Opening comments for my in-progress writing, currently titled:

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Lessons from a police career

for the future of policing

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Located in the South-west corner of Canada between the coast and the off-shore Gulf Islands lies the Salish Sea. On the mainland by the delta of the mighty Fraser River and bounded by the beautiful natural grandeur of the temperate rain-forest, sits the deep-water port of Vancouver. There at the terminus of highways and railways stand business towers, industries, high and low-rise apartment blocks and homes sprawling out across the city and its surrounding municipalities.   

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From its relatively recent beginnings in the 1870s as a sawmill town, Vancouver today has become an urban center with extremes - of wealthy estates and poverty-stricken single-occupancy rooming-houses, of pleasure-seeking windsurfers and tormented drug addicts, of benevolent social agencies and greedy corporations. Keeping peace and order 365/7/24 since the spring of 1886 in the core city of Vancouver has been the Vancouver Police.

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From my personal perspective, I share my four decades long policing career in the Vancouver Police Department - my visceral frontline experiences on the streets of the city as well as my encounters with the political undercurrents in the hallways of the police organization.

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I also describe the transforming social, political and cultural landscape which the department reacted to with marginal adjustments, while steadfastly resisting reinventing itself. I detail the political motivation in response for ever-greater civilian intrusions into policing and the resulting undermining of and damage to policing.

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Through it all I describe my own individual evolution, while being repeatedly challenged to hold on to my core values.

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In the end I hope to convey unique insights into the origins of the troubled state of our policing services today - losing in the effort to be current, credible and effective - and why policing is becoming less and less desirable as a career to pursue or to stay in.

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Shaped from my first-hand experiences, I outline the critical and urgent need for the transformation of policing - to be visionary and adaptive, to be rationalized, to be properly governed, to develop a competent and assertive leadership, and most significantly – to be professionalized.

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I hope you will find value in my words.