THUNDER BAY – Police often see the worst a community has to offer.
In a city like Thunder Bay, which has been the murder capital of Canada three years running, where violence is the norm and where ruthless gangs are trying to take over the lucrative drug trafficking trade by any means necessary, it can be pretty traumatic to first responders.
It’s all in a day’s work for local police, who don’t have a magical switch that allows them to turn off the results of the violence they run into on a daily basis trying to protect the city’s law-abiding citizens from those who would do them harm.
Those memories have a long shelf life, said Joe Collins, chief of police in Two Rivers, Wisc., also the co-chair of the officer safety and wellness committee for the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Academy Associates.
Collins said they spent more than three years researching resiliency training, the goal to help police around the world be better prepared for what they might encounter on the job.
“They’re able to take all that material, bring it to their organization, incorporate it into their organizations and change the way that they train, based on the resiliency factors and build their organization’s culture around making sure that before officers, or whoever, go into these traumatic situations, that they’re stronger going in, they’re stronger during the event, but then they also have the skill set of how to process the stuff that they see,” Collins said.
Thunder Bay Police Service Insp. Derek West was one of eight members of his department taking part in Monday’s session and said it’s a very important lesson for local officers to learn, given that four years ago they introduced a peer support program to the force.
This training is a natural extension of that, the expertise proven around the world to work.
“Every day our officers are out there on the front lines, dealing with things we know about already. There are addiction and mental-health issues in this community and (it’s great) for officers who provide that assistance, who reach out, to have that resiliency to take some of the things they’ve learned and help them become resilient,” West said.
Also on hand were representatives of several other local police departments, including the Ontario Provincial Police and Brent Genereux, the acting detachment commander in Pikangikum First Nation.
He said building resilience is tremendously important among officers.
“I always say, we do this job for 30 years. We hear things, see things, smell things and do things that nobody else does. We do it because we care and we do it to help,” Genereux said. “What we need to realize is like what you say in an airplane – you’ve got to help yourself, you’ve got to put that mask on before you can help someone else.
“Having this type of training is going to do just that for us. By having this it will make us better officers, it’ll make us be able do things.”
In turn, it will also help officers deal with the public.
“We’ll take what we learn here and definitely we’ll look at it,” he added.
