Interview 6 Police in Uniform

Uh all right thank you so much uh chief larkin for uh joining us for this interview i know it's a very busy time we're just talking about and you're don't shy away from volunteering in the community either so i'm sure it's an extremely busy time for you i really appreciate it uh so i just kind of wanted to start off By before getting into sort of more detailed discussion heavier discussion uh i kind of wanted to know from your perspective why did you become a police officer and what is the role of police in society

in your view well well thanks and thanks for it's great to connect uh you know it's always great to connect with old connections and previous connections uh it's interesting Where our past cross and where we uh sort of come together and obviously our time in guelph was uh one which i very much enjoyed particularly our time on the victim services board um and so policing for me was probably a very young age sort of in you know in elementary school we used to have this office or the tourist school it was very road safety based

traffic safety based bicycle Safety pedestrian safety just overall community safety and this officer his name was bernie and he was a very engaging certainly a very charismatic individual and of course in elementary school sort of that uh and this is in montreal uh in quebec and uh you know i went to a french immersion school so it was in bilingual and uh this officer would come in and it was His ability to connect and engage with young people uh always fascinated me and admittedly at the time you're sort of maybe as a young person kind

of like wow you know look at the uniform and look at all those pieces um and this officer through through elementary i sort of you know would come in on a regular basis and then as i progressed into high school You know my activities and interests continued to do very different things uh i was very interested in history and politics and urban affairs community leadership community recreation and how that impacts and in fact my original course of study was around community recreation and leadership and how leisure studies and how recreation impacts society of all ages

and so how do we interact with different societies but I was always involved in the community through volunteerism and i had a number of connections with police officers in the community i eventually worked for the municipality and was involved in like parks and recreation so we'd have contact with police officers and i would talk to them and by this time as a sort of a teenager and young adult you begin to mature and you recognize that the complexities of policing is very Different from on the surface so you start to understand and gain a better

understanding of what they're doing and i just happened to have a consistent conversation with a number of police officers whose focus was very much on uh community development addressing the root causes of crime and that just sort of interested me and and i sort of would have dialogue and discussion as i continued My my studies and as i said i had i was not studying criminal justice uh that wasn't my area of interest i was really involved in municipal recreation and how uh that intersects with our community and healthy lifestyles and those types of processes

but uh i decided that i i thought i would give this a shot in you know and as it i guess you know growing up in montreal i sort of was looking to Different opportunities and i ended up in ontario and and that was sort of where i started my policing was in waterloo region it was really bas in some ways by fluke um you know i was very interested in joining the ontario provincial police the provincial service i thought that i had some abilities to you know as bilingual thought that i could work in

eastern ontario and You know based on some different pieces i ended up landing in waterloo on a recommendation from an opp recruiter but i would say that amir you know 30 years ago when i joined my focus was really much around change within the community so making a difference in the community it wasn't for me so much focused on arrest or those types of processes i mean you start to learn some of those pieces but I did believe that policing had an opportunity to influence uh communities and the way that we address issues and and

and you know i you know a story shortly i was hired by waterloo and i was still living in montreal and i was actually traveling back to montreal uh and and i was excited to meet some friends to let them know that i was starting this new journey and In montreal i did this illegal u-turn i didn't realize i had done this traffic violation and got stopped by the montreal police and and i had this interaction with a traffic officer and a gentleman asked me for all you know license registration all of us that have

been there of course like anybody else when you get stopped by the police i mean i had i was worried i had some fear i'm also Worried that i just recently got hired and the officer was having casual conversation with me uh asked what i was doing was i student was i working and i explained sort of the is you know what i was up to and that i had just been hired as a police officer from ontario and he said oh it's interesting and we had more discussion we talked about policing quebec policing ontario

and the Subtle differences in culture and he wished me well and he said okay you know i'm going to give you a warning and his message to me that that night was that you know every interaction doesn't have to end with process or judicial process it can end with education it can end with discretionary approaches and i never forgot that interaction it was one of the few interactions i ever had with police i did not have a lot of Um interactions in the sense of other than through my admissible work uh through volunteer work and

some of those things um you know i did not have any uh sort of um i would say business related or in conflict with the law other than that particular interaction and so that kind of left an indelible mark on me um as i got into policing and that was The there's a whole piece of policing around social justice and community development neighborhood development um and it's interesting that that was 30 years ago and if we fast forward 30 years today policing is still talking about contemporary issues in society and what is our role in

fact i think that there's a significant crisis in policing right now uh both internally and Externally with what is our actual role and what is our role in policing and how do we actually provide you know policing services and public safety and and services to our community and i think that it's a an excellent time for discussion and dialogue but that's the rooted history was really from his interaction in elementary school and it just kind of sat in the back of my mind i thought About teaching i thought about law and and i sort of

just landed in policing and and here i am 30 years later it's kind of been a journey it's interesting because we seem to have a very similar kind of career trajectory in a sense i was very interested in leisure studies i did my phd in leisure studies and then afterwards everyone kept insisting i know a lot about policing and insisting I should teach policing classes and do research in policing so it seems like we have a very similar kind of trajectory on two different paths though um and there is a lot in what you said

that i want to unpack one of the sort of things that i wanted to talk to you about was the concept of police discretion because in the class we start off by reading the very first definition of what a police officer Was in united kingdom and literally on the second line they mentioned discretion of police you know so plea and at the same time police indiscretion is fantastic at the same time that is the cause of a lot of the social injustices that we see as well so it's this double-edged sword how do you sort

of when communicating to your police officers to people who work uh For your office how do you communicate the concept of discretion because for us as society it's very difficult too right as a citizen i go well i want police to do certain things as a scholar i won't police the desert and other things we know that when it comes to use of force people want police to use force immediately but not afterwards but only Use certain amount of horse on particular people so as a community we have a sort of a hard relationship with

discretion as well how do you view discretion in a more philosophical way if you will in a more theoretical yeah i think discretion's an interesting piece uh and your analogy to being a double-edged sword is one that is very much there And i guess at the heart of our democracy at the heart of our process there's very few uh sections in legislation where it says the police shall uh it's generally the police may and it's always created this uh you know ability around discretionary pieces and i i use the analogy even around uh our judicial

bench is that you know There's when you start looking at mandatory sentencing and minimum sentencing it takes away some discretion from our judiciary uh equally like there's very few pieces other than you know for example if a police officer uh issues you know a police action for somebody traveling over a certain percentage of the you know speed limit you know it says the police shall See the vehicle there's not a lot of discretion there but the officer has the discretion whether or not the issue uh the citation or ticket the officer has a discretion whether

they issue judicial process and so for me discretion is a key part of democracy even from a perspective of being in a police leadership role i never view it as my role as the chief to basically say you know we shall Do this discretion is at the heart of how officers manage and build communities so for example um and i think uh you know it at times and policing gets us into trouble because maybe people are expecting us to do certain things and we didn't and people go geez you know you call the police and

they don't do anything or vice versa geez the police you know They come here this person didn't need to be arrested they have a health issue or an addiction issue um and so for me discretion is something that is built into fabrics of policing or organizations now you know my upbringing is a waterloo region police officer you know waterloo is very much the home of restorative justice and victim victim offender Reconciliation so it's always been built into our fabric now some of that may be partially because of our you know our commitment to you know

a large mennonite community that is built on restoration based on peacemaking and peace building but if you pause for a moment and you think about you know your processing for example i use the example of Early on in my career i provided policing in a high priority neighborhood there was social disparity of economics uh you know people didn't have the same affluence and abilities and so i dealt with a lot of shoplifting you know and particularly you know their shoplifting goods food diapers baby food essentials to live and i recognize that obviously the financial impact

on the proprietor the store it you know raises Prices for everybody they have to hire private security but at the heart of it if you actually look at the the crime being committed was really around an economic policy or the ability for you know those that access to others to other privileges so so the person that actually you know was was shot lifting um they made a decision um it you know some would say well that's a bad decision because you should pay for Your goods okay so we may agree on that that people should

pay for their goods and it was a bad decision but it doesn't make them a bad person and what it does is it creates a the perfect environment you know you're a young parent uh you're trying to make ends meet you may be on ontario works you may be on some form of wsib disability you're paying rent um you know you're Paying your bills um and at the end of the month you're a little short and you have a baby at home that needs diapers or food and you make some tough decisions and so for

me you know there was always a piece of you know how do we what's the restorative piece uh you know how do we actually build some reconciliation here how do we help the individual uh because they're not a bad person um You know and so i think that that's the element of discretion like clearly you know there has to be a proper governance you know you don't want police uh for example you know homicide investigation you don't want them to say well you know we're not going to lay charges here because for these reasons no

like i think the public expectation is we take action but the the one piece where i real for Myself personally as a police officer and quite frankly as a human being where i've really i've seen you know my focus change significantly is around addiction and and drug use and illicit drug use you know again early in my career you know the crack cocaine epidemic was coming into our community uh it was devastating to see the impacts of addiction um and at the time probably as a young Police officer i thought well this is a choice

you know people choose to use people choose this lifestyle but when you start unpacking it and you deal with these individuals and these citizens every single day you recognize that everybody has a journey everybody has a story um and and it's it's and you start looking at it you know so So recently you know the canadian association of chiefs of police launched some significant uh drug recommendations around policy reform uh which i was a very much a part of a loud voice because we shouldn't be treating addiction as a crime but our policies built that

system um the reality is is that yes we should target those that prey On the vulnerable but many of the vulnerable are marginalized and vulnerable based on social policy you know they landed in this in this world of disparity of access to education access to economics access to work um and so so i think in in different ways discretion's an interesting piece and so you know within the last couple of years i witnessed on a number of occasions where officers young officers Who now work in the same neighborhood that i worked in 30 years ago

will go to a shoplifter and you know even the the proprietors take different approaches and they simply say well don't come to my store i don't really don't want any criminal charges but i've seen officers you know go to the till and actually and some officers have enacted judicial process so they've laid a charge and then go to the till and pay for the Forty dollars worth of uh sundries and say good luck um you know that's an interesting piece where the officers decided to take judicial uh action but decided you know what i'm gonna

make something right here and give a small commitment so discretion's this interesting tool um but it does at times gets us into trouble and at times you know Some people see good in it at times people don't and you know the example i'll use is really around drug policy it's a very polarizing issue um and so some communities where there's you know um addiction maybe some social order attached to it fast from vehicles uh break-ins those types of processes naturally those individuals in the neighborhood want police action they Want us to take action they want

to live in a safe community they may actually be sympathetic to those with addiction but they don't want them stealing from them and it's and in those types of cases you know we may go in with a bit of a different approach where we're empathetic in that you know the judicial process people get upset and so there's a very challenging piece and i think that That's the larger discussion in communities right now is what is the role um but i do believe discretion should always play an important role i think even within our court system

discretion should play a role because um i don't think you can take a cookie cutter approach to every situation so you know every family violence and i recognize in some like for example family violence Uh there is no discretion you know officers shall take action because you know through various uh corners in quests and reviews we recognize that if you don't protect victims of family violence the likelihood of potential being a victim of homicide or serious injury is significant so i think the community understands that the community understands when we Take action but there's other

thresholds where the community probably expects us to do business differently we've all heard the adage you know when you stop somebody for a traffic offense people often say don't you have better things to do the reality is is people also die based on driving and traffic issues and so it's a very delicate balance but i i do believe it's The cornerstone of our canadian democracy um i do believe that it's actually from so from a philosophical perspective um you know i do believe that we have to entrust those that are entrusted to provide services as

police officers the ability to have some discretion in how they handle and manage issues um you know when it gets down to i think i think what we you know the use of Force piece is something that ontario's long been a leader in the the use of force model but if you think about it even from a perspective of the the term use of force it implies that naturally when we have when we train officers around use of force it implies that when we show up that we're going to use force and i think that

you know from a discretionary piece if we change the landscape and Said you know the public safety model of policing is this it would change our mindset a bit and give us more discretion on how we manage issues but you know philosophically i'm a big supporter of discretion it has to be monitored it has to be you know people need to be held accountable but i do think that everybody in life actually deserves opportunities um and sometimes not taking that judicial action or giving somebody a Different diversion path is the right answer to go and

discretion is founded in the youth criminal justice act you know the whole diversion is founded because we recognize that we can give people second opportunities or open doors to other opportunities absolutely and uh i guess it's a very good segue for me it seems like you have read my sort of interview questions ahead of time uh but it's a very good segue for me Because one thing i have been interviewing a lot of people for this class and some of them are i interviewed for example current opp officer uh or a former police officer who

now runs an organization called fit for duty that she talks about sort of police use of force or uh you know the third person who Asked exactly who said the exact same thing was ruth from the black legal action committee that they all kind of seem to raise a question about use of forced discretion for example one of the stories that one of the police officers told me was he said i know that if i go touch a drunk person from the back he's going to push my hand away i know that for a fact

so if i want to Bring some guy down i'll go touch him from the back if i want to not use force on him i'll go from the front both ways give me the option to do what i want and i guess it brings me to what you said at the very end of uh that discussion you talked about kind of monitoring now there are two approaches to this monitor and i want to talk about both one of them is question of hiring who do We hire do we hire the most ethical people and that

it seems to for example like i get about a dozen calls a year from police asking for reference for my students and what they're really asking is that is this ethical person so in hiring practices what are some of the things that we should think about and the old sort of 1990s early 2000s mentality of well if we want to reduce for example Racial dispersion and policing we should hire more uh ethnic minority officers if we want to sort of reduce hyper masculinity and policy we should hire more female police officers do you think those

sort of quota uh sampling of populations work in actually changing the culture of policing the way that we want it to be changed or do you think something is much deeper than just hiring practices Yeah i think it's actually a combination i think that there is an element of a much deeper piece and that's around organizational culture and policing culture so you know you can um i suppose you know if the culture you know i always say this that you can implement a significant policy and procedures and strategies and culture will eat that every single

day you know and so it takes this transformation and it takes so i do Think that talent acquisition is a big part of it um i do think that bringing the right people at the right time into organizations is key um and you know recently we're seeing significant changes to the constable selection recruiting system um i will say that the recruits that i see in our organization and and i think other organizations from my dialogues with other police leaders Were bringing in a much more academically uh rigorous and much more academically trained candidate so the

percentage of individuals that come in with post-secondary education many with graduate level education and we're even seeing in police leadership uh you know obviously a doctoral level education i think is all positive i think that that brings about divergent Thinking i think it brings about divergent thought it challenges status quo those things are very important and so you know if you think of the evolution of policing you know at one point there was a height requirement a weight requirement uh when you look at the evidence-based process of that i mean there's little evidence that says

you have to be a certain height Uh there's little evidence no evidence that says you have to be a certain weight um even around sort of the the fitness pieces although you know policing is a physical component um you know we've in our organization and provincially been looking at using kinesiologists and and other hr experts to look at what is the true nature of who we're hired what's the Acquisition you know even from a psychological perspective there's significant psychological examination um but much of it was rooted on you know older dated psychological personality and behavioral

testing so very rooted in steep and ethical standards but it didn't test for empathy it didn't probe for emotional intelligence Uh it didn't probe for resilience and so i think that all of those pieces are important um personally i mean from my perspective i do see value in a police service is egalitarian so that is a gender balance that has representation from our community um because i think it brings different voices and different lenses and how people look at issues and different pieces So you know if we all look the same and our recruiting practices

are all hiring the same and we're at a table then one can expect that the way that we apply the lens to an issue may be very similar so i do think that you know different life experiences different backgrounds new canadians and policing bring a very different perspective on policing and what policing is and how they see it You know we know that for example in special victims unit family violence units youth protection units that having a gender uh equitable approach so that you know we're able to serve victims and serve survivors is important um

i look at in particular the growth that we've made particularly around our lgbtq s-plus community in policing we've made significant strides Um you know we're viewed as a safe secure employer and or workplace and i think that that's changed significantly i don't think it was that way 30 years ago um but you know you know internally you know as we talked about some of the challenges we're facing right now in particular with our black indigenous and people of color communities and that includes internally um you know So building support networks and hearing uh different voices

is extremely important but i think talent acquisition is key but it's only one part i think then you have to look at culture transformation um so moving away from this uh warrior mindset don't get me wrong there are times where the community expects us to do certain things which uh when Everybody else is actually going in the opposite direction uh the police service is going in in the direction to face threats or to face harm but you know that's a that's a small percentage of the work that we do the larger part is providing a

safe secure community and i think our community is expecting and demands a much more collaborative integrated Approach and we have to innovate social issues differently that can only come from talent acquisition you know because our workforce if you look at policing in canada uh the demographics of our workforce is multi-generational uh so we have you know uh you know we have baby boomers on the way out uh we have Gen y gen zed the millennials you name it our workforce is very different and they all bring a different level of talent into the organization so

um i think that you know one of our keys is dismantling uh the traditional hierarchy so for example in our organization in waterloo we don't use the word commander we use the word leader um you know so if you if you're You know going to a diverse neighborhood or a uh an event with new canadians um the word commander may mean something very different to those representatives but if you use the word leader it's very different so we even the vernacular and the vocabulary we use is something that we're looking at and continue to look

at changing you know 30 years ago when you came into The prisoner control center i mean they would ask you you know are you a drug addict uh now that language is you know do you have any health issues and or addictions um and so language matters in how we treat the individuals we come in contact with but that has to start with talent acquisition because you know the the the potentially and this is no fault it's not a criticism But if you've been in policing and you know your baby boomer in policing um your

thought process around for example illicit drug use is probably very different than a than a 22 year old or a student in your class it's a whole different approach um and so how do we educate how do we raise awareness and how do we build culture but i do think talent acquisition is only one aspect i think the whole Transformation of organizations and culture uh respect in the workplace holding people accountable are all key uh and that sort of brings us to kind of question of the relationship between police and community because that's really what

we're uh concerned with in this class we are really concerned with sort of legitimacy of police and community that the starting point of the class is we kind of point out that there is Similarities to be drawn with between police and a very well organized mafia organization that is running a place for example comparing after world war ii sicily the only significant difference that we see is that police is legitimate that we have given police solutions obviously this legitimacy as your revere is breaking down or has never existed even Within certain communities so how do

we go about kind of convincing these communities because community policing didn't work out so well for a lot of these committees community policing kind of ended up being more intrusion of police so how do we go about convincing these communities to actually come and listen to people like you listen to chiefs of police who get it who are going I know what's going on here i know i can see the problem i sympathize with you how do you think police can reach out to these communities in a way that's accessible to both that can achieve

both goals yeah you know it's an excellent question and one that um you know i consistently think of i mean because i want to emphasize that um you know police legitimacy and trust is gauged in Different ways and it's something that stats canada is even very much interested in how do we measure this how do we monitor this um and what does the average citizen really want from the police service so if you think about it you know i'll use waterloo as an example uh you know we manage and respond to over 310 000 calls

a year um out of that we estimate over a million interactions With citizens or people traveling through our area et cetera um and so what is that what is the expectation and what are they looking for um you know some citizens may listen if i call 9-1-1 my house is getting broken into you i just want you to come um i may not care what you look like i may not care whether you're a male a female i really don't care um i just want you to come and provide Security uh other communities particularly communities

that may have um you know um other challenges so low economic uh low in low employment uh single-family parents we all know that at times the economic impact and the social determinants of health impact certain communities differently than others and so their their demand or their need for police may be very different but i Think at the heart of all of it is they simply want either solutions up to concerns approaches to concerns um but often you know um policing in my view has to really come to terms with who leads when so sometimes we're

called into issues or we find ourselves in the middle of issues because we're 24 7 365 and and the system has been built right and so it's not You know it's not even the system's been built this bureaucratic system and make no mistake about it policing is part of this you know larger public sector system and it's kind of been built that we're the catch-all or we want to be everything to everyone and we may have a well-intentioned officer that finds themselves in that community wanting to make some form of change or take action Um

but the thing we necessarily forget sometimes is around well what are the issues what's the root cause can we manage this differently so can we move to an upstream model so maybe for example uh you know all the evidence shows that you know young people that go to school with full bellies learn better and we know that if you learn better and you stay within the educational System so you graduate from high school your likelihood of success in societies far greater of those that don't i mean the evidence is significantly all through this process it's

many studies by people that are way smarter than myself have actually shown us all this you get a driver's license which leads to more other employment opportunities etc Um and so but sometimes you know policing would go into communities and to your point community policing um you know i guess i would challenge your students to even define what is community policing what is community policing what is it what is policing what is community development what's community mobilization like in policing we've migrated and used different terms But at the heart of it isn't it about providing

a level of service which should bring hope should build thriving communities and should really be founded on partnerships so i don't never view policing as being the end-all be-all and the solution to issues in fact we're not uh in fact many times our response is very much symptomatic of larger system issues larger social issues So for example you know when we arrest somebody a young person involved let's say in a violent crime i think we have to pause and go um okay person a is you know been arrested for this let's say a robbery what's

their story and where are all the gaps in the system that led this young person to commit a violent crime because by the time that we as a police service get to that level we Probably have other failures of other systems and where did we miss the boat and we're probably investing socially a lot of money in this individual you know they may have been in some form of you know prolonged support healthcare support etc so i think it's about rethinking what our role is but to your point around communities is that how do you

build trust Right how do you actually and some of it has to be we have to be vulnerable so i think in policing we need to hear and right now i'm doing more listening than talking because we need to hear how people feel and whether it's real or not even if they perceive such you need to hear it and then i think the natural question and the question that i'm posing particularly toward black indigenous and People of color communities around this process is okay so now that we've you know we've listened we've heard the next

question for me is okay well will you walk with us will you walk with us to some sense of improvement um you know and i'll use mental health as the the prime example we're currently you know in a you know even a i'll start with addiction Because i'm passionate about the addiction piece as you know and and served in a a not-for-profit uh drug treatment center which was unique at the time a police leader sitting on a on a residential treatment board where most of the clients were uh you know parole on parole and at

a halfway house seeking drug treatment And it was very passionate because at the heart of it is that you know this center was teaching people to relive let's lead your life in a healthy way but you know addiction you know the 50 first time we arrest somebody for simple possession and has an addiction and we push into the judicial system generally is that you know their background finds them then remanded and then held in corrections Let's be honest our correctional systems are infiltrated with illicit drugs and so there's no correction there's no help there's no

support we're not actually addressing really the root cause which is addiction which leads to the many of the crimes and the decisions that those individuals make doesn't mean they're bad don't get me wrong there are some people that commit crimes that are simply Evil bad people and the judicial system is probably the right system for them and correction is probably the right system that's all part of what i believe is a healthy dialogue but you know when you go into a community that is perhaps suffering and feels over police feels you know over surveilled we

have to ask ourselves okay why do you feel this way and what's bringing us into the community And one of those pieces is mental health you know these are years of policy decisions that have led to policing being the primary caregiver we were never designed in this system to be the primary caregiver yes are there times where we need to go because there may be a weapon involved or somebody's gonna harm i think everybody agrees okay we get it but for the most part when somebody's in crisis What they really need is a health care

system and so how do we reimagine and rethink but i think that those are discussions you know if we want to build trust with our community we have to sit down be prepared to listen hear the challenges we also need to be able to explain you know what we do and why we do what we do i think sometimes some policing we Haven't been good at that in explaining well no this is why we do it um but there's different opportunities here you know to your point that you know it's very seasoned it's been a

long time since i worked in the field but very seasoned police officers you can tell who's new who's mid-year and who's near the end of their tenure and the way that they manage it and i view policing You know people ask me what makes a really good police officer and i say well they got to be like a dimmer switch they need when to be 10 volts or 10 watts they need to be when they're 30 watts or 40 watts they need to know when they're going to be 100 watts but in any situation they

know how to dim and dial it down and dial it up and i think that that's what makes Really good police officers and i view police officers as leaders they have the ability to impact change but this is all relationship based you know relationships is at the heart of everything we do and so you know when you go into a community that's maybe in some form of social crisis there's a large unemployment large economic issues Um you know large uh rates of family violence we're not the solution we may be a part of the solution

but we need to bring more people together but i think we get much more traction when we take public health led social service led approaches to the challenges we're facing uh versus policing being the primary but i think you know we would all i think if you're you know if we look at policing We have a lot we hire a lot of people that are like aaa batteries right they're energetic they want to make change they're well intended but sometimes you know it's not our role to lead amir our role is to listen and build

relationships so i think the only way moving forward in all of this is dialogue we do need policy change and we need Legislative change that comes after all the dialogue of people saying well this is what we think mental health response in our community should look like i've always long believed that the levels of policing are set by the community not necessarily by the police service or the police chief the community demands what they want to see and the community demands what Action they want and i think that that's at some point where we need

to lead a larger discussion uh both provincially and nationally i think that you know i would say that we're facing an opportunity here in in the current climate ontario but also in canada uh where we have an opportunity to if we get this right we have an opportunity to Reshape and transform uh the role of policing in society well the world is changing i mean 10 years ago i if you had told me that chiefs of police of canada are going to come out pro-legalization of all drugs that would have said you're out of your

mind but here we are sitting and to your point like i've always wondered why when there is a huge Rise in crime we don't call in the minister of education minister of health and ask them why there is a huge rise in crime we always call in chiefs of police and go why is there crime in your neighborhood and i've always sort of taken that as a very important kind of cursor that police has about society as i'm quite aware of our time but i kind of wanted to ask you two questions That they maybe

can be rolled into one the first one was about training it was about sort of this because uh you talked about education importance of education but then it comes police training and there has been some criticism not only about the length of training that uh ontario police officers go through that they say it's way too short compared to some of the countries that are very successful you know Some of the scandinavian countries have four years of training compared to our few months and the other thing is what it is that we train our police officers

in uh so for example one of the people i was interviewing uh she was in uh she was a use of force trainer uh for uh a police municipality and one of the criticisms that she had was that are you our training has not caught up with The progressive ideas that we see in changes in policing culture uh for example one of the examples that she gave was when you approach a suspect and she said you have two options in some countries that we train our police officers to drive right up to the sub to

the person with a knife or a gun or whatever and engage with them in other countries we train our police officers to Not go up to them to sort of distance themselves place barricades between themselves and the person and just wait them out kind of if someone's a santa with a knife all you have to do is keep everyone else away till they fall asleep then you can go arrest them type of idea so i guess in that training uh what do you see as some of the necessary changes That we need to have in

the training process and the last thing i wanted to ask you was about sort of my i have about ten percent of my class one to become police officer what messages do you have for them about what policing is and how they should think about their own before walking into a training facility how should they think about policing So that they can get the best that they can out of it yeah so great um i'll start with the training piece um and so um certainly a proponent of actually do you believe that provincially as you

know all training is mandated under the ontario police services act soon to be the comprehensive ontario police services act some modernization Uh every police officer in ontario must attend the ontario police college the basic constable training is 13 weeks a lot of the larger municipal services so similar to like waterloo and large the big 12 services have added considerably free ontario police college training and added considerably post ontario police college training um and i think that that is symptomatic uh To saying that you know uh we need more training and we need more education and

the word training for me is always problematic and i have these debates internally with my leadership team i prefer education um right so training is sort of for me is okay how do you work this but education is about changing who we are it's about opening our mind it's about opening our mind to different approaches It's around divergent thought and so i look at for example universities uh they promote difference of thought they promote uh challenging status quo they you know you're learning through that process um but you know roles of yourself professors are the

you know in my view designed to actually spark uh thought-provoking discussions which lead to growth Training is a very specific piece we're going to drive the car and this is how we're going to teach you to drive safely i get it that's a part of it and so if you look at the you know for example myself i came from a rec and leisure background eventually went to the crime and public policy background and to grow myself um but you know i'll openly admit as a Young person getting into policing i didn't understand the theories

of crime i didn't understand the theories of deviant behavior uh i didn't understand any of those theories but if you asked me about you know uh if we built leisure and recreational opportunities into a community the long-term outcomes of social determinants of health likely have a healthier community both Spiritually mentally and physically i could talk about those theories in those types of pieces but i think that i you know my general sense is that we need to rethink around what does the police college look like so and and quite frankly even around uh police foundations

very contentious issue uh you know where police often you know young people who want to be police Officers study police foundations and that i know the program's evolved considerably and grown considerably um but then i look at the number of people that we hire uh from justice studies or crime and public policy studies we hire a number of young people who academically have been trained in an undergraduate degree in justice studies or crime and public policy they bring Everybody brings a different component or a different sphere but i do believe that when you look at

the complexities of society look at how complex our society is um and when you get to the heart of it the ontario police college and this is not a criticism of the college but they haven't changed i mean when i went there it was 13 weeks and today 30 years later it's 13 weeks and we know that you know considerably The complexity of everything we deal with is so different our courts demand more accountability rightfully so our society demands more oversight and accountability rightfully so most of the people we hire have never really been engaged

in you know the application of force those types of processes and so we need to actually spend more time understanding you know the When we use force how we use it different opportunities different options we know that if you talk to a police officer who's been around for a long time they'll tell you that the greatest tool in any engagement is your mouth right that is the greatest piece is building that connection building that whole connection to the Human uh putting yourself in their shoes being empathetic um no different than the innovation of training so

i have seen some evolution in training so for example you know in the 1990s if there was an active shooter the training was okay you just contained and you wait for the shooter to come out but then you know policy was well There's tremendous loss of life we need to protect and so now the training is as we engage that active shooter i think society expects that but to your point around crisis intervention or the individual with the knife we've seen in ontario examples of when we're calm and patient and time is on our side

the system resolves itself very differently and so how do we train the Mindset how do we train the officer and educate the officer around that mindset do we need to escalate de-escalation has become a popular term but do we do enough training we've added other tools to conduct an energy weapon but if you look at use of force reports from across ontario very rarely do we use the oc spray very rarely do we use the police baton So are those tools still relevant in 2000 or 2020 those are questions we should be asking ourselves uh

around the training concept and perspective so i do think that and my advocacy piece provincially is is let's look at the whole education system there's probably a way to to stream uh police officers into police Services uh using also a partnership with our academic institutions such as uoit so you're training young minds and you're educating young minds and you're growing young minds they bring a skill set they bring the availability to that so how what what role does that play and where is that mesh so for example in some recruiting processes across the world You

know if you have a university undergraduate you go right to this part of the recruiting process you skip you know point a b and c because you have this academic rigor that says well you're here um you know we're not there yet in ontario i think it's a dialogue that needs to happen um and so on the closing note to your students that the 10 percent of one of The police officers um you know my my first question is is that self-reflection is a key part of this so i want all of you just in

a quiet moment wherever it is to go why do i want to do this what is driving me to want to become a police officer um because being a police officer and i do believe it remains a noble profession um i do believe that you know we're human we're human-centric People driven we're people focused um and the reality is is that you know we're not perfect um and perfection you know we're human we have flaws we're invaluable um and quite frankly we should strive for excellence not perfection because you know we're human we're naturally flawed

but i want you know those young people to ask themselves why do i really want to do this What's driving me around this piece and for me it has to be around you have to love people you have to love service you have to consider society and i describe society as this massive iceberg it can be beautiful and it can be dangerous at the same time but if you're committed to a life of service if you're committed to a life of making a Difference i do believe we can make the iceberg even more beautiful through

every interaction and some of our interactions and the reality is in policing a lot of times that we come in contact with individuals it's at a low point in their life and we have an opportunity to make a slight difference even if you're arresting an individual for example for impaired driving It's not about treating them any different it's about ensuring the safety of the roadways ensuring the safety of other users but we can still process that individual and manage that individual with dignity and we can also do it non-judgmental and say here you go you

know all the best and and we wish you well um and and so you know that's kind of my heart in my heart you know my my advice to Them or my wisdom because i'm not good with advice but make sure that you're actually internally doing this for all the right reasons because it is a challenging career it changes your lifestyle it changes your outlook on different things there is a lot of negativity and so you have to be resilient in the sense of okay how do i turn this into a positive outcome But i

think there's a great opportunity you know if you're sitting in a justice studies class at the uiot in 2020 2021 you're the future of policing and think about the impact that you can bring into organization so bright minds bright ideas and so i do think in my view that the timing is is phenomenal for all of you to join this profession and it doesn't matter which service you're In each one is unique they serve different communities but do it for the right reasons uh it's not about power it's not about privilege it's about making a

difference and when you commit to that then i think you'll lead a much healthier life as well i always say this you know closing this term you know young officers they go to court and it Maybe didn't go their way and they go i lost in court and i go no no you didn't lose what you witnessed was democracy you know and that's what's founded in our in our in our judicial system is democracy and and so we take action as police and our judicial system judges not us we take action but more importantly i

think we're moving to a model of a much more You know diversion public health-led model integrated with policing which is very exciting and i know that students coming out of academic institutions in ontario um they're the future i'm excited i see it every day uh the people that we acquire and and bring into our organization are top-notch the future's bright and i think the future's great for reform and transformation So thanks for the opportunity thank you so much thank you very much i really appreciate it i should put you in touch with our dean he's

uh very interested in building relationship with police forces as a way of developing graduate course and yeah i know for sure should put you in touch with them yeah anytime a mirror for sure let's keep in touch and uh i hope you have a great summer all the best Absolutely thank you very much bye-bye