Eric Hofstein
Author
I am a retired police officer/deputy sheriff with 27 years of laws enforcement experience in the Bay Area of Northern California. After working as an Emergency Medical Technician in Santa Cruz California, I started my law enforcement career in 1993 at a busy gang plagued city, Salinas California. I moved on to work at other departments, including a few years in Florida until I settled into a department that matched my familial and professional needs, Contra Costa County Sheriff' Office where I worked 5 years in the jails and 6 years in patrol.
After surviving several close calls with death during my career I witnessed the death of a CHP officer on a freeway in my jurisdiction. Traditional patrol work lost its appeal to me after this incident, and I transferred to the San Francisco Bay Area Transit Police Department to wind down my career for retirement in transit policing.
Working in San Francisco exposed me to a world of homelessness, mental illness, and addiction in a way I had never seen before. There were over 8,000 homeless crammed into 49 square miles of the iconic city by the bay. Many of them traversing the city and adjacent regions via the BART trains exposing me to the subculture of life on the streets and the effects of addiction in a major city and its transit systems.
In my outreach work on and off duty I met many lost souls languishing, suffering, seeking connection to their lost humanity as I struggled to mitigate their conditions. Now in retirement I want to give a voice to the voiceless in the hope of appealing to others to also take up the mantle of outreach work and generate realistic constructive dialogue to address these issues.
This book is meant to speak to the power of a spirituality that binds us all as a social species. We have an inherent obligation to help others following our moral compass with compassion and empathy to help others, and if we can't help them, at least "see them." That request came from many of the people I helped who want the world to know at least that one thing, see them.
The book is free on Kindle Unlimited and will soon be available on Audible.
Proceeds help support a non-profit my co-author and I started in the state of Georgia.
