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The Police Academy, 1975

My partner: “I have two degrees from the University of Saskatchewan. This police department isn’t capable of writing a test I can’t pass.” (He didn’t pass the test.)

My first day at the Police Academy was March 10, 1975. Up until that time, Vancouver had run its own academy, attended by municipal officers from all over the province, but I was a member of class one of the new Provincial Police College. Recruits from six of the twelve municipal police departments were represented at the largest collection of officers ever trained at one time in British Columbia. In fact, class one was so large that it had been split into four units to be more manageable.

On the morning of the first day, the inspector in charge made a speech to the group acknowledging that though 107 recruits was a very large number to train, he was confident that, because of the extensive background checks that had been done and the quality of recruit selected, all 107 would graduate. Except there weren’t 107 recruits gathered there that morning waiting to be sworn in. There were 106. The previous evening one of Vancouver’s pre-recruits had been the subject of a police check when he was found exposing himself to prostitutes in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They advised him not to show up for work the next day.

Training at the Provincial Police College was to more closely resemble a university environment than the traditional police academy, and completion of some of the courses earned recruits transferable university credits. As well as the usual training in law, police procedure, pursuit driving, traffic studies, firearms and physical education, we had courses in psychology and multiculturalism. Our training consisted of three “blocks” of study, and the first of them, which was fourteen weeks long, included our VPD orientation and ended with a mile-and-a-half run on the last day.

Corporal Steve Sidney was our drill instructor, and on the first day he walked back and forth, inspecting our class. As he passed me, he said, “Cope, haircut.” So I thought, okay, this is Monday. On the weekend I’ll hit the barbershop and everybody will be happy. At Tuesday morning parade Sidney stopped in front of me and said, “Cope, didn’t I tell you to get your hair cut for today?” Well no, not really, I thought. There was no timeline given for what had appeared to be more of a request or suggestion than an order. Before I had a chance to vocalize my defence, Sidney said, “Okay, Cope, have your hair cut by tomorrow or don’t bother showing up.” This really wasn’t the good first impression I wanted to make on my second day at the Academy, but I don’t think an explanation would have mattered anyway.

Attrition was brutal in those first weeks of training. Two or three times a week, a recruit would be asked to report to the office and bring his or her books. I sat in the front row of our class, fourth desk from the right. When the first two recruits sitting at the far left of the front row were sacked, the next person in line picked up all of his books and quietly relocated to the back.

One day when I was sitting with one of the policewomen in our class, she said she wanted my advice about something personal. I said, “Sure, go ahead.” She told me that when the examination marks were posted on the wall and she went up to check her scores, one of our classmates, a former armoured-car guard, would come up behind her and grind his pelvis into her hip. As she was telling me the story, another policewoman overheard and joined us to ask, “Is he doing that to you, too?” The question was whether or not I thought this was normal behaviour, and whether they should report it. First, I joked, “Define normal,” but then I reconsidered and told them to report it. They didn’t report him, but a different sort of offence about a year later finished his police career.

It happened when members of our recruit class participated in a “Take a social worker to work” day. I guess the idea was to see the community from another professional perspective. “Constable Pelvis” and his worker met with two other constables for lunch in company with their respective social workers. In the course of the conversation, one of the social workers commented that it must be frustrating to deal with criminals who commit horrible crimes and can’t be prosecuted because there just isn’t enough evidence to charge them. Pelvis confided that, if this were the case, he would just plant some evidence on the criminal to get him off the street. When the social workers reported the conversation, a quick investigation was done, and Pelvis was asked to bring his books to the office. The two other constables at the lunch were also interviewed, and it was pointed out to them that they should have spoken up. I know both officers, who are highly respected and now retired from policing, and they told me, “Wayne, we just didn’t hear him say it.”

Jim Roddick was another odd duck. He had previously served as a police officer with Vancouver, quit over some controversy and then returned. I later learned that the controversy concerned the arrest of an armed suspect who had just been involved in a robbery. Roddick had cornered the suspect in a lane from which there was no exit. Time passed, cover units arrived, and ultimately a dialogue was established with the suspect, who refused to surrender. The exchange went on and on and on and finally the negotiator asked, “So why won’t you give up? We guarantee your safety and you will be taken into custody.” The crook yelled back, “Yeah? Well, that’s what the first guy said, but every time I stood up, he fired another shot at me.”

Roddick was one of those “been everywhere, done everything” guys. Though guardedly friendly, he spewed negativity about just about every aspect of the new police college. One morning he told me that he would be happy to talk to me about all of the problems he was observing with this completely dysfunctional academic program, but that any conversation we had would have to take place outside because the classrooms were all electronically bugged. After we went outside and he told me what was wrong with the college, I told him that the real problem with the college was that the director and his staff running the program weren’t getting proper feedback from credible people who really knew what was going on. I told him that the director would probably welcome the type of ideas and concerns he had just expressed to me. Roddick asked, “Do you really think I should talk to him?” I said, “I think you should go to his office and tell him exactly what you have told me here this morning.” Roddick said, “You really think so?” I said, “I think you owe it to yourself and everybody here.” Roddick got up, walked over to the open door and turned left to walk down the hallway toward the director’s office. That was thirty-nine years ago, and I haven’t seen him since.

As a recruit, I recognized that in some areas people with previous police experience had a leg up on the others during training. When I had taken firearms training in the reserves, I had been taught Olympic-style one-handed shooting with .38-calibre Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolvers firing moderate-velocity, lead, round-nose bullets. But the reserves had a three-strike rule. After receiving training, if you failed to shoot a qualifying score in three attempts, you failed the reserve-police program. I had failed twice, then qualified by the skin of my teeth on my third attempt. As I hadn’t wanted to ever worry again about being a poor marksman, I had begun to practice the new two-handed style of shooting both with the reserves and at Oakalla’s outdoor range. As a result, I usually had the highest firearms scores in my recruit class, and in 1976 I won first place in the Service Weapon Event at the BC Provincial Combat Shooting Championship. In 1981 and 1982 I won first place in the Expert Division of the Provincial Combat Shooting Championship and won trophies in the team events.

Anything I had learned in the reserves, I kept to myself. There’s little that’s more annoying than some know-it-all recruit who wants to tell everybody about how it really is out on the road. Chuck Hadley was and is a good friend of mine who also had police-reserve experience but didn’t follow the same code of silence. He would ask incessant questions about every aspect of the lecture topics. At one point a frustrated instructor confronted one of his questions with “Hadley, I know that you already know the answer to that question.” Hadley responded, “Yes, I do, but I am asking on behalf of others in the class who may not.”

On the first day of physical training, Hadley wore brand new blue running shoes with his running gear as opposed to the white ones we had been directed to purchase. The physical training instructor advised him to henceforth present himself in white runners like all of the rest of his classmates when taking physical education. Hadley’s response was “I just spent forty-five dollars on these runners, and if you think that I am going to buy another pair because these are the wrong colour, you are out of your mind.”

The corporal responded, “Hadley, you will report for duty tomorrow with footwear of the correct colour or don’t bother showing up.”

The next day Hadley was wearing white runners when the class reported for parade. The corporal nodded approval, noting Hadley’s correct kit, then took his position at the front of the class. “I have considered the issue of footwear,” the corporal said, “and have decided from this point forward there will be no colour restriction. Wear whatever colour you like.”

Physical training was a rigorous program that included push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, self-defence, arrest techniques and running. The scores for each activity were weighted then added together on the day of the final test, which was the mile-and-a-half run. I, like most of the other young men in the class, found the training eminently survivable and, because of the high scores we had accumulated in advance of the run, would have passed the final test without taking it.

I found that a lot of my criminal-justice training at Langara assisted me at the police college. I had already memorized all of the sections of the Canadian Criminal Code that I knew would be significant and can still recite the peace officer’s “powers of arrest” (then Section 450, now Section 495 of the Criminal Code of Canada) verbatim. However, attending the courses and enduring the subsequent testing was very stressful. Even though I usually scored in the top third of the class, I was very apprehensive when I approached the posted scores.

After we had finished our first block of training, we were sent out for four months with a field trainer who would assess how we applied that training on the street. The second block was eight weeks long and continued where block one left off, though it focused more on training simulations and police techniques. At the end of block two it was back out to the field, usually assigned to a senior partner for about a year.

The last block of training was a five-week-long lovefest where recruits attempted to out-bullshit each other with tales of derring-do in the rough-and-tumble world of Vancouver’s street scene. (In subsequent years, block-three training was deleted from the training program.) Because of this long, ongoing training program, our graduation didn’t take place until February 3, 1978. My friend Dan Dureau gave the valedictory address.