Police officer, father, parkrunner: Inspector Steve Burke's parkrun journey

Good evening everyone, 

I am emailing to highlight the excellent partnership work between Wandsworth Police and Parkrun. The initiative has been lead by Inspector Steve Burke and you can read about his personal journey with parkrun and how the initiative began below. 

Steve Burke is the Police Inspector for Putney and an avid parkrunner who discovered parkrun at a challenging time of life and benefitted from the power of communal physical activity. 

Mr Burke shares how parkrun has shaped his life and his goals for the future of Wandsworth Police.

“Running teaches us to keep moving forward, one step at a time, especially in the most painful moments” – Unknown

If ever there was a quote that seems so apt to my story, this is it.

Let me introduce myself, my name is Steve, I am a 44 year old dad of two, and an Inspector working in the Neighbourhood policing team in the London Borough of Wandsworth. The role is hard work, balancing the demands of arresting criminals, whilst finding the time to proactively go out to meet and engage with our communities.

Finding an opportunity to meet with hundreds of people at the same time seemed to be an impossible task. I would organise local meetings, informal drop-in surgeries and online discussions but the truth is that people have busy lives, their time is naturally precious and there wasn’t much appetite to spend their time listening to me when they could be relaxing with their families and friends etc.

I was thinking about how I could solve this conundrum. In a moment of inspiration, I looked to the historic Peelian principles of “The police are the public and the public are the police”. If you were to ask the average person on the street when was the last time they saw a police officer on foot patrol, most would tell you that they wouldn’t be able to as the perception is that we all drive around on blue lights and sirens. The reality is of course very different with lots of colleagues patrolling their patch on foot or cycle patrols but they simply can’t be everywhere all the time.

It is our officers that are part of the public, a visible presence on the streets and who become a beacon of reassurance to those that they serve. In many respects, parkrun does the same thing every Saturday morning right across the country. The knowledge that every Saturday morning at 9am in a park, playing fields or woods near you, there will be a group of people with the common purpose of getting fit, chasing a new personal best or simply enjoying the scenery. A place where you can arrive as a stranger but leave as a friend.

My own parkrun ‘career’ started a little bit by accident, I had done a single run in 2013 and not really understood the wider picture of what parkrun was. I thought I had simply entered a 5k race that was local to me not realising that it was a weekly event and with that, I didn’t think to go back. It was only when a colleague was telling me about parkrun that I realised that I had done one previously. I wasn’t really a runner back then although I had been a good runner as a child and as such I had no real inclination to go back.

In March 2014, my wife and I were expecting our second child. The prospect of being a father again excited me and as the countdown to arrival ticked down, the frenzy from friends and family intensified. On 26 March we welcomed a little boy to the world, Joseph. Sadly there had been complications with the birth, Joe was blue, my first sight of him was to see the doctors giving him CPR. Joe had been without oxygen for 37 minutes.

Joe made it but he spent four weeks in an Intensive Care Unit whereby he received specialist treatment to mitigate the trauma caused to his brain. Sadly, much of the damage had been done and we were told by the consultant that Joe had quadriplegic cerebral palsy.

The news was crushing, the hopes and dreams that you have as a parent to a typically developed child came crashing down. The realisation that Joe would never graduate from school, get married or become a father himself cut deep.

As men, we often struggle to show our emotions. We bottle things up and sometimes we make decisions that can be detrimental. I have always enjoyed a beer and it was tempting to go down the route of dealing with this situation through the bottom of a bottle. I had a new born baby screaming his head off for 23 hours a day, a three-year-old daughter who needed caring and loving and a wife that had experienced the physical and emotional trauma of an emergency labour.

I felt like I was going to explode, there was no outlet, all the attention was rightly on my wife and Joe. Back then we had a dog, Jack. It was on a random Saturday morning a week or two after Joe was born that I was walking him in the woods close to where I lived. I saw the runners lined up and asked someone if there was a race going on. I was told that this was parkrun and that anyone could attend for free.

On that spring April morning, Jack and I ran free, and our parkrun journey had begun. I let the tears roll down my face as my pain escaped from my trapped body stride by stride. For the first time in a month, I felt positive. I started to put life into perspective and realised that I was the lucky one. So many other parents had not been so fortunate in similar circumstances.

I started going every week, the faces became familiar and soon people knew my name. I began to realise that I was a semi decent runner and I looked at how I could use parkrun as a springboard to longer distances. Before long, I had signed up for my first half marathon which I used to raise money for a new TV and kitchen facilities in the family room at the hospital that treated Joe. The following year I ran my first full marathon raising over £3000 for a small charity that was helping Joe with his functionality and mobility.

I was now an established member of this wonderful community of people. As the months passed and Joe got bigger and stronger, I would take him along on a Saturday and he too would become a regular. When Joe’s buggy finally succumbed to the undulations, tree roots and rocky hill of the woods, the kindness and generosity of the parkrun family shone through as unbeknownst to us, they raised £2000 to buy a specialist running buggy for us to continue our parkrun endeavours. In a world where nothing is normal and everything is a little bit more difficult than it might otherwise be, it was a source of immense pride when Joe reached four years old and he ‘completed’ his first official parkrun – it doesn’t always have to be run, jog or walk, in Joe’s case, he was wheeled. The cheers as Joe crossed the line created memories (and tears) that will remain with me forever.

Now, going back to my original problem about how to engage with hundreds of people in one go. The police are the public and the public are the police. We are members of our communities in the same way as our hospitals, our schools and our parks. We belong to our people, because we are the people.

It dawned on me that parkrun would be a fantastic platform for us to be visible and present. An opportunity for us to go to the public, as opposed to expecting the public to come to us. I contacted Tooting Common parkrun which sits in the heart of Wandsworth. 

In September 2024, we headlined the event which was attended by over 500 participants. An invitation to address the crowd as part of the pre-event briefing as well as the sight of a number of officers taking part in uniform chatting to runners as we went was well received with dozens of positive interactions enjoyed. Such was the success of our visit to Tooting, we have since attended other events in the borough — Battersea and Clapham parkruns.

We are proud to serve and protect our residents, businesses and visitors in Wandsworth. We continue to build and strengthen our relationships and hope to attend more parkrun events right across the capital.

Kind regards,

PC Izzie Hensby

Communications and Engagement Officer for Wandsworth