When Marian Johnson was a baby, her family moved from the Jim Crow South to central California to fulfill his dream living in an equal society. The daughter of a police officer, Marian dreamed of being the black Angie Dickinson when she was a girl. She loved watching her daddy come home in his uniform everyday. That dream came to an end when she woke up to the light and smell of a burning cross in her front yard. Her fear turned to horror when she saw the bloodied face of her father, as he crawled to her to try to get her to go inside.
An investigation showed that fellow cops had done this to her father after he’d turn them in. Disheartened, James Johnson moved to Sierra Falls and went to school to become a math teacher. Despite her mother being around, Marian always was a daddy’s girl and followed him into education. She was a young middle school science teacher when her dad got sick. He admitted that the worst mistake he’d ever made was to quit being a cop. That didn’t turn her into an officer right away. That didn’t happen until she met Frank Wright when she was a student teacher.
Frank Wright was a police officer that came to her school to talk about drug prevention programs. They started dating soon after that and he encouraged her to become an auxiliary officer. She enjoyed the volunteer work while she continued to teach middle school science.
After five years of teaching hormonal, bored kids, she’d had enough. She decided that working as an officer would be more fulfilling and quit teaching and became a patrol officer in the central district. In the couple years, on patrol, she had many opportunities where she had to bust former students for drugs. Sometimes, she would have had them in a class that she was subbing in the morning only to arrest them in the evening.
That led her to ask for a transfer to Anti-crime, to try to get the drugs off the street so that her students didn’t have the temptation. In her years in Anti-crime, she did a lot of undercover work to bust up drug and prostitution rings, as well as many operations to get those who solicited sex off the street.
In 1992, she became pregnant with Frank, Jr. and started working from a desk. That same year, Frank, who was a patrol sergeant at that point, was severely beaten while perusing a perpetrator and was put into a coma for two months. She took the newly enacted Family Medical Leave Act leave to take care of him during his recovery. By the time he made his partial recovery, it was clear he’d have to retire. So, after Marian gave birth, he stayed home and took care of the child (later going to law school) while she went back to work.
She wanted a little less pressure and better hours, so she joined the D.A.R.E team and was back in middle schools. She enjoyed being back with the hormonal tweens and pre-teens and relished teaching again. But after staying there for six years, she realized there was going to be no opportunity for advancement, so she transferred to Internal Affairs.
Thinking this would be a brief sojourn before going to CIDB, It was only after she started that she realized that had a gift for discerning between officers who could be rehabilitated and those who needed to be gotten rid of. So, finding her niche, she’s stayed in IA, despite the poor prospects for promotion.
