years old. He is survived by his three children and
his ex wife. His work and life is immortalized in his memoir, Dahmer Detective, as well as in the film The Jeffrey Dahmer Files. He is an example of the importance of compassion and empathy in the field of criminology and forensic psychology.
Flu season would be way less prominent if parents just let their kids stay home when they’re sick
true and also parents would let their kids stay home when they’re sick if school districts didn’t send threatening letters and truant officers to their home when a kid misses 4 days without a doctors note.
also if it was easier to actually take days off to take care of the sick kid or to find someone to take care of them. flu season would ALSO be less prominent if workplaces actually let their workers take more sick days, and didn’t put them behind financially for doing so.
queerlybeloveds 