June Hawkins is the Miami police officer who helped bring down Griselda. She’s played by Juliana Aidén Martinez, a 2020 Yale drama school grad and 2021 alum of Lena Waithe’s mentorship programme to advance marginalised people in the film industry.
In a 2017 episode of the podcast Law Enforcement Talk, Hawkins herself shared more nuance about her career in what’s now known as the Miami-Dade police department. When asked about male chauvinism on the force during her tenure from 1975 to 2004, she said, “once they [male officers] realised that I was really sincere… and this wasn’t just a lark for me, then they became my big brothers”.
In the show, Hawkins is shown as equally as underestimated as Blanco. Her hunches are dismissed, her reports go unread, and her relationship with her young son suffers. In real life, Hawkins described herself on Law Enforcement Talk as a “tough old broad” with an iron stomach. Despite the many horrific things she witnessed over her 30-year career, including the dramatic track-down of Blanco, Hawkins shared on the podcast that seeing the police footage of her own adult son, Eric Reynolds, being shot in the line of duty (he survived), was more difficult than anything else she experienced.
“I have been to homicide scenes, horrible death scenes involving children, babies, unbelievable stuff we all have seen and experienced… But when it is your own child… if you are a mother, you are a mother first, I guess,” Hawkins told the Law Enforcement Talk host.
