My career started on October 15, 1972. I attended police college four years later – I was a first-class Constable. There was the Ontario Police Act, back then. I completed my recruit training in December 1976, both part A and B.
What drew me to policing? It was actually my mother’s influence. Originally, when I was growing up, at about age 13, I turned Catholic all on my own, with my parents’ blessing. I decided I wanted to be a priest. I’d attended church pretty regularly – the United church, but it didn’t just wasn’t enough for me. So I went to Catholic Mass, and I was sold. It was pretty powerful.
But of course as I got older, getting to the point where I was finishing high school and thinking about going to university and not having the financial wherewithal at that point in time to do it, my mother saw an ad in the paper for police officers. She said, ‘I think you’d be really good at that. Why don’t you look into it?’
I was on the Auxiliary at that time, and I got bitten by the bug I guess. So I did look into it. I was pretty much sold, so I decided to go in to the Law and Security Administration Program at Georgian College. I was in the first class actually; there were nine of us in all.
I didn’t abandon the priesthood thing. I consider myself to be not very religious, but religious enough. I believe in my beliefs and they’ve been strengthened over the years. I’ve called on my faith several times to make my decisions, particularly in hard times, like when we lost an officer on duty. It’s a constant.
Was there anyone who influenced you?
Not really. It’s the old textbook response – I wanted to help people, as corny as it sounds. That’s all I wanted to do. My first day was really kind of crazy. At the time I started, the police service had six officers. When I started, I was 19. The closest one in age to me was about 40. I was the kid. What was funny, when we had a new chief come along in 1976, he asked me, ‘why did you stay? Why didn’t you go somewhere else? Somewhere with more officers?’
Well, that was part of my succession planning – I knew I’d outlive them all!
When I completed my first year at Georgian, the instructors were pretty impressed with me. They offered to send me to base Borden, because they had ties to the military police there and I could get more in-depth training. They suggested that the mayor of our town was never going to get me trained up. I got a call from them one day that the OPP were looking for dispatchers and they suggest that I take the job. This was in the first year of my studies. I was ready to go back to my second-year, but they said, ‘hey, here’s the chance of a job so why don’t you take it?’
So there was myself and another guy and I ended up as a civilian radio operator at Bracebridge OPP in June of 1972. I started to became disenchanted with the OPP, though. Partly it was the first time I was away from home, but there was another guy who was in my class at Georgian and he got a job at the same time. He lived in Huntsville. He was posted to Barrie OPP. I lived just south of Barrie, and was posted a few hours away up north. We’d both been on about a month or two, and we got to talking one day, and we thought, ‘Hey, this doesn’t make sense – we were both boarding somewhere and being away from home was costing us good money.”
So we were thinking about the logistics and figuring, why don’t they just switch us around? Well, that got done pretty quickly by the superintendent of the district. So that was okay, but it kind of made me think there’s got to be a better way to do stuff like this.
I understood the discipline of it and the fact that we were civilian employees without much going for us. It wasn’t like we were constables assigned to a detachment. We sure weren’t any big cog in the Big Blue machine of the OPP, but it just seemed like a good idea to have us working close to where we were living. So that episode made me a little bit disenchanted. Not with policing, but with the bureaucracy of it.
Before that, when we were on a field trip from Georgian College, we visited Toronto police, and of course did the tour. And no surprise – the recruiting guy was standing there waiting at the end. So virtually all of the nine of us applied right then and there. The recruiting sergeant gave me the colour test and we found out that I’m colourblind. So they weren’t going to hire me. I was completely devastated.
I returned to my home town and I spoke to the Chief of Police there because there was nothing to lose. He knew me snd my work, because I was already an Auxiliary member, a volunteer.
He said, “shit, I don’t care if you’re colour blind or not – can you see? Yes? We’ll hire you. We’ll send you to the Ontario Police College.”
So that was that.
It was late September 1972. An opening for a constable came up a when one of the older guys left to go to York Regional Police. The sergeant and the Chief called me in and asked I was still interested in the job. I said of course, absolutely! I banged off a resume and handed it in. So the next day he called back and said I was hired. No physical, no psychological testing – nothing. They knew me. I wasn’t offensive to any of the other six guys, I guess, so I was hired. I was so happy coming in as a fourth class constable making $6,400 a year in 1972. I was thinking, if I could only make 10 grand a year like the first class constables, I’d have it made.
Why did it take four years for me to get sent to the police college? They just weren’t prepared to invest that kind of money in a new candidate until he proved himself.
Four years later, I was still wearing the old uniforms of the three or four guys who’d left before I started. The Chief didn’t even buy me my own uniform until he figured I was going to stay. There was no coach officer. I had a year of Law and Security under my belt. At that time, I probably knew more about policing than anyone else. The Chief had been there forever. He was a big man. An old-fashioned copper. He was a good guy, but he was more of a pirate than a police chief. He was a survivor. And in the old days, of course, if you were the biggest, strongest guy in town and could kick to shit out of anyone causing problems, then away you went. He got the job done — that was the style back then. The sergeant was another good guy – he was old-fashioned too.
My first day on the job, they couldn’t find my gun because it was locked in the sergeant’s desk drawer, so I had to go out on patrol without my gun. I’d been an Auxiliary for more than two years and I really didn’t need the gun. I did have a car, though. We had one cruiser. There are about 3000 people in town at the time.
I walked up the street with my parking tag book for about an hour and a half. I filled the book with 25 parking tickets. I felt kind of pleased with myself when I got back to the office but I was in for a shock. The sergeant cancelled 24 or 25 of the tickets, because of course they were friends of the Mayor or municipal councillors. It was a quick education for me. Council members who ran the stores and that kind of thing had influence, so I learned right away that I had to adjust my style.
Do I remember my first call?
There wasn’t one pivotal call that I remember early on. There were a couple of memorable ones in the first couple years because we had to work alone all the time. Eight hour shifts, afternoons, days and nights for week at a time.
At that time, the radio dispatch system we were on was linked to York Region’s. It was run out of the local funeral home where the phones were answered by a dispatcher. There is an OPP detachment nearby with only one officer in a really big area. Next to us was a small town with a township police officer. It was common for us to run down to Newmarket or Aurora to back up York Regional officers at the time. The York service was in its formative years. We all got to know each other well.
There was one Christmas when I got a call. It originally came in as a domestic but wasn’t a domestic. It was a despondent woman who said she was going to commit suicide. She was half in the bag and just wanted somebody to talk to, so of course she called the police. When I arrived, she yelled at me to come into the kitchen. She had sleeping pills and a knife on the table.
I spent three hours talking with her. As I was sitting there with her, I was thinking, what a position to be in. I’d never do that today – spending three hours alone with a woman who had a weapon and was threatening to commit suicide. I know better now. But back then, it was a crisis situation and I had to react the best way I knew how.
Remember, there were no cell phones back then. I had to use the avocado green wall phone behind her, but she didn’t stop me. Finally, I got hold of someone who might know a relative of hers. They came. But basically, it was just me sitting there listening while she talked. Was I prepared for that? Absolutely not! I’d had no training whatsoever. I just went on gut instinct.
The other part of it is that the next night we got a similar call from the same woman. Instead of going to her house, I called her sister and said, “We can’t spend all of our time talking with the woman. We can’t babysit her every time she’s lonely and desperate and gives us a call because we’ll respond.”
She didn’t really want to kill herself – what she was looking for was comfort and companionship. That one stuck out in my mind because of the fact that I realized – I have no idea how to handle this, because I hadn’t received any training. Now if she’d slit her wrists or something, I’d have been in big trouble. Of course, I would’ve called an ambulance if I thought she was serious instead of lonely.
Are our officers per better prepared now?
Absolutely.
I was a Constable until 1984 when the service expanded. A new chief had taken over in 1976. He’d been a Constable with the OPP and became chief here the next day. At that time, I still hadn’t been sent to police college.
Before he came on, there had been a competition for the chief’s job. I was 23 and I knew everybody else had applied at the time. So, I did too.
The hiring was done by the Ontario Police Commission at that time, so it was a legitimate type of process because the Commission was arm’s length. They included a committee of Council and the chair of the police committee. We went to a local hotel for the interviews. When I got there, I was the first interview. I had studied all the information I had from my first year of Law and Security, and I went in there intending to use common sense. It wasn’t until about two or three years later that I found out that was probably the best thing I could have done. I had impressed the police committee and the police commission at the time. I’d impressed them so much, that kind of cemented me as a keeper. At 23 years of age.
I finished my Aylmer A. and Aylmer B sessions at the Ontario Police College. And I’d been taking correspondence courses on my own through Waterloo University. Psychology, that sort of thing. Did my mother stay happy with my choice of career? Yes, she did.
I became the Community Services Officer in 1973. Yes, I did things fast, but there is no one else doing it. I said to the Chief, we need to be doing something in the schools, and he said to me well, you go do it. So I would work a midnight shift and then come back in around 10 or 11 the next day and teach traffic safety at the local schools. No thought of overtime. No thought of compensatory time. It’s what I did. Why did I do it? It goes back to me wanting to help the community, to make it a better place.
Within about a three to four year time span, I could see the effect that I’d had on the schools by my going in there. Especially with the kids, the young adults and especially the ones who were more likely to get into trouble. I mean, I knew it was a good thing to be doing it. But then I saw the positive aspects we were getting out of it. I pretty much knew who every kid was in the school and I’d see them on the street and they’d talk to me.
What did the older guys think about it? They thought that I was crazy. Why would I do more than I had to do? It was my own ethics and values and personality that get me out there doing it.
I wanted to become chief at a young enough age so I could make a difference. I felt I could do more. Traffic safety was a big issue. I put in the first school crossing guards in this community. It’s still working.
It wasn’t about leaving a legacy but making a difference. I really don’t care about legacies. Everybody’s got an ego – every cop has to have an ego. You look good, you’re all dressed up. You’ve got power. But if you’re operating like that, by the time you get promoted to chief your head will fill a room. To me it was about bettering the community, bettering policing. It sounds corny, but it was true.
What made me different? I’ll give you an example of old-style policing. I always respected the people I worked with. I understand that more clearly now that I’m getting close to the age those older men were when I started in policing, but I still have that fire, 35 years on and I’m still not ready to go. I think there’s still more to do until we walk out the door. I’ve seen it – they say it’s time to wind down their mortgage before retiring, because they have a secure future, but I don’t buy into that – you have to care and keep caring. You still have to be able to pull cars over because that’s our job. I still enjoy that part of policing. If there’s a driver pulls an offence in front of me, I’ve got no choice, this is my community. If it’s something major I call in a patrol car – I don’t carry a ticket book.
I don’t think it’s a conscious thing to lead by example, but it makes me feel good when the officers see that or someone comments. That’s one of the things that was really a shock to me personally. I always used to be ‘the kid’. About four or five years ago, I became the longest-serving person in the service. Not the oldest, but the longest service. That was a big change for me because I still think of myself as a kid. I still have the enthusiasm and the energy.
…to be continued
