BRUTE FORCE

Firouzeh Zarabi-Majd always wanted to be a cop, and she loved the job. Even when her fellow officers started harassing her, she said nothing at first. That's the codeyou don't go public, no matter what. But eventually she had to speak up, and it cost her everything

- JASON MCBRIDE

The first time Firouzeh Zarabi-Majd met a police officer, she was 13 years old. She and a friend had slipped out to a 7-Eleven for Slurpees without telling her mother, Fatima. Firouzeh, known to friends and family as Effy, was Fatima's baby, the youngest of four kids. The family had moved to Toronto from war-torn Iran just a few years earlier, settling south of Bathurst and Wilson, and Effy's English still wasn't great. At school, she was routinely bullied. When, after about an hour, Fatima couldn't find her, she panicked and called the police, saying her daughter was missing. Effy returned home to find a pair of uniformed constables standing in her living room. They were tall, kind and compassionate, she remembered, and they seemed as relieved to see her as Fatima was. When she grew up, Effy thought, she wanted to be just like them.

Effy's mother was an art teacher, her father a civil engineer, and they hoped that their kids would become lawyers or doctors. But, by the time Effy graduated from high school in the late 1990s, she was set on a career in law enforcement. She wanted to do something that she thought would be helpful and courageous, something that would make her mother proud. In truth, Fatima disliked the ideapolicing was too dangerous, she said-but after she passed away in 2001, Effy forged ahead, enrolling in the police foundations program at Humber College. One of her close friends from that time described her as ideal law enforcement material"reliable, resilient, always the one to stand up for the right thing." At age 27, Zarabi-Majd applied to join the Toronto Police Service and, after a lengthy interview and vetting process, was hired as a cadet. Her first task: three months of training at the Ontario Police College.