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Nov 8, 2007

"Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Zen and the Art of Law Enforcement

If it had been a different day, just a few weeks earlier, Captain Cheri Maples would have arrested the man without a second thought. He'd already threatened her and was refusing to hand his daughter over to his ex-wife after a weekend visitation. But on this day, shortly after returning home from a meditation retreat, the Wisconsin policewoman tried another tack. "This guy was huge, a lot bigger than I am," she recalls. "I just talked to him about what was going on, and he started crying and sobbing and it was clear that he was in a tremendous amount of pain. And given that there hadn't been any physical violence, I decided not to arrest him." Three days later, Captain Maples ran into him again. "He recognized me, and picked me up and gave me this big bear hug and said, 'You saved my life that night.'" Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh, Cheri Maples is working to bring compassion to law enforcement sector.