Who Killed Community Policing?
Do you have an active security system in your home? Do you – would you – live in a gated community? Does it worry you that police departments seem to be going through a plague of situations where members, high and low, are being charged with varying levels of wrongdoing?
by Fil Fraser
Do you think that police services need more resources to deal with white-collar crime? When was the last time you saw a police officer walking around your neighbourhood – I mean walking, on foot?
One of the great debates of our times is over the role of law enforcement. At all levels, municipal, provincial and federal police services across Canada, and right here in Alberta, are under attack for bending, often breaking, the rules. At the root of the debate is the question of civilian oversight; whether it’s municipal police, the RCMP or CSIS, or indeed the securities commissions that oversee our markets. Most of us think that police officers should be held to higher standards of behaviour and morality.
“We live in a fearful society,” asserts Doug McNally, a member of the Edmonton Police service for nearly 29 years and chief of police from 1990 to 1995. Many think of him as the best chief of police the city has ever had. He introduced community policing with dramatic results. “In four years,” he tells me, “from 1992 to 1995 inclusive, crime was reduced in the City of Edmonton by 46% – almost cut in half. For a while we were looked on, all over the world, as the leader in community policing.” So many people, senior law enforcement personnel from Australia, Europe and other parts of the world, came to see how the system worked that McNally had to schedule their time.
McNally is, to me and others who have met him, an unlikely cop. There is no swagger about him, no macho, no-nonsense, tough-guy image. His admittedly “low key” personality seemed much more suited to the career he switched to after he resigned as chief of police. For 10 years he was the executive director of the Edmonton Community Foundation, an organization that manages money donated by wealthy citizens to good causes. It’s one of those interesting loops in life that his first job out of high school was in an accounting firm headed by Francis Winspear, one of Alberta’s great philanthropists, later a substantial contributor to the Community Foundation. But accounting was not for him. A job herding cattle reawakened his love of the outdoors, and when he saw an Edmonton Police Service ad looking for patrol officers he jumped at the chance. He reminisces that his first seven years as a patrol constable were among the most satisfying in his life.
But McNally is a reader who constantly upgraded his education. It’s no surprise that he was promoted to the Criminal Investigation Division as a detective, becoming the first trained polygraph (lie detector) expert on the force. The promotions continued: to superintendent responsible for the south side of the city, to deputy chief, and then, in March 1990, to chief of police with a mandate to develop the concept of community policing. In a time of budget restraint, he managed it with very few resources, eliminating layers of bureaucracy and putting patrol cops into two-person detachments in neighbourhoods around the city. Volunteers (he was astonished at the response) stepped in to help run their small offices, answering phones and handling routine inquiries. Other officers were assigned “ownership” of various parts of the city and given the responsibility to solve long-standing issues there. I remember P.J. Duggan, who, from time to time, would drop into my then-Whyte Avenue office to catch up on local gossip. A relaxed, low-key policeman who gained the trust of people in the neighbourhood, he often was aware of crimes before they happened.
And yet, while there is a great deal of lip service paid to the concept today, community policing is all but non-existent. It was fortuitous that on the day that I had lunch with McNally, a former police officer, Chris Braiden, a frequent newspaper columnist, occupied the bottom half of the Edmonton Journal’s opinion page, arguing that “A monopolistic bureaucracy of law enforcement works against the core purpose of public peace.” He attacked the police “culture” that, in the case of a blood-spatter expert disciplined for testifying for the defence in a case in B.C., insist that “the Crown and the police are indivisible.” But what Braiden’s column really focused on was the need to put more police on the street, in uniform. “Police need a culture of visible policing, in uniforms and marked cars” ran the five-column headline.
Why did community policing disappear? “I’m shocked,” McNally said, the first time in our conversation when his voice rose above the level of quiet conversation. “When I left after five years I thought that anybody looking at [the record] would ensure that we stayed on top and would continue to improve the system. But an officer told me that within weeks of my leaving, things were beginning to move back.” His successor, John Lindsay (McNally was not consulted about the choice), did not support community policing. “And so it soon began to wither and die.”
Evidence of resistance to community policing turns up in a letter still posted, years later, on the website of the Edmonton Police Association. The letter is dated October 2005, a decade after McNally’s resignation as chief. Under the heading “McNally. Another Perspective,” policeman Peter Ratcliff writes “Doug McNally did a lot of things as chief of police in Edmonton. However one thing he did not do was decrease the crime rate by 46%.” The letter goes on to decry the community policing program as a failed experiment.
McNally’s response was blunt. “They’re full of B.S. They’re absolutely wrong. We did not doctor those statistics. Edmonton was a more peaceful city in 1995 than it was in 1991.” He fully agrees with Braiden’s comments about “the culture of the cloth [where]… too often police wants are trumping public needs.”
The issue facing all of us is whether we can live with a defensive police culture, often led by police unions describing themselves as associations, who hire lawyers to defend every real or perceived misstep by one of their members. Too often police seem to act as if they are in a we/they relationship with civilians, almost as if they existed in a perpetual state of siege. Calls for more effective police oversight are the subject of a strenuous tug-of-war between various factions.
Retired, and fully recovered from a mild stroke, Doug McNally admits that he has lost sleep over the issue. But many support his views and have recognized his contributions. His work at the Edmonton Community Foundation has been lauded. Grant MacEwan College recognized him with an honorary diploma in community service. The University of Alberta awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 2003. But McNally still worries about the current state of policing. “Younger members of the force don’t know a thing about community policing, and the senior members have been silenced.” He’s concerned about the growing militarism that seems to animate many police forces. “The frightening part of it for me is that we arm them to death. When I look at the equipment that constables carry today, I’m just astounded.” And, “Helicopters have no place in policing.” For the $1 million a year each costs to operate, McNally says, “I could put 20 cops on the street.”
Where do we go from here? McNally, who says he’s an optimist by nature, does not expect to see the return of community policing anytime soon. The key, he says, is better, stronger, more independent oversight organizations that will act like corporate boards of directors: determining policy, setting goals, hiring and firing the police chief and holding him or her accountable. He believes it’s important that the provincial government update the Police Act to give more autonomy to police commissions. And the government should set up a system of incentives to reward good policing.
Something else for Premier Ed Stelmach to think about.
Grey Eminences is a 12-part series of conversations on today’s business issues with retired leaders in business and public life.
Fil Fraser is an Edmonton-based writer, broadcaster, film and television producer, Athabasca University professor and member of the Order of Canada.
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