Requiring police officers to rotate roles benefits everybody
Union leadership sees squabble merely in terms of seniority, John McFadden says.
Re: “One step forward, and one step back?” Licia Corbella, Opinion, April 21.
I created the Calgary Police Service’s tenure policy in 1987, while I was the staff sergeant in the career development section.
It wasn’t my idea, unfortunately, because it was a good concept, but I wrote and implemented the policy on behalf of then-chief Ernie Reimer and enforced it throughout the remainder of my career, even while leading many of the more interesting sections and units within the service.
There is limited upward, promotional opportunity within most police services, so, if leadership is at all interested in making the careers of the majority of police officers challenging, educational and rewarding, to the mutual benefit of the officer and the department, leadership must guarantee lateral movement throughout the service, and Reimer understood that.
He believed we could maintain superior investigative and technical capability in every unit, while creating reasonable opportunity for movement into those units by creating reasonable movement out.
We already used a competitive, merit-based lateral transfer process that admitted only proven officers into specialty units, so the tenure policy simply set term limits, of three to five years generally, in all units — ample time for experienced officers to learn and practise new skills before they moved to other areas, taking that experience with them.
That policy upset some people then, just as it does now, but I assure you the only people upset by any tenure policy are those currently occupying the more interesting positions, and supervisors who are reluctant to tell good people to move on.
(I can also assure you neither the incumbents nor their supervisors ever complained when one of those “irreplaceable” officers was promoted out of those units before completing their tenure.)
Tactical officers (think SWAT) complained that five years was insufficient, arguing it takes at least five years to learn the skills.
Skeptics, including me, wondered how the U.S. Marines could take civilians from the street to the front lines of a war after 12 weeks of training, or how the U.S. Navy could make sailors into SEALs in 21 weeks, yet it took five years to train an experienced police officer to perform quasi-military tactical functions in a relatively safe civil setting.
To be fair to the Tac officers who wanted to remain so for life, or until they were promoted, when we first implemented the tenure policy, the greatest resistance came from our school resource officers, who were restricted to three years in that equally worthwhile endeavour.
They, after all, had a job that paid more than what many of the teachers working in the same warm and dry schools earned.
The job required no night shifts, allowed most weekends off and ample summer holidays, which was certainly not the norm for the equally qualified constables patrolling your neighbourhood 24/7/365.
Others complained as well, but as I reminded the detectives who worked for me in the major and organized crime sections who suggested others were not sufficiently competent to replace them, their predecessors said the same things about them.
Cycling 20 to 30 per cent of any unit annually, when demand warranted it, created a predictable rotation of experienced, talented, energized people and never diminished the ability of any unit to do its job well.
We could easily pull experienced people back in if needed. It’s not like they were transferred to Iraq, and specialty units could get help from the districts in busy times because they now had officers with the experience required to complete complex tasks well.
Good organizational leadership, like Chief Roger Chaffin is demonstrating by reactivating this policy after it was ignored for years, is about demanding excellence while treating every employee fairly, which is never an easy task.
Union leaders, on the other hand, are allowed, if not expected, to favour seniority over competence or capability, and that’s all that’s happening in this current debate, no matter how it’s being framed.