Service exits challenging year on streets, in the boardroom
It was a year of triumph, frustration and change.
Police Chief Roger Chaffin said 2017 was an exhausting and challenging year for the Calgary Police Service’s more than 1,300 employees.
“For the officers themselves, it’s been a very trying year,” he said.
“If you were to talk to the average officer, you would hear lots of discussions about an incredibly high workload, an enormous amount of pressure about the accountability of the day, about what it’s like to police publicly now and have the expectations of high transparency and high accountability.”
Workplace harassment and ongoing HR reform efforts dominated much of the first few months of the year as fallout came from a scathing 2013 review, first reported by Postmedia, highlighting allegations of sexual harassment, intimidation and bullying within the service.
With the challenges given a human face after the public resignation of veteran officer Jen Magnus at a January meeting of the Calgary police commission, the service and the commission have worked together to make CPS a safe place for all employees.
Earlier this month, the commission’s annual employee survey painted a bleak picture of morale within the service, describing an overworked, underappreciated workforce struggling with plummeting confidence in senior leadership and a crushing workload.
All of that creates an incredibly challenging environment for Calgary officers, Chaffin said — all of whom face a newer, more dangerous breed of crime on the streets.
“The tone and tenor of crime these days has changed quite a bit,” he said.
“They’re seeing a lot more danger in the work they do, a lot more presence of weapons, the presence of powerfully addictive drugs, and behaviours that have changed because of them makes their work chaotic.
“It has an impact on members; health, morale and their fatigue levels.”
Chaffin also pointed to the economic downturn as a factor, and its relation to the increase in the number of domestic violence and abuse calls.
All of the hard work by officers wasn’t in vain, Chaffin said, pointing to the successes his members had in keeping a handle on crime in the city.
“We’ve taken some of the crime trends, from a little over a year ago some of the highest in Canada, back down into the middle of the pack,” he said.
“They’ve done some amazing things to try to create a better experience for Calgarians in terms of quality of life, but at the cost of exhaustion and fatigue of officers.”
The biggest advice he has for new officers is to patiently and persistently learn the craft of policing.
“When you’re out working — and it’s an incredible learning curve to go out there and do this work — be patient and take the time to learn,” he said.
“The things you believed you knew coming into this industry are always going to be challenged by the realities of policing.”
Learning to be a sympathetic listener is vital for today’s police, Chaffin said.
“If you can show up and be that person willing to listen and talk to them and give them a hand up, it’s an enormous experience,” he continued.
“We need employees willing to take the time and do that learning, and make sure they’re prepared each day.”
Chaffin said the biggest change he’s seen over the course of his 31year police career is the nature of crime.
“When I started, marijuana was a big thing — finding somebody with an ounce of marijuana on them was like finding Pablo Escobar,” he said, referencing the Colombian drug lord known as the King of Cocaine.
“Now, with the amount of heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine on the street, and the danger that goes with it, is so different from when I was out there.”
Those dangers are the collateral crimes that typically occur out of both drug trafficking and drug addiction, he said, including robberies, break-and-enters and auto theft.
“Stolen autos was something, when I was in uniformed policing, when you’d pull in behind them and turn your lights on, they’d stop — ‘damn, he’s caught us,’ that kind of thing,” Chaffin said.
“They might get out and run away, but you rarely had pursuits. Now, a stolen vehicle is a need for an operation. You have to bring resources in and get prepared and manage yourself around how we’re going to stop this car safely so we can get the operator out of the vehicle, so we don’t get into a shooting event with them.”
Changes in worldwide violent extremism and the spectre of homegrown radicalization also weigh on the minds of officers, Chaffin said.
“It happened in Edmonton, so I’m sure it’s in the officers’ minds now that it might happen to us someday here, too. That’s something I didn’t have 30 years ago.”
On the positive side, Chaffin sees today’s police as more significant agents of positive change in the community they serve.
“They see policing as an ability to do a lot more than we did,” he said.
“We probably thought of it more as a patrol job, but officers see a lot more potential for this career in the things you can do that are different and really advance yourself. It has a lot of positives assigned to it, but it really is a very difficult job.”