Sgt. Harley Kesler recently described to me the skills required for this job. You have to be able to:
drive like a race car driver
fight like an MMA fighter
think like a lawyer
have the social skills of a politician.
That last line I added. Politician was the closest stereotype I could come up with for a job which requires constant people skills. It’s difficult to understate the complexity of modern policing, but this description paints a vivid picture of what a typical day might look like.
No job comes close to the well rounded skills required for a modern police officer. As enforcers of our laws they are natural targets for deliberate provocation and anti-social violence. They need to be prepared for violence, either directed at them or other members of the community. Since most service calls involve people in distress police need above average social skills to deescalate fraught situations. Including navigating perhaps the most complicated social interaction—mediating a domestic dispute.
Beyond the physical, empathetic and social skills, they also need good judgment in tough situations. In 2006 a stolen truck was spotted near Slave Lake. RCMP began pursuit that quickly reached speeds of 150 km/hour. A mere 17 seconds after the chase began the truck lost control and fish tailed across the divided highway. The truck hit an oncoming vehicle killing an innocent mother and her two daughters. The RCMP were criticized for risking public safety over a stolen truck.
In 2017 another stolen truck was reported near Lloydminster. This time the RCMP spotted the vehicle, but did not initiate a chase due to safety concerns. 30 minutes later the stolen truck hit a minivan killing three women—each one a mother. This time the RCMP were criticized for not chasing the stolen truck. Sometimes police can’t win because these might be impossible situations.
Like all first responders police deal in life and death situations. However, unlike emergency medical services and fire services, police carry an additional burden. Charged with enforcing our laws they also must maintain the trust of the community. Thus police are held to a higher standard than private citizens. Every police officer is a community leader both when they’re wearing the uniform and even when the uniform comes off. A mistake by a police officer carries far graver consequences than a mistake by any other first responder. Peace and justice are foundational values for any community and perhaps more important than life and death. That measure of responsibility is unique among public servants.
Changing communities
Police put their lives on the line everyday, but nowadays police are expected to handle a greater variety of situations than ever before. The Globe and Mail reported on a parliamentary security committee hearing in 2018. The committee listened to police chiefs across Canada testify that “as much as 80 percent of calls for service don't involve Criminal Code violations. Officers increasingly find themselves responding to calls involving mental-health issues and social disorder—a person shouting in the streets, for example.” The Medicine Hat Police Service also sees a significantly high (and increasing) number of social conflict and disorder calls relative to criminal code violations.
This aligns with my experience. As a librarian I often called the police for help at the public library. However, my need for help usually had nothing to do with criminal activity. Rather I needed help with some social disturbance and the police were the only mobile service available to me.
One example of these types of social disorder calls. In September 2019 police responded to a man in distress in waist deep water in the South Saskatchewan river. He was yelling for help to save a non-existent person. The man was eventually taken to the hospital with mental health issues. This situation required 4 officers for 5 hours. Considering there are typically 9 officers on patrol, (3 for traffic patrol and 6 for service calls) at any given time this single call was extraordinarily resource intensive.
There isn’t one single reason for the changing nature of emergency service calls. There is a need for more mental health services for those suffering from mental health illness. The country is in the middle of an addiction wave of opioids and crystal meth. The provincial economy is hurting. All these factors stress a community and the police are the canary in the coal mine—the first to see problems in our community.
The Medicine Hat Police Service has moved proactively to address these trends. There are now multiple social service partnerships and workers housed within the police station:
The Safe Families Intervention Team assists families in dealing with incidents of family violence. The team partners with the Medicine Hat Women’s Shelter Society.
The Addictions Crisis Team includes two addictions crisis workers from Canadian Mental Health Association who respond to individuals experiencing crisis behaviour as a result of addiction.
The Police and Crisis Team includes police and two Alberta Health Services clinicians to assist those that frequently use police and health resources, and provide appropriate assistance to avoid calls to police.
But the increasing number of social service calls also illustrates something else. If police across the country and in Medicine Hat are often performing work they were never intended to do that’s an inefficient allocation of resources. If mental health and social disturbance issues now form a significant number of calls for services we are using a highly trained and well paid police force for work they weren’t intended to do.
I’m grateful that police are willing to work outside their core mandate of law enforcement. But ultimately gaps in our social net shouldn’t be their job to cover. As a city councillor, it’s my job to explore solutions to improve the system.
A new type of first responder
Though the Medicine Hat Police has proactively responded to these trends I’d like to encourage the next step in the evolution—a new branch of first responders dedicated to social service calls.
Right now, 9-1-1 callers are first asked ‘police, fire or ambulance?’ Creating a social service mobile branch would allow dispatch to add a fourth option—social service.
Police are sent to a larger variety of service calls than any other first responder because 911 dispatch usually doesn’t have the full picture. It’s not always clear if a situation is about to escalate into violence. For those ambiguous calls, police will always be called upon. And police will always be required to handle the same range of problems.
However, for those calls where it is clearly not a criminal code violation and where it is clearly a social service problem—we should send resources appropriate to the job—social workers. It will take some trial and error to integrate a new type of first responder into our emergency services. Since the Medicine Hat Police Service already houses a number of social service workers it makes sense to house this new service in the police department. I don’t know of any other city to try this idea though others have experimented with these types of mobile social services.
Fixing systems
The $23 million deficit that our city has to fix is a huge number. City council has been debating tough choices for the past few years. For example, last year council spent 30 minutes debating a $25,000 cut to the City Centre Development Agency. Single decisions like this one often receive the most public attention, but these decisions are a drop in the bucket in comparison to the larger challenges.
The real cost pressures come from systemic issues we face. We can’t solve them without reforming the way we provide certain services. We need to understand where the real cost pressures are coming from, then explore options to address them.
The city’s biggest cost pressure is our infrastructure deficit. Over the next 30 years Medicine Hat is faced with a $1 billion infrastructure tab. In some areas sewer pipes are older than 80 years. But there is a good reason why we got into this mess. I’ve laid out an argument here as to the why and how to stop the infrastructure hole from getting bigger. I think this was my biggest insight since I got on council, but this column also got the fewest reads. Perhaps understandable because it’s boring and talks about systemic changes to our tax rates. But it’s these types of systemic improvements that actually make the biggest difference. These are the types of debates we need to have.
Emergency services are the second largest municipal cost after infrastructure. Police is the single largest budget line. Considering public safety is a core community value this is natural. But more and more police are responding to calls that they were never designed for. I’m convinced there is a better way to allocate our resources.
Modern police officers will always be walking Swiss Army knives—the ultimate problem solver, able to handle the greatest range of situations of any first responder. And we could keep using police to respond to these calls. This path comes with increasing costs. And it places police in more tough situations where the cost of bad judgment can be severe. The more we place people in positions that aren’t their strength, the more risk of problems. We need to explore alternative service models rather than awkwardly using police to serve an increasingly multitude of needs. Creating a new social service first responder would help move towards a more efficient allocation of resources.