Turning the super‑tanker around

The bright scarlet uniform. The distinctive Stetson hat with its wide, flat brim. The officer riding a beautiful black stallion as he patrols the frontier.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is more than just a police force – it’s a pillar of Canada’s history and national identity, recognized around the world as distinctly and proudly Canadian. With that pride, though, comes a profound disappointment when it lets us down.

Dalhousie sociology professor Chris Murphy has studied policing and the RCMP for more than 30 years. Paul McKenna, currently enrolled in the Interdisciplinary PhD program, brings with him extensive experience as a policy advisor to police organizations across the country. So when a convergence of damning incidents – the Maher Arar scandal and pension fund mismanagement – led the federal government to establish a government task force on reforming the RCMP, it commissioned a comprehensive report from the Dalhousie researchers.

“I believe that some of the work that we do as academics should attempt to transfer our academic knowledge and ideas into a public environment where it can have some influence, hopefully for the better,” says Dr. Murphy. “We wanted to contribute to the debate and work towards informing public policy, which I think is part of the obligation of social scientists.”

Dr. Murphy and Mr. McKenna’s report, Rethinking Police Governance, Culture & Management, argues there are significant failures and limitations in the culture and management structure of the RCMP that have prevented the force from adequately keeping pace with its changing mandate. This culture is no accident – it comes from a rich historical military policing tradition and brings with it many functional elements – but its inherent conservatism has prevented sustained change from taking hold in the rank and file of the organization.

Mr. McKenna explains the mandate of today’s RCMP has changed dramatically, even within the past few years. “The RCMP has taken on security roles, international roles, and it is a police force operating at federal, provincial, municipal and international levels,” he says. “In that sense, it has become larger and increasingly more complex.”

To move into a more flexible, modern policing institution Murphy and McKenna recommend a number of significant changes, including the development of a new secular management culture more reflective of the management skills, values and experience required by the broad complex policing task and functions preformed by today’s RCMP. They also target more specific strategies such as increased university education, broadening senior management experience through lateral entry, the creation of an elite officer corps, more social internal and academic research and development and a new organizational structure to manage the different kinds of policing done by the RCMP.

The Task Force’s own report, released last month, and aptly entitled Rebuilding the Trust, recommends top-level changes to the RCMP bureaucracy that the Dalhousie researchers hope will start the process of modernizing Canada’s national police force.

The Public Safety Minister and the RCMP have yet to respond to the Task Force’s recommendations, and everyone involved recognizes that change won’t be easy – in their report, Dr. Murphy and Mr. McKenna refer to the RCMP as “a proverbial super-tanker that takes miles to turn around.” But they believe that current events present an ideal opportunity for reform.

“Within the membership of the RCMP, they want fundamental change,” says Mr. McKenna. “There is a clear indication at the upper levels in senior management that they want change. There is a public desire for change and there is a governmental or political desire for change. That’s a pretty important coalescence of motivating factors.”

Dr. Murphy agrees. “What Canadians want is that image to be real,” he says of the RCMP’s symbolic status. “They want (the RCMP) to be the best and brightest, to be the police force that they’ve always thought it was, and maybe are starting to have some doubts about. I think it’s within the reach of the organization to achieve change – these problems are not beyond repair and not beyond reform.”