An averted tragedy first made Summer Spisak consider the drastic career change that landed her in Austin’s police training academy. A police officer, she says, “literally saved my family member’s life, essentially by talking them down from committing suicide.” Around the same time in 2016, an ambush in Dallas that killed five officers and injured nine others further inspired Spisak to consider leaving her business operations job at Intel, where she’d worked for nearly a decade. In the aftermath of the ambush, Dallas’ police chief challenged people who criticized the department to apply and help change the profession from the inside, which resonated with Spisak. “I didn’t feel like I was making much of an impact on my community,” she recalls.
Spisak talked it through with a friend, an Austin Police Department (APD) officer who warned that the academy was intense. At about 5-foot-4 and 140 pounds, Spisak knew she wouldn’t exactly cut an imposing figure, even with a badge and gun, but she figured she was athletic enough for the job. “It kind of snowballed into this idea of, ‘Why not me?’” she says. “I’m in good enough shape, I’d recently run a marathon and I’ve run tons of half marathons. I’m healthy enough and fit enough.”
In May of 2017, after a long screening process and months of crossfit training, Spisak left her tech job to begin Austin’s 32-week police training academy. The first day, Spisak says instructors barged into presentations by other trainers to berate the new recruits, “just screaming at us and turning over tables.” They also spent hours running stress drills in the heat—jumping jacks, planks, army crawls, and racing up and down a fire department training tower. Spisak remembers struggling to stay hydrated because of how short and infrequent the breaks were. Instructors barked at them to hurry at every turn. That first day would set the tone for the coming months.
