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Recruiting goes local for Medicine Hat Police Service
CHARLES LEFEBVRE
In 2015, the Medicine Hat Police Service decided to look within its own borders to find new police officers.
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During the spring and summer, Medicine Hat police partnered with Lethbridge College and the Lethbridge Police Service on a recruit training program, giving 11 local recruits accreditation to become a police officer over 17 weeks. After the program ended, eight of the 11 were hired for full-time positions in Medicine Hat, while the other three are able to be hired at other police stations.
Medicine Hat Police Chief Andy McGrogan says the last time police recruited officers locally was when he started with the service in 1980.
“The thing we had been missing in the last number of years is hiring local people,” said McGrogan, noting in previous years MHPS has recruited officers from around the province, the Saskatchewan Police College and the Atlantic Police Academy, among other places. “It’s always good to have people that grew up in this community policing this community, and that’s what makes Medicine Hat Police Service different from, say, the RCMP or the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police). We’re a local police service. We live our career here, we work with the community, we raise our families with the community through our career and hopefully retire in this community.
“What we want to do is hire some people who have some skin in the game for this community, and that’s what we did.”
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The recruits selected from the application came from all walks of life. Const. Perry Rasmussen was working as an automotive technician before he made the change.
“The challenge is what I was interested in,” he said. “The ongoing challenge and the fact that you never know what the next day has in store for you, and the
continually changing work environment was a big reason for it.”
Const. Martyn O’Donnell, originally from England, applied for the program after becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
“Growing up, both my father and brother were in the military," he said. "It was a goal of mine to join the RAF when I was growing up. I went through interviews and that kind of thing, then we decided to move out here.
“For me, this is another way of serving and protecting, without going back to England to join the army there, so I took the opportunity to serve and protect Medicine Hat through the police.”
During the 17-week course, the recruits spent time building competencies in core areas of policing, including understanding of the Criminal Code, control tactics, emergency driving and firearms training.
“All of our instructors were from the Medicine Hat Police Service,” said McGrogan. “We have experts in every area. We have a legal counsel here, we’ve covered all of the pieces locally.”
The other piece of learning during the course is about the police service’s culture.
“One of the issues we had in the past is that people will go away training somewhere, and it’s like school,” said McGrogan. “It’s like if somebody is going to school to be a doctor and then they became a doctor, it’s two different things. I learned in those book and how to write exams, and now I’m out there. It’s easier for us when we train locally to integrate them into our program and use our field training officers to mentor them during the progression of their training.”
O’Donnell added fitness was a large component of the training.
“We had 150 miles to run over the 17 weeks on our own time,” he said. “We
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