This episode explores the evolution of the Edmonton Police Service through trauma informed training. Insp. Dan Jones discusses the benefits of a relational, community-based and decolonized approach to public safety and partnership-building.
This episode touches on sensitive subject matter including sexual assault, suicide, PTSD, mental health and murder.
Episode 17
Myrna: I’m Myrna McCallum, Métis-Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of trauma-informed lawyering. Welcome to my new podcast, “The Trauma-Informed Lawyer,” brought to you in partnership with the Canadian Bar Association.
I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum: trauma-informed lawyering. Becoming a trauma-informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs, and biases; call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy; guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others; and ask that you commit remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now. This podcast comes to you from the traditional, unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh [Squamish], səl̓ilwətaɁɬ [Tsleil-Waututh], and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam] people.
Welcome back to another episode of the Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast. Before I get started, I have to say: Brittany Scott, Melissa Erickson, Marissa Faulkner, Ellen Campbell. These four law students, in the case of Ellen who has just graduated, have stepped up said “we want to transcribe season one of the Trauma-Informed Lawyer podcast. They heard my cries for help on social media and they answered the call. So, to them I am eternally grateful. Love them, love them, love them. Law students, law grads, they are the future of this profession and it just makes me so happy that they stepped up.
I also have to give a shout out to a couple new podcasts out in the world that you all have to go listen to. Not that long ago, the Federation of Asian-Canadian lawyers of British Columbia started their own podcast. And, who did they ask to interview for their very first episode? Me! So, if you haven't heard enough of my voice and you want to hear some more, head on over to their website. It's faclbc.ca, FACLbc.ca. And, you will be able to access their podcast on their site.
In addition, Pro Bono Students Canada started their own podcast as well called “Indigenous Human Rights” and who did they ask to interview for their very first episode? Amber Prince and yours truly. They wanted us to chat about our experiences representing Deborah Campbell at the BC Human Rights Tribunal Last Year. We talked about human rights issues, we talked about cultural safety, and cultural humility, and trauma-informed lawyering, and self-awareness, and all these, like, really cool things. So, if you want to hear more of Amber's experience and my experience at the Tribunal, then head on over to probonostudents.ca/indigenous-peoples and you will find their new Indigenous Human Rights podcast there.
Now, I have to say, for those who didn’t know, I am now officially an award-winning lawyer. Mhm. Award winning. Recently, the Government of Canada gave away a number of awards. One of them was a new award: excellence in legal practice in victim support. And, who did they give it to? Me. I’m like, so humbled. Woah. I've never received an award. I mean, I think the last time I received anything was, like, a participation ribbon back in third grade. So, this is pretty awesome. So awesome. I'm so humbled. Thank you to the Government of Canada and thank you too EVA BC, who nominated me for this award.
All right, so, today's episode is a good one. And, so, like, I mean, they’re all good, right? They’re all good.
I met Dan Jones on Twitter, of all places. Where, that’s where people are meeting these days. Social media. Right? And he is an inspector with the Edmonton Police Service. He’s got 23 years experience. He has worked in homicide, patrol, professional standards, specialized investigations, and Indigenous relations. He earned a Master’s degree in applied criminology in police management from the University of Cambridge and he is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield. Dan and I had a really cool conversation about what the Edmonton Police Service is doing around trauma-informed policing. Yes, I said it. Trauma-informed policing here in Canada. It was such an awesome conversation. Very inspiring and I hope you enjoy it.
Okay. Hi Dan. Thanks for joining me today and thanks for the work that you’ve been doing. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you as a police officer with the Edmonton Police Service had an introduction to trauma-informed policing or trauma-informed practice?
Dan: Absolutely, and thank you for having me. It’s interesting. I had no understanding, really, of what trauma-informed meant until I went back to school. I had an opportunity to go back to school to do my Master’s degree, and then—and then, subsequently, I’m—I’m in the middle of doing my PhD. And my supervisor was very wonderful. She is a wonderful woman named Molly Slothower and she told me, I need you to pick ten topics and I want you to pick a topic that you think could change the world. So, I had no idea what that was and I started to think about something that happened in—I started to think about a lot of things that happened, people I intersected with, but one specific case came to mind for me.
And it was Gordon Dominey. And Gordon Dominey was a Anglican priest that worked at a youth centre in Edmonton, a youth detention centre in Edmonton. And, in the 1980s he was there, and, in the early 2000s, it came up that he sexually assaulted at least 13 young men in that facility. And, it was interesting because one of the young men, who provided a statement, went right home and, shortly after he provided a statement, killed himself. And that young man I had known for a really long time. Uh. Uh, my entrance into the justice system was as a correctional officer in both provincial and federal settings and he happened to be an, uh, incarcerated in a federal institution I worked at. And—and that kind of started to bother me, but what really bothered me was, um, when preliminary trial was coming up, there was, um, five of them incarc—of the young men who were victimized by Mr. Dominey—they were—they were incarcerated in the Edmonton Remand Centre and Victim’s Services refused to see them because Victim’s Services said they only deal with victims—not bad guys. So I—I took that in my brain and I went and I said “I want to do—I want to look at the victim offender overlap in the Canadian context.” So, I got connected with the University of Alberta Prison Project. Dr. Sandra Buceris, Dr. Kevin Haggerty, and Dr. Luca Berardi—allowed me to bring my—uh—desire for victim—uh—offender overlap research into play. And, initially interviewed 113 incarcerated provincial men for my—my master’s thesis and then, later, 39 remanded women for my—for my doctoral thesis.
But, our greater body of work is we now have 800 interviews with incarcerated men and women in both provincial and federal settings and what it shows is the victim offender overlap is profound, with 97 percent of women experiencing victimization in their lives and 95 percent of men. And one of the arguments I get often when I talk about this is well, of course they’re getting victimized, they are in criminal networks, in criminal cycles. So, when you look at pre-victimization, prior to their first detected criminal offense, 83 percent of women and 82 percent of men experience those victimizations. So, I started—I really started to think of “What are we doing? What are we doing in justice when we’re actually—we’re actually incarcerating people that are—that are have trauma and adverse childhood experiences. And, doing my lit review for research allowed me to start digging into ACEs and looking at what Wales was doing with safeguarding and bringing in—you know—understanding that we can have an impact if we do things earlier. If we do things different and if we start with the word “compassion” in everything we do. So, that was kind of my introduction to it and I started getting involved and there was a—a Trauma-Informed Edmonton group that did a—a 3 days—I think it was three days—of trauma training and I was fortunate, I got to present my research there.
And, I, now—I do a trauma 101 victim-offender overlap procedural justice and policing training internally with recruits as well as with others in specialized areas and we are trying to get the entire service educated on this. But, more than that, we also want to measure is it effective? Like, are we changing the way our members are interacting with populations? Because having that understanding of, you know, almost a universal—like, I’ve—I’ve—I’ve talked about it as universal precautions in policing when it comes to trauma. We teach universal precautions when for first aid. We have 0.6 percent of our population in Canada have seen—0.06 percent of our population has HIV, but we teach everyone you’ve gotta wear your personal protective equipment and—and even though pre-COVID we are masking up—why don’t we treat everyone we’re dealing with from a justice perspective with a compassionate lens and see how that goes and see how we could potentially help those individuals feel more than—than what we’ve, as a system, have allowed them to be.
Myrna: Thank you for that context. I’m—I’m just thinking about conversations I’ve had with so many other people, um, through this podcast. Like, my first interview with Gabor Maté. We had a really long conversation, it didn’t make it into the, like—not all of it made it into the interview that I posted, so there might be a part 2 coming up—but, he had talked about how, when he worked on the DTES and he said, for, think, 15 years, he said every Indigenous women who he met who was homeless or addicted had disclosed childhood sexual abuse to him. And, then, we had this conversation about the connection between childhood abuse and trauma and, then, self-harming behaviours or, then, offending behaviours. And, and he really had me think about how, you know, so—there are so many people who come into our systems who are offenders who were once victims and he says, “yeah, so that child who was abused by so-and-so and so-and-so and, in all of these different ways, then becomes the drug addict who is robbing houses and stuff and how we need to think about that.” And, he talked about compassionate inquiry and, etc. It was a really fascinating conversation that got me thinking also about exactly what you are talking about, that victim-offender overlap and I want to chat with you more about that, but, I also now have to think about Harold Johnson and our conversation. One of the things that he said when we spoke was that he didn’t learn about trauma until he left prosecutions and what a difference it would have made for him if he had gotten this education right out the hop when he became a lawyer. And, so, let me ask you this, how long had you been a police officer before you learned about trauma-informed approaches or trauma-informed policing, or being trauma aware and how would it have, maybe, changed your outlook and—and your way of engaging had you gotten this education right at the beginning of your career?
Dan: It was probably 19 years of policing before I even heard the words. I think, and this is a—I think things happen for a reason. Uh, this is a—I’m not sure how to say this properly, but—I grew up with a lot of people who ended up doing jail time. In fact, I had many of my friends in both federal and provincial jail that were incarcerated in the units where I worked. So, for me, I had a—and it was weird because I grew up in a very privileged neighborhood and if you talk to my teachers from back then, I’ve had conversations with them since, and they’ve said there was something weird about your year and the year right after you with a whole bunch of people that got criminally involved, and heavily criminally involved. So, I had that. I worked in social services prior to. So I didn’t know the words, what trauma was, but I felt—I felt—I feel like, a lot of me, I kind of had a different perspective sometimes and it was because of my background. It’s not because I am special, it’s because having a background with people.
I also have a cousin who, and, unfortunately, has since passed away, and she was in the Edmonton Institution for Women for drug trafficking. And, so, having this really blended gray between good and bad, for me, was really something that’s always been there. So, and—and it’s funny. My father was a police officer for 28 years, my brother is a police officer, my uncle’s a police officer, my cousin’s a police officer, my aunt worked in 9-1-1. So, I had this really, kind of, eclectic background where—where, I think, for a lot of my career, and there’s, and don’t get me wrong, I’ve made mistakes and treated people badly just . . . because I have. I’m not immune to doing the wrong thing, but I had a really profound event early on in my career in my beat days.
And, I—I found a woman left for dead in an alley. A sex trade worker. And she, I—I took her to the hospital and I sat with her all day and, three weeks later, I got a letter from her mother. It was a handwritten letter in pencil. And, it was interesting. She said “thank you for treating my daughter like a human.” And, I reflected on that early on in my career and, at first, I thought “well, that was really nice.” And, then I thought “what have we done to this woman that her mother felt that it was necessary just to thank me for treating her like a human.” I never solved the sexual assault or the violent offence that occurred. And, I started to think for my own, like, “we need to do better. We need to, as police officers, be better with our population and realize that, our marginalized folks that we end up arresting are the ones that need us the most.” And—and I’ve tried my hardest to work my whole career with that mindset.
And, I—it’s interesting—I got off the phone yesterday with, I call her, my third daughter. Um, my third daughter is a young woman who I investigated, had a wiretap on, incarcerated for five years for, um, conspiracy to commit murder. And, I—she sends—she was the first person to wish me happy father’s day. She beat my two biological daughters this year. I talk to her at least once a month. When I get off the phone with her I say “I love you.” She says, “I love you.” And, it’s—to me—we have done a disservice to members of policing in this country because we don’t teach people who the justice client is. We don’t teach people what the social determinants of crime are and, oftentimes, those are the same as the social determinants of health. And we haven’t had our police agents focused on community safety and wellbeing. But, then, we expect the members to go out and manage offenders and manage crime, without teaching them what they’re managing and how to do it. So, I think, it’s not the fault of the individual police officers. I think it’s the fault of what we’ve focused on from a policing perspective and that we have to shift that thought process into community safety and well-being so we can focus on, yes, of course, we are going to hold people to account for criminal offences.
But, I truly believe, if we focus on the right things early on, you’re going to see demand reduction, you’re going to see calls for service go down. You are going to see crime go down. Because, right now, what we’re doing is—it’s—it’s—it’s symptomatic criminality, the vast majority of it. Crime is a symptom of trauma. Crime is a symptom of poverty. Crime is a symptom of social determinants of crime. And we are treating the symptom but we’re not treating the cause of that. And, and, when I use the analogy, we are often times policing in the justice system is an antacid tablet for pancreatic cancer. It’s not going to solve the cancer. It might make you feel better for a second. We need to start looking at root causes from a policing perspective and we need to build that community safety and well-being social safety net with our partners and really start to address trauma, to address, um, the issues that create symptomatic criminality.
Myrna: So, you mentioned a few things that I want to follow up on, and I don’t want to overwhelm you. [Laughter]. So, let me start with, like, I definitely want to go into partnerships and who—who are the partners that police services should be partnering with if they are not already and what are the benefits of those partnerships. Let’s start there.
Dan: Yeah, that’s a great question. There are so many NGOs out there and I think that one of the necessities is—and I might not be popular when I say this—but we need to make sure—and it’s not just the police, but—the systems need to make sure that our NGOs and our partner agencies are focused on outcomes, too. One of the things, I think, has been a failing of policing, as well, is we’ve focused on outputs for so long—like, how many arrests I’ve made, how many warrants I got, how many street checks I did. And that’s what success was. Well, that’s not success. What are the outcomes of the individuals that we worked with. How many of those people desisted from crime after? Did we reduce . . . ? Those are out—outcomes—not outputs. So, we, first of all, have to determine which organizations are best placed to work towards positive outcomes for the client that they’re dealing with, oftentimes the most marginalized.
We need to have partners and a—and—and a . . . you know, we have some great partners right now in this org—in—in this city, and I don’t want to miss anybody but we have Native Counselling Services, we have Bent Arrow Traditional Healing Society. We have (inaudible) from a specific perspective. True, we are working with these groups, but maybe we’re not working smart enough with them. And, that’s where we have to just start aligning. Right now, we’ve had a spike of gun violence in this—in this City. There is a program called focused deterrence that was developed by David Kennedy of John Jay. It was super, super effective and—in Boston and it has been effective in all kinds of places. And the requirement of focused deterrence is the police go and develop a relationship with the people who are doing the shooting and then give them alternatives. Like, “hey, there’s a program called “Working Warriors” at Bandero that you can go to rather than do the shooting. I think it would be better for you. We don’t want to see you dead.” And all of that type stuff. And then . . . when you started doing that, what they saw at the Boston Cease Fire Project was a reduction in youth homicides as a result of doing focused deterrence. And that’s 1996. That’s not—and—and David Kennedy has repeated this and repeated this and repeated this. But, the failing, oftentimes, of policing, are when the researchers leave, the police go back to doing what they do before and that’s reintegrate to prison and they kind of forget about the community partners. So, the partners really need to be integrated to a level of, that we’re side-by-side often.
We, in this organization, the Chief McFee has brought in some really great programming. One is Help Teams, which we actually have now, social workers and police officers are working together to navigate through systems for individuals. Uh, a program that we started in the downtown division when I was there, was—um—I—I call it the barrier reduction cost. Well, it’s now been turned into a full program where we have a constable that works specifically from someone from Homeward Trust to help people access housing. Because, oftentimes, a warrant for whatever that warrant is, whether it’s a transit warrant or a criminal warrant, people are afraid to do anything and we become the justice barrier. So, they’re not accessing housing or services because they’re afraid—they don’t want to go back to jail. So, if we have a police officer and a housing worker and if the police officer can give them a promise to appear and the housing worker can—can access housing, that’s what those partnerships can look like—they have to look like. And it has to—we have to build the fact that people, when they see our uniform which, oftentimes, brings trauma with it. We have to be aware that we are the police in the Prairies. And, historically, not that long ago, 1996 was the last residential school in the Prairies. The police were part of the agents that took people out of their homes to put them in residential schools and they were also the same—same group of people that went and took people out of their homes sometimes for the sixties scoop. So, acknowledging the trauma our uniform brings and trying to repair that trauma with good will and good partnerships with community to try to help individuals navigate through the system and—and not just—and not fall—and I know—I know labelling theory is an old theory, but—not be the label that we’ve told them that they are. Because people will strive to a label that they’re given.
Myrna: It’s refreshing when I hear a justice participant, sort of, justice players, acknowledge—like—the truth that comes before reconciliation. Like, so, the police had an active role in kidnapping Indigenous children and removing them from their homes and either putting them in residential schools, or putting them in white homes, or sending them overseas. We know this history, but no one really talks about it. No one really acknowledges it. And, so, I really appreciate you doing that and putting some focus on the value of building relationships with partners and communities and how that, coupled with becoming trauma-informed and integrating trauma-informed practice into policing is going to transform relationships and engagement and, maybe, recidivism, and incarceration rates, and all of these things that we are seeing about, especially policing on the Prairies, we know, doesn’t really have a good reputation right now. And, so, can I ask you—I’ve heard you talk about decolonization and decolonizing police services. And, it’s hard to be able to give a recipe for what that is and how we achieve it. But, what do you think the benefit is of taking that approach?
Dan: Well I think it’s—it—the benefit is taking it apart and changing the focus. And, again, I go back to, rather than being focused on public safety and law enforcement, if we’re focused on community safety and wellbeing, that’s the start of the decolonization process to me. And, it’s a tough thing to do. How do you unbake a cake, right? Like it’s almost—well, not almost, you can’t unbake a cake. And when you look at the March West—the March West, from the Northwest Mounted Police, was literally to tamp down Indigenous populations. That’s what we did. Um, and I say we. I—I wasn’t there at the March West, but I understand, with vicarious trauma, what I bring. I understand that. And, I—I think we all have to understand that. I think part of it has to be—there has to be a couple of things. One, the trauma-informed, understanding what vicarious trauma is—understanding what the impact of my forefathers in policing had on the Indigenous communities that we are currently policing today. And, then, look at the impact of the Sixties Scoop and the residential schools. And, then, look at the impact of—I look at, right now, we have a 53 percent increase in the last ten years in the incarceration of Indigenous people. We have Gladue and we still have a 53 percent incarceration increase of Indigenous peoples in this country. That, to me, is absolutely horrendous and—and it can’t be, well, they are committing crimes so they have to—no. It has to be our systems are failing individuals.
What we also need to do, and I think this is part of decolonizing—it’s not just decolonizing the police, it’s decolonizing justice. And, I look at Rupert Ross’ work and I look at Harold Johnson’s work. And you look at Rupert Ross and, Returning to the Teachings is an amazing book and you look at the impact restorative justice has on recidivism rates, from anything from child sexual violence to child sexual violence, to robberies, and the reduction in recidivism by using the old ways of justice—and we still—I don’t know when Rupert Ross wrote that book—I think it was ‘98—and we still haven’t made that book a part of our options for the courts. We still do things like mandatory arrests for domestic violence when we know that roughly 60 percent of missing and murdered and Indigenous women have been killed in domestic or intimate partner violence circumstances. And, then knowing that, when you look at the research on intimate partner violence, that restorative justice practices actually work and, also, that mandatory arrest laws have to—often actually create more recidivism. And, the third thing of that, goes back to trauma-informed policing. ‘Cause there was research in ’96 and it’s been done more . . . than that, but Larry Sherman’s original research on procedural fairness and justice when arresting an intimate partner violence offender, when you treat that person with compassion, you actually reduce the likelihood of reoffending. And, I think, that’s a power the police haven’t been told that they have. That the way we interact, the how, is way more important than the what. And that, when we do it right, we have, you know, that’s the magic of, that’s the move towards decolonization. When we all become part of the same community. And, realizing that we are treating people.
Myrna: Becoming trauma-informed is all—is a form of PPE for officers. ‘Cause, I think, sometimes, whether it’s officers, or lawyers, or judges, sometimes there is a focus on how this knowledge and this approach helps those outside of ourselves but less emphasis on how it helps us.
Dan: And, that’s a great point and it is—it does become a PPE because, if you look at procedural justice and you look at trauma-informed, they’re really closely related. And, when you look at the research on when police officers act in a procedurally just way, that actually—the use of force that they have to use is sig—it—it drops, right? So, like, Robin Engel did some research in Cincinnati on, um, social interaction training and procedural justice training and shows that the use of force has dropped because, when we enter a room and we do some disarming because we are actually walking in compassionate, people are less likely to lash out at you. And, that’s the training we—that we’re starting to give in this organization, which I really appreciate. And the other thing—and, I think that, this is kind of a, I’m going to plug the Edmonton Police Service here because it’s one of the things we did—we’ve been doing—for about, I want to say, seven years, with recruits.
Now, I still don’t think—and, now—now we’ve changed this because we are talking about the victim-offender overlap, we are talking about procedural justice—but about seven years ago, we started doing what we call “community conversa—conversations” with individuals from varied—varied communities from the Indigenous community, individuals who are involved in the sex trade, LGBTQ2S+ individuals, individuals from the Somali community. And those community people would come into the recruit training and the recruits would, I call it “speed-dating” with the community. They would go through and have these community conversations and be able to ask things and learn things about cultural safety and learn that it’s okay to ask somebody about their hijab, it’s just how you ask them. And that’s one of those bits of training that’s come back when people have talked to me about it and said that was one of my favourite days in training because “I’d never met a person from this community before and it was an opportunity for me to do that, not in a, uh, crisis setting, which, a lot of times, police that is where we meet people, and it’s hard to develop rel—relationships in crisis.”
Myrna: Tell me, what do you think the future is for trauma-informed police? What are the possibilities? What would you like to see? Are there other police services here, within Canada, that are doing what the Edmonton Police Service is doing, or is that completely unique, at least, in our country?
Dan: The recent events—um—the murder of George Floyd. The murder of Breonna Taylor. The murder—you know—the murder of Sammie Yatim in Toronto—um and that’s not that recent. But, I think, these reason events, and the time we’re in now, have given us an opportunity, and that opportunity should be ceased, and I say this a lot. I don’t want to see, twenty years from now—um—somebody talking about the same things. About that we need to reform policing. Actually, I truly think we need to move away from the word “reform” and we need to talk—talk about evolution and that evolution needs to be community safety and wellbeing.
But, right now, as far as I know, there’s no other agencies that are doing the victim-offender overlap training and I know there’s some that talk about procedural justice, but none that I know of. I am fortunate. I chair the research advisory committee for the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police [AACP]—um—and we presented on doing this training for the AACP and bringing the training—bringing the training of victim-offender overlap and procedural justice as a provincial standard. So, I think, that’s a possibility right now. I think that’s going to happen. Unfortunately, COVID, we were supposed to do spend three days of showing this training to the chiefs and, then, we had to cancel because, for obvious reasons, during the pandemic. So, that’s slowing things down. But, I truly believe that there is a desire in policing in Canada. There are some amazing individuals in chiefs roles. Peel has Chief Nish. Uh, you’ve got Chief Sloly, in uh, Chief Pete Sloly in Ottawa. Chief McFee here. Chief—Chief Neufeld in Calgary. You’ve got individuals who have an interest in policing be different. Um—and if you have that kind of, core group, I think you can see some change.
Um—there’s a—there’s a really big movement towards law enforcement public health. I’m really fortunate—at the Edmonton Police Service, actually—we are the only police agency that I know of that’s ever put a fellow in the global law enforcement public health. So, we have Staff Sergeant Jamie Clover is literally embedded in the global law enforcement public health world right now. Um—I’m fortunate. I sit on—uh—two different committees with GLEPH, Global Law Enforcement Public Health. I sit on the Research advisory Committee for North America and I also sit out of the Fair and Just Prosecutions Committee out of—um—that was started in New York. And, it was an interesting commentary that I had on my first meeting with them was—the American system needs to start looking north to see how policing is done. And that doesn’t mean that we are without—because we need to change and I believe in the evolution and I believe that we’re—we need to push that. But, at the same time, it’s interesting to see. We’re doing some things differently up here and it’s getting noticed and we are getting asked to be on some of these international committees. So, I truly think the sky is the limit right now. I think the sky is the limit for bringing in trauma-informed training, I think it’s in for bringing in a public health lens and moving things to community safety and wellbeing not just here, but everywhere and I think that we need to seize that opportunity and the thing we have to remember—the biggest thing we have to remember while we are doing it—we need to do it with the community, not to the community. ‘Cause, if we do it to them and not with them, it’s going to fail.
Myrna: I am really glad to hear that the Edmonton Police Service is looking at this. So, are there conversations with police officers on safeguarding their mental health and how trauma-informed practice could actually serve them in terms of safeguarding their wellbeing?
Dan: Because the trauma-informed training we’ve done is so new, we do talk about that, but it’s not been given to the vast majority of our members. Um—the—this organization has, actually, pretty robust, um, employment-family assistance services and there’s been a lot of training on road to readiness and it’s talked about a lot. Uh—we lost a member to suicide this year. So, we need to do better and we need to do more. And, it’s interesting because, and this is one of those—this is one of the pieces that I think you just touched on—I think we need to really, really work how do we—how do we help people understand this?
But, we’ve done some research on the reduction of stigma of mental health in policing, kind of. It’s actually—people are less—they’re less stigmatizing of their coworkers with mental health. But, what they’re—what that’s not showing is the same thing outside of the police. So, inside of the police service, if you have mental health issues, people are a lot more kind and compassionate about it. But, what’s not—if you have mental health issues outside of the walls of police—that’s not—it’s not translating out there. And, I think this is an opportunity for the trauma-informed training to actually be that link to understanding mental health outside of the—outside of the building. And, I can tell you, this organization has come so far when it comes to mental health and policing. And, I’ve had my own experiences with post-traumatic stress and issues that I’ve had. And I’ve been able to access help in this organization and I’ve been able to talk about it. Um—I have a very strong family that supports me and there were periods of time that I wasn’t talking about these things. And, I learned the hard way that we need to do that. And, as a result of that, in—when I’ve been in roles where I have individuals that I see are starting to, kind of, have behaviours that may be related to some—to them going through something, I am very, very open about having those conversations and a lot of our senior leadership is here. It’s—it can be—and, you know, there’s other jobs that have psychological impacts, but it can be very hard eh? It—can—com—compassion can be fatiguing too. And—and where—when—you know I’m—you know I’m asking—and—we’re asking our members to be compassionate when they deal with people, and that’s a draw on your system, too. Compassion—being compassionate—can also fill your bucket. So, it’s about, how do we get that balance for our membership? Because, they are—there’s a lot of demand and there’s a lot of demand and there’s also a lot of scrutiny and there’s also a lot of things said—and, you know—I’ll—I’ll—if I may, my own personal experience when the murder of George Floyd happened and the defund the police movement and some of the things that were being said about the police. I literally went home one day and I . . . actually talked about quitting policing. I have tried my best—to do my best on this job—and I have . . . things work in really mysterious ways because I had this conversation at home with my wife and I was very upset and she said “then let’s figure out what we can do, if you need to leave, leave.” And, then, the next day, I got a phone call and that phone call was from an individual named Shawn who was on the lived experience panel that I did. He called me—he’s a Black man—he called me to see how I was doing because he was worried about me. And then I had a text from Cynthia and another call from Teresa. And, these are all people who were involved in the criminal justice system and done federal prison time. And, they called me to check on me. And, I thought, okay, reset. It’s okay, and we’ll get through this and then take this as an opportunity for real, substantive change that unclothes the status, if you will.
Myrna: Well, thank you for sharing that, that personal experience and connection to traumas and the psychological, some of the psychological hazards of the work we do is quite profound, and how you all do what you do and still be able to get through it, I don’t know. Some cases, I’ve had to, of course, read the reports for the purposes of prosecution and review all of the witness statements, and interview witnesses as well. And, I just, you know, have thought, if I had to be the one taking these photos and being the first point of contact in getting these statements. Like, I don’t know that I could go another day.
But, I was thinking about, like, so when I talk to lawyers, I often talk self-awareness. And, I find, and this is true for myself as well, when I was neck deep in the traumas of other people—because, for years, I was examining survivors of residential schools and I was taking them back to fifty, sixty, twenty years, thirty years ago and, oftentimes, they would never—they’d never talked about it and I had to be the one to pull that out of them, and, you know, eventually, that—that experience totally messed me up because it forced me to confront my own residential school experience—something that I had refused to acknowledge. That I went to residential school. That my brother did. That I experienced a lot of loss as a result of residential school. So, at the end of it, I was so incredibly traumatized and I was in a really dark, dark, dark place and, I’m, you know, I’m really fortunate that I came through it. But, I have found, in dealing with others, whether they were colleagues, or opposing counsel, or, even, some police officers and some judges that, I think, one of the ways that we cope, not to say that it’s healthy coping, is we push things down or shove things to the backs of our minds and, then, what happens is we become really desensitized and, then, we become the biggest assholes that you’ve ever met. Like, you hear them on the bench, you hear them in court, you hear them in police stations. It’s like there is no connection between heart and mind or recognizing the person in front of you is a human being. I think that could be an indicator that someone is so highly traumatizing that they’re lacking self-awareness. Like, they don’t even know that they are showing up in this, almost, conflict-seeking zombie state. So, how do you think we can use trauma-informed education to help each other build that, sort of, self-awareness—that recognizing what your triggers are—so that, when they do come up, you don’t end up, like, having a gut reaction or a conflict response.
Dan: You know, that’s a great question and it’s, you know what it is? And this is, to me, you know, I’m not an expert in this area for sure, but, I think, when I look back on my own life and being the jerk, at times, and realizing that I was being the jerk and, I, you know, I was fortunate to have people around me that would tell me that, which is also good. And, checking yourself. But, one of the things that has to happen, and it was a friend of mine in Toronto, Stacy Clarke, who is a superintendent there, who’s amazing. She said, “We always talk about building—having the community trust us. When do we start to trust the community?” And, I think, that’s the piece there that has to . . . when we trust our community and we can be a little bit vulnerable as—as justice actors with our community. That’s what a real relationship is. And, if we want to have a real relationship is, that’s what a real relationship looks like: is our vulnerability with our—with our community and trusting the community and them trusting us back. And, I think, if we start to do that, you’ll see—I think you would see less of that walling up yourself to protect yourself from further trauma because the community will reach out and help you when you let them. And, it happens, like I just said, I had three people call me about the, about the defund the policing and the murder of George Floyd to check on me who, for all intents and purposes shouldn’t have called me, but that’s, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and the community can call us and check on us and we can check on each other.
Um—and I—I—I think I learned that lesson very early on in my career, too. I had a—there was—I had a suicide attempt, a young woman tried to kill herself and she said, “you won’t ever understand” and she said—I said “try me.” And, she’s like, “my son—my son just died and you will never understand that.” And, I said, “actually I do. Actually, I had a son die as well.” And, she said “you’re lying.” And, I said “no I’m not, my son died June 2nd 1997.” And, she instantaneously calmed down. And, unfortunately, every time I left the room, she would get very agitated and angry again. I remember that was an opportunity where I realized that that was not something I was planning on telling anybody that I was dealing with in a crisis situation that me and my wife lost a son, but—and it wasn’t in any way done—it just happened to come out and it was really an effective—being vulnerable with people is an effective way to de—develop relationships quickly, even in crisis, which is almost always really hard. But, when we allow that vulnerability to come out, it’s not easy because, you know, we’re kind of, you know, there’s times where I’ve been told you don’t tell people that you’re—I was even told at some point don’t wear a wedding ring when you’re working because you don’t want people to know that you’re married and—and I disagree with that. I think that we, as the police, need to be seen as part of the community, working in the community, with the community and, and that’s where, I think—when we do that—I think it’s the benefit of the positive energy that comes from both ways will reduce that—um—desire to wall yourself off from traumas.
Myrna: Well, yeah, I am hearing you and I’m thinking about how it would be beneficial for the police, who might be a first point of contact when someone is in a crisis state, to not only see them, hear them, let them know that they’re seen and they’re heard, but also to allow themselves to be seen as well, like, beyond the bullet-proof vest, beyond the uniform. To be seen as a human being engaging with another human being. And, I think, that is probably one of the barriers of the uniform is some people put those on and, suddenly, they’re impervious to the things that afflict humanity, so it seems, and it’s the façade, I think, that creates a barrier.
I really love that we’ve had this conversation about compassion, about relationship-building, and partnership building, about the possibilities of trauma-informed policing. And, so, how should we be changing the conversation, whether it’s police or partners who want to partner with police?
Dan: I think that’s the key. I think the police, themselves, can’t change this conversation. And, I think, unfortunately, there are—the desire of the abolitionist movement of policing really gets in the way, in my opinion, of the work that we can do. And, the work is that we need to evolve policing, and I one hundred percent agree with that. But my fear is that when we say abolish the police, don’t trust the police, is that we actually have less people coming to the police with their victimization. And, we know, things like sexual violence or—and—and intimate partner violence are massively underreported .. . But if we keep saying “Don’t trust the police, abolish them” we, potentially, are re- or over-victimizing other individuals who would otherwise maybe have come to the police earlier. And, so, I think that’s something that we have to think about when we have these conversations.
And, that’s when we think . . . need to think about how do we build up the social safety net properly. How do we build up things like stable housing, supportive housing. Because, housing first works really well if you don’t have comorbidity with mental health and addictions. So, just giving someone a house who is suffering significantly with mental health and a substance use disorder isn’t going to work. But, maybe, we need more permanent supportive housing units. And, we’ve got to get rid of the NIMBY-ism. We’ve got to get rid of people saying, well, I really agree with permanent supportive housing, but can we put it somewhere else? And in—and I sat on a panel recently for the City of Edmonton talking about permanent supportive housing and one of the questions I got from the community was that “what does permanent supportive housing bring to my neighborhood?” And I said “did anyone ask you that when you bought your house? Like, what do you bring to the neighborhood?” Because we need to start thinking about that. It’s about being community as a whole.
Um—we need to think about things like personal security. We have, you know, in the research—my research at Huddersfield with the University of Ottawa Prison Project—we have women on our staff that are using methaphetamines so they don’t get raped. When they go to prison, they don’t crave it, they don’t want it—they’re using the drugs because there is a lack of personal security out there. A lack of services and different services for management of addictions. There are a lot of people that want to desist or reduce their drug use and we don’t have, you know, things like cognitive behavioural therapy available. Um, we have, certain agencies that only accept people on Wednesday for intake. Why? If someone is ready on, you know, Thursday, they might not be ready by next Wednesday because a lot of things can happen in a week when someone’s living precariously housed and marginalized. We need to look at how do we manage mental health differently? How do we ensure that people that are suffering with—you know—mental health issues are getting the proper treatment and the proper care.
Um, you know—it was in the—I think it was in the early nineties—when we moved to a community mental health model in the Prairies—I think all of the Prairies, the province of Alberta for sure—and that community management—mental health model just seemed to forget about everything and just said “yeah, you are on your own.” And, even things like, we live in a—we live in a country that has allegedly free health care. There’s a lot of people that are precariously housed and marginalized that have a really hard time getting wounds dealt with. And, just, these—these simple, stabilizing issues, oftentimes, end up in the police’s lap. And, that’s okay, because we have members that care and will do everything we can to help. But, we need to build that social safety net around that. We need to build it around what people need to be healthy and we also need to change what we think is success. And, I think, that’s one of the, that’s one of the biggest weaknesses of our whole system. Success is seen as a house, a couple cars, and a white picket fence. Sometimes, success can be “I’ve stopped doing bank robberies and now I’m stealing pants.” Right? Significant difference. So, when we look at the severity of crime and we look at human beings reducing the severity, or we see success for somebody who is suffering from substance use disorder as fully desisting, and, if you don’t fully desist every time you slip, you are shamed for it. And, how about we talk about reduction of—of use as a success?
I had a friend who, unfortunately, he passed away of an opioid overdose and he would talk to me every time he would slip and he would be like “I’m screwing up again, man.” And I’d be like “George, you are not. It’s a mistake. It happens. Give yourself a break.” Like, what happens is we put people in these shame cycles, um, just, systems-wide. Um—we’ve seen it, you know, the recent hospital—uh—issue that happened in Québec with two nurses talking—uh—about the Indigenous woman [Joyce Echaquan] while she was on FaceTime live and, in her dying moments, heard people laughing at her and talking negatively about her. Those are the things we have to change. We have to not only look at the justice system. We have to look at education, and we have to—you think about colonized institutions—higher education and education is a colonized institution.
We have to look at decolonizing all of this. We need to look at changing how we interact with people in all of these circumstances. Um—right now, justice is under the—under themicroscope, so let’s start with justice. But, let’s not just start with the police. Let’s get—let’s get—um—trauma-informed training to judges. Let’s get trauma-informed training to prosecutors. Let’s get trauma-informed training to the defense. And, I was really fortunate—in this province—with the Alberta Prison Justice Society and the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association, I did a lunch and learn on trauma-informed training and the victim-offender overlap for a whole bunch of defence people at the defence bar. And, these opportunities need to be seized so we can have these conversations. And, you—you know—people would think “Why would the CTLA and defence lawyers listen to a police officer talk?” Because we’re all part of the system and it doesn’t mean we have to be, and that’s something else from the systems perspective, we have to realize, yep, there’s the adversarial nature of our courts, it doesn’t mean we have to be adversaries, and we could all work together for the betterment of the individuals that we’re dealing with—um—and looking at their human side and making a human experience out of justice. I think that we need to look at that human-centred design, for sure.
Myrna: [Laughter] I’m totally with you. I hear you. And, I’ve been—like—hearing people talk about—uh—human-centred design within the context of—uh—legal education as well. I had a conversation not that long ago with some, a law professor at UVic, talking about human-centred design within the context of law. And, yeah, I think—absolutely—our adversarial systems, maybe, needs to start moving away from being so adversarial and—and being more human-centred and what does that mean. And what are the benefits? Obviously, there’s a ton of research that needs to be done in this area to start to turn minds towards letting go of the status quo and, so, you know, I am hearing you talk about, like, these social networks and it really comes back down to relationships, building relationships with each other and meaningful partnerships because it’s not all on the police to achieve all of these outcomes for the public. They’re just one part of a wider, bigger, system. And, so, maybe, just to, in closing off our conversation today, what would you say, Dan, are like, at least, three benefits that come to mind immediately for trauma-informed policing. Because I know a lot of cops are listening to this podcast, more and more every day, and I thank you, officers, for listening. Uh—but if—for the—for those who are working in police-service organizations where this isn’t a conversation yet, but they’re very curious about it, what are three benefits to trauma-informed policing.
Dan: Uh—three benefits to trauma-informed policing. Um—the number one benefit is—um—it becomes a human relational interaction, starting with compassion. And, when we do that, it’s just a better interaction for both me as a police officer and the individual I’m interacting with. Uh—number two, it goes into the evolution piece that we are talking about. We—we’re in—with the murder of George Floyd and all of the events that occurred—people are really questioning the—the—you know—the legitimacy of our police agencies and our—and—and our—do we have a place? Um, I’ve heard it even said, community safety and wellbeing means no police to some people. And, I truly disagree. But, I think, when we bring in trauma-informed, we actually prove that point wrong, because, then, it is us being community safe. It’s building towards that being community safe and wellbeing together with the community. And, thirdly, it gives us permission to understand our own trauma. And, that way, we can potentially move when we see a person that we are working with, a colleague, a person who works, is a, works in our squad for us, we have the potential to see that trauma with them and go, “yeah we need to help that person and we need to ensure they get the proper help.” Because—you know—the numbers are pretty consistently four to one across the board. Four police officers in North America kill themselves to every single one that is feloniously murdered. So that means we kill ourselves more a lot more than people kill us. And, having that trauma-informed piece there really is an opportunity for us to give ourselves permission for us to be healthy.
Myrna: Thank you for that, Dan. I really wish we were having these conversations—like—back in the—like—was it the ‘80s, with the whole Neil Stonechild thing in Saskatchewan and the “starlight tours” that the Saskatoon Police were giving Indigenous men. And, so—but, it’s happening now, and I’m so glad it’s happening now. Thank you for all of your work and thank you for this conversation today.
Dan: Thank you so much, Myrna, for having me. I appreciate it. And, thank you for doing these podcasts, because they’re a great way to get people thinking.
Myrna: Alright. That was my conversation with Dan Jones. Inspired? Are ya? I am. Possibility, right. Possibility in policing. We need it. We need it now more than ever. And, I hope to have Dan back. There is so much more we need to talk about. Anyway. Thank you, so much, for listening to me. If you have any feedback, comments, you can find me on Twitter, @legaltrauma. Instagram @thetraumainformedlawyer. LinkedIn, you can find me, of course. And, if you haven’t already given this podcast a rating and a review on Apple podcasts, please do so. People read those. I read those. So, until next time, take care everyone.