BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Baltimore City Police Detective Edward Gillespie spent over a decade as an officer on the Pennsylvania Ave. corridor, working in high-crime and at-risk areas.

He sometimes experienced tense and dangerous situations, and at other times, saw people in desperate conditions. To try to process and express some of those experiences, he turned to poetry.

“I’ve always written and I’ve continued to write as a law enforcement officer,” Gillespie said.“It’s funny, as I’m working, I do get bits and pieces of things that come up in my writing later on and it’s very cathartic for me. It’s very therapeutic.”

Gillespie now teaches officers at the Baltimore Police Academy about ethics and community policing, but when he’s not working, he writes about what he and other officers have seen while patrolling and responding on the streets of Baltimore.

He shared some of his work with WJZ.

“Everyone says that when the sirens fade away and boombox parties wined down, you can hear a baby falsetto chanting a double dutch rhythm and answering the call of a stranger in a plain white van,” Gillespie wrote.

He hopes that his poetry shows people that there is another side to police officers that many don’t see when they encounter them.

“When they do encounter it I think if they see that officers are multidimensional individuals, that officers have the same complex human dramas going on as anyone else I think that can do a lot,” Gillespie said.

You can read more of Detective Gillespie’s work by picking up one of his books.

Gillespie will also be featured at the Baltimore Book Festival.