Jana Monroe

“The point I’m trying to make—the one that kept being reinforced with me time and again by the violence I witnessed—is twofold. First, the victims of violence are not just data points in some national tally of crime. Those data points are flesh and blood; they’re men, women, and children. They had lives that were violently extinguished, and they cry out for our attention. Second, the first responders who deal with so many of these gory events—cops, SWAT teams, firefighters, EMTs, and the like—are not just data points, either. They’re flesh-and-blood humans, too. They feel up close and personal the horror that most of us only feel secondhand, watching the after-footage on our TV or computer screens. And like any human being, they have to process those moments and rearrange their lives around them so they can go on.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI

“To the extent it’s humanly possible, we had to control our own emotions. It’s impossible at some level not to feel revulsion at the sight of an obviously tortured and battered body, and very challenging not to feel hatred for whoever committed this and sympathy for the victim. But emotions almost invariably cloud reasoning. In a sense, we had to stand outside of our own humanity while we were doing our job.”
― Jana Monroe, Hearts of Darkness: Serial Killers, the Behavioral Science Unit, and My Life as a Woman in the FBI