In late April, the Ontario government scrapped a planned requirement for new police officers to first earn a postsecondary degree. This lowering of the bar to become a cop moves in the exact opposite direction of consistent calls for more extensive police training, the most recent coming from the Mass Casualty Commission in Nova Scotia.
Finishing high school has long been the standard to become a police officer, though in practice many recruits bring more formal education to the table. Once hired, a recruit attends basic training. It is a short stint, usually about half a year, and generally has a paramilitary focus.
In Ontario, the plan to up the educational requirement was part of the 2019 Community Safety and Policing Act, but it had never been implemented. Instead, citing the need to hire more police, Premier Doug Ford left the old minimum in place, a high school degree, alongside the province now paying the $15,450 tuition for recruits to attend the Ontario Police College. Their time there has been extended to 66 days, from 60.
Mr. Ford is making a mistake. But the mistake isn’t about a postsecondary degree. Studies at university or college before a career in policing can help – but it isn’t necessarily helpful. It’s in fact a lazy policy answer. Oh, just go to college or university for a few years. That’s not the problem. It’s about the need for more specific and detailed police training. The type and rigour of training is what’s important.
The RCMP has, since 1885, trained cadets at Depot Division in Regina, where future officers receive 26 weeks of training, barely enough time to learn the basics.
The Mass Casualty Commission, a wide-ranging review of the mass murder of 22 people, came to familiar conclusions about the inadequacy of police training as previous reports and reviews of policing. To modernize police education, the commission recommended that the RCMP phase out its Depot model of training by 2032. It said Depot is “inadequate to prepare RCMP members for the complex demands of contemporary policing” and added that the existing standard of police training does not equip police for the “increasingly complex social, legal and technological environment in which they work.”
But what replaces Depot isn’t a standard postsecondary degree, and nor should it be. The commission highlighted the Finnish model of policing – which this space cited a year ago when the commission was conducting its work. Finland has a three-year national Police University College. Such a system provides ample time for recruits to learn about policing much more broadly than wielding a weapon. One example: work with weapons doesn’t happen right away, as it does in Canada in a rushed half-year at Depot. “The technical skill comes somewhere very far after we have gone through several stages of teaching the theories of ethics and law,” a Finnish expert told the commission.
Replicating the system in Canada will take a co-ordinated focus. The commission proposed a three-year degree-based model of police education for all police across Canada, with Ottawa’s Public Safety Canada working with the provinces and territories. It could draw on an existing framework, an undergrad degree in policing – including diversity, ethics, and psychology – at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.
While Mr. Ford is going in the wrong direction in Ontario, recruitment of new officers is a challenge. An average officer in Canada earns about $118,000 a year but the number of officers in the country is stuck around 70,000. In 2022, the number of police officers, per 100,000 people, was 181, according to Statistics Canada, in steady decline from a ratio of 203 in 2010. The current ratio is about the same as the mid-to-late 1990s.
One important goal is the commission’s recommendation that a new police college is welcoming to women, Indigenous people and other groups that are under-represented in police forces. Statscan data show that fewer than one in 10 officers are racialized, compared with about one-quarter of the population. And the advancement of women has stalled. They accounted for 23.8 per cent of constables in 2022, not much higher than 21.5 per cent 15 years earlier.
A postsecondary degree for a new cop is a simplistic solution and dodges the real issue, the inadequacy of actual police training. But making it easier to be a cop, by lowering standards, is also not the way forward. A new model of police training needs to be the focus.