Stepping into a new year, I’ve reflected on my failings and successes in the last, feeling a renewed sense of purpose and resolve, striving to stay the course, embrace the obstacles that life offers up, and keep my eye on the horizon. Placing one foot in front of the other, my goal, both long and short, has been to contribute something useful in society, and to those around me. My hope and plan are the same in 2025, perhaps with a renewed sense of determination as I’ve had a deepening wisdom with age, that our time is limited, so we better get on with it.

Some famous words of George Bernard Shaw resonate more and more with me; “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations” (George Bernard Shaw, 1856 – 1950).

Compassion in the front-line and Winnipeg’s new Community Safety Team

Ten years ago, I wrote an editorial, which was published in the Winnipeg Free Press and highlighted the humanitarian culture in our city, and the heart that front-line emergency responders invest in protecting our vulnerable. As the cycle of things go, we seem to continuously revisit social issues and solutions to them. Perhaps the lesson in this is that we need to find solutions for the urgent issues, but then we have to sustain them as well. One constant has been the compassion and devotion of front-line emergency services, police, fire, paramedic, medical staff, and social workers who all carry the burden of dealing directly with social issues and community safety on the front-line. I see now, more than ever, the passion that public safety personnel have for the vulnerable, and the burden they bare, the moral injuries and operational stress that they carry always striving to do more with less. Having completed 34 years in front-line policing, as-well-as my post-doctoral fellowship with the Canadian Institute for Public Safety Research and Treatment, I am acutely aware of the emotional burden that is continually imposed on contemporary emergency services.

While social justice is not their primary mandate, emergency services are the ones who, day in and day out, strive to help homeless people get in from the cold, protect people suffering debilitating substance-abuse or mental-health issues and advocate for them. In the vast majority of cases, they do their best for people in need. This phenomenon is not unique to Winnipeg, but our history has a particular social-justice character. We are a compassionate city, perhaps because of our diversity and the deep social issues we have struggled with as a community. Ten years ago I wrote (Free Press, 2014),

It is no accident the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the first national museum established outside the Ottawa capital region, was opened in Winnipeg to serve as a beacon for human rights and social justice. This intellectual underpinning is part of our compassionate culture. However, it is the people at street level who actually look out for vulnerable peoples’ basic human rights. It is the people who do the right thing for fellow human beings when nobody is looking that are our real protectors of human dignity. It is the businessperson who volunteers at a soup line and the child who stands up for a bullied peer at school. Each of us plays a part in our own unique ways, but we are all a part of our community. The thing we know for sure is working together we are all stronger. As long as we continue to have problems in our community, we all must ask ourselves what we have done today to help make the situation better. “A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.” (Khalil Gibran). We all know ways we can contribute, but until we act, we know we haven’t unleashed our full potential.

Now we have the City of Winnipeg’s new Community Safety Team, stood up to help take the burden along with existing resources, to improve a feeling of safety in the city. With Transit as our first priority, it seems fitting as many of our community’s problems are intensified in our public transportation system. The more we all collaborate and find collective multi-sectoral, multi-faceted ways to combine and focus our efforts, the greater synergies and momentum for peace and brighter our future will be. The Community Safety Team was built with a culture of compassion for our most vulnerable citizens, with a goal of connecting people with the right resources, but also with the tools to protect them. Coming from a lifetime of over 40 years devoted to law enforcement, this new team feels like the perfect element to fill many of the system gaps that I’ve watched grow over the past two decades.

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FIRST CLASS GRADUATION

Winnipeg Free Press

Finding applicants for a tough job

By: Editorial

Posted: 2:00 AM CST Friday, Dec. 8, 2023

AT first glance, it seems like a job nobody would want. The City of Winnipeg is seeking recruits for its Transit security force, whose officers, unarmed, will be tasked with protecting passengers and drivers from the myriad threats and disruptions that have become commonplace aboard the city’s besieged public-transit system.

It’s a role whose complexities would be daunting to even the most ambitious and qualified of applicants — performing what are essentially law-enforcement functions without access to many of the tools (such as firearms or Tasers) available to actual police officers, with the expectation that their mandated non-violent crisis intervention will be coupled with an emphasis on linking those causing the often-violent disturbances on buses with the resources and supports necessary to address the mental-health and addiction issues that motivate their actions.

Officers will be outfitted with protective body armour, handcuffs and slash-resistant gloves, as well as batons which could be used in emergency situations, and will be authorized to arrest and detain.

Despite the inherent difficulty of the task set out in the job description, there does appear to be significant interest. According to Robert Chrismas, the former Winnipeg Police Service officer hired to lead the security force, more than 60 applications were received in the first 24 hours after the posting appeared online.

In a radio interview this week, he estimated more than 100 applications had been received for the positions of 20 full-time safety officers and two supervisors, with the expectation that hiring and training will be completed in January and the “community safety team” will be installed aboard Winnipeg Transit buses in February.

That’s a welcome measure of good news for a public-transportation system whose operators and passengers are desperately in need of encouragement. While this relatively modest initiative — 20 officers dispersed across a transit fleet whose daily rush-hour complement exceeds 500 buses — cannot possibly address all the ongoing issues, a strategic response targeted to areas of greatest concern could be an valuable first step toward confronting Transit’s ills and beginning the long process of rekindling public interest in public transportation.

The question, of course, is whether the propitious early interest will deliver a field of recruits truly suited to the formidable task at hand. Chrismas describes the safety-officer job as “not an extension of the police force; not purely a security function,” but instead “a heavy emphasis on the authorities that being a sworn peace officer bring, and compassionate, trauma-informed, non-violent crisis intervention (including) how to draw on all the mental-health and addictions resources in the community.”

It remains to be seen how officers’ in-the-moment actions to resolve on-board crises will lead to longer-term interventions and connections with resources and services. There will doubtless be an evolution of the security team’s functions as it becomes a permanent and (one hopes) expanding feature of the transit service, but its immediate goal must be to provide those who ride and drive the buses with a level of confidence that they are safe from harm.

City council was wise, in formulating this crucial initiative, to set pay scales that should attract candidates who view these new roles as a serious career option. Safety-officer salaries will range from $78,000 to $99,000, while supervisors will earn between $85,000 and $115,000.

This will not be an inexpensive undertaking for a city whose budgets are forever constrained. But since it now appears these are jobs that somebody really does want, it’s imperative that this effort to make public transit safer is rolled out in a manner that ensures it’s money well spent.