Something's gone terribly wrong with how we train our police

Me and the Farm Manager were somewhat acquainted with a local kid who had dreams of becoming a cop. That's not a bad dream to have; hell, any kind of dream for kids today is a good dream to have... these are tough times for dreamers.

So this skinny brown kid heads off to one of the many colleges offering the "police foundations" course. That's an invention of the community college system intended to offer pre-police-training training to aspiring police officers. Thirty or forty years ago these programs did not exist. Now they are ubiquitous.

The community college system spews out at least ten times more "police foundations" graduates than will ever find real policing jobs. Most of them will spin their wheels in various iterations of security guard work. It's a hyper-competitive job market for "police foundations" grads.

We saw a picture of our skinny brown friend after his first year of police foundations. This skinny kid had morphed into a hulk. He was massive. Massive in a way that just screamed ROID ALERT. I don't care how much time he spent in the weight room - his new physique could only be the result of steroids.

Police college is a hyper-competitive environment. It stands to reason that people will do whatever they can to stand out. Only the buffest and toughest police foundation grads are going to be the ones getting interviews for real police jobs. Every student will do whatever they can to be seen as the buffest and toughest.

If you're going to land a gig in any regular police force in Canada, you'll be looking at a six-number annual pay within two or three years.

And if you don't, you'll be doomed to min wage security guard jobs.

Naturally, normal looking smart people are going to miss out. That's why sheer adrenalin and raw stupidity took over when our local cops had that murder suspect cornered on the GO bus last night.

Once they knew, or thought they knew, that their suspect in this murder investigation was on this bus, all they had to do was meet the bus at Union Station and quietly have a couple of officers accost him. That's how a reasonable person would have handled the situation.

But no, since this operation was in the hands of roid-addled hyper-macho crime fighters, they had to close off one of the busiest highways in Toronto, inconvenience thousands of people, endanger the lives of the other passengers on the bus, and create worldwide headlines that universally lampoon police stupidity.

It all comes down to police training.

Here comes the latest attack on police unions

And who better to lead the attack than Stephan Cretier, boss of Garda, the biggest private security company in the world, and his eager minions among the think tanks and the media.

Until now, at least in Canada, policing has been one of the few professions that has successfully avoided being ground down to poverty-level shit-job status, along with nursing and teaching. Why?

Essentially it's because policing, nursing, and teaching can't be outsourced to Mexico or China.

Mr. Cretier thinks he's found a compelling argument to circumvent this problem, and it certainly hits a lot of the right buttons. Let's re-define policing!

Yes, real he-man cops don't want to be receptionists at the police station!

Let his private mall-cop agency handle those duties, at major savings for the taxpayer!

Real cops don't want to direct traffic and answer burglar alarms.

Let the private security companies do that!

That'll free up real cops to focus on all that real crime that's been decreasing year after year, decade after decade.

In other words, if we restricted "real cops" to "real cop" work, we'd only need a quarter of the cops we have now.

The other three quarters of their work could be done by... his company!

At massive savings to the taxpayer!

We can turn tens of thousands of police jobs into security guard jobs! After all, they have "similar educations."

That's true. Over the last twenty years there's been an explosion in "Police Foundation" programs at colleges across the land. They graduate ten times more qualified applicants than can be absorbed by police forces. A lot of them end up as security guards while they await their big break into a "real" job.

Cretier is being truthful when he says they don't want to replace the police. They want to be police.

So, going forward, this is how things will shake out. The public will gradually come to the realization that Police Foundations programs will train your kid for a job as a security guard. Interest will rapidly wane. Once we've stripped actual police of all duties other than armed confrontation, the same right-wing ideologues driving this anti-cop agenda will propose that armed confrontation is best left to the military.

Voila! We won't need cops at all! It'll be min wage security guards for the light-duty stuff, and the Canadian Forces for the heavy duty stuff!

Good-bye police unions!

Good-bye, tens of thousands of well-paying middle-class jobs.

Coming soon to Canada; privatized police forces

There are a number of forces at play that will make private policing a reality in Canada sooner rather than later.

First of all, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews likes the idea.

Secondly, it's disconcerting for the Harper gang to see how many cops are showing up on various sunshine lists. Almost half the members of the Toronto Police are making six numbers a year. That's got to be awkward for the Harperites who view all public spending as anathema.

While the proposals on the table will only hive off "minor" police duties to the private sector, you can bet it won't take long for the private sector to clamour for more of the policing pie.

Thirdly, there is an overabundance of viable candidates for these jobs. For about twenty years now there has been a steady growth in college courses aimed at preparing candidates for a career in policing. These "police foundations" and similar courses graduate exponentially more wannabe cops than can be hired by police forces.

These folks may have their eye on a gun and a badge, but the vast majority inevitably end up as mall cops or Brinks guards.

This leaves a perfect niche for privatized policing. Here are Paul Guindon's thoughts on the matter almost eight years ago.

Obviously Guindon has not been idle in the intervening years, and now that he has the ear of the media and the Minister for Public Safety, good things will be happening soon.