For this reason, it was important to gain their trust and to ‘warm them up’, so to speak. Asking them to simply start talking about their experiences without any kind of lead-in could risk officers becoming closed and would certainly make it harder to get the best out of our meeting. For this reason I would often start a conversation with a light-hearted subject to get the conversation going. Death, I found, was a great subject to get the antidotes and hilarity flowing and conversations would more often than not, start like this: ‘So, got any good death stories?’ As odd – and perhaps awful – as it sounds, police officers, for the most part (but not always), find talking about their experiences to do with dead bodies an easy subject to open up about. No matter where a cop works, death will always be part of the job – natural deaths, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, bones in the woods, decomposed, maggot infested bodies – and usually a cop will always have a story (or many) to tell about death.
