WEIGHILL’S FINAL DAYS
City’s top cop helped drive change
Q What have been the biggest changes you’ve witnessed over the last 42 years you have worked in policing in Saskatchewan?
A Policing has changed dramatically since I started in 1975. I can remember when I first started in Regina. One-person cars. I could drive around, put 200-some miles on a patrol car in a night, not even get a call. And now we’re in an environment where our officers are just responding to call after call after call. We’re a lot busier.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing gang activity that we didn’t have when I started, a lot more drugs, organized crime and all of the stuff that’s happening on cyber.
There’s so much happening now on the web, whether it be identity theft, fraud, financial crime.
There’s just so much going on now in the cyber world that’s very, very hard for us to detect.
You look back and you just see how things have changed.
I mean the training for the police officers has changed so much.
The expectation upon police now, especially with social media, has changed.
Everything we do now is scrutinized to the nth degree and it puts a lot of pressure on our police officers. Q What moments or cases have stuck with you the most?
A I’ve been to sudden deaths, found young children dead in a refrigerator. There was a girl in Regina, Tamra Keepness. She was five-years-old. She went missing. That was a big investigation.
I think that’s what really got my interest on missing persons and why we’ve done so much change here on missing persons as well. (Tamra disappeared from her Regina home on July 5, 2004 and was never found. Her case is assigned to the Regina Police Service’s cold case unit).
Q What are the biggest challenges facing the Saskatoon Police Service today?
A There’s so many different things that are happening in our community. Number 1: Immigration.
It’s very positive, but we have to keep training our officers on different cultures, we have to have an interpreters’ program so that people who need assistance, or if we arrest somebody, we can make sure they get the language requirements that they need.
And there are just so many different slivers in our society right now that it seems every event I go to somebody will say ‘Well, chief, you’d better train your officers more in autism,’ and ‘chief, you’d better train your officers in FASD,’ ‘chief, you need to know more about these cultural issues.’ There are just so many things that are going on.
We could train our officers 24/7 and still never keep up with all the different dynamics because we touch so many different facets of society and it’s changing very quickly.
Q Is there anything you had hoped to accomplish that you didn’t get a chance to?
A No. The last thing I wanted to check off before I left as chief was get the monument for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls erected. I really believe strongly that the police have to take missing persons seriously.
We’ve revamped our whole policies on that and I thought this statue was important as a beacon to the community to show the community and the Indigenous community that the Saskatoon Police Service takes this seriously.
Q In addition to that statue, what else do you hope will be your legacy as chief?
A It’s the men and women of this police service who have really come together as a police organization. They embraced change when I came, they wanted to change the way we were doing business. We’ve changed a lot of things here and I think people make their opinion of a police service by the way they’re treated by individual police officers, not by me going out in the public and talking about it.
I think the legacy here is that we’ve got a very solid organization now that’s well on the way to healing with the Indigenous population, that certainly has a different attitude from the citizenry about how we’re serving as a police service and, of course, we’ve got this great new police headquarters here that’s a stateof-the-art police facility.
Q Do you have any interest in running for elected office now that you’re leaving the police force?
A I have no interest in politics, I’ve never really been political. I plan on starting up a small consulting business. I think
I have a little bit to offer on change management and leadership and building Indigenous relationships and working with the media so I’m hoping I can share some of my thoughts.
The reason I’m leaving now — I’ve still got a year left on my contract — but my runway’s getting shorter so I wanted to embark on a new chapter here while I’ve still got the energy to do it.