The Ottawa Police is hiring 80 officers. But, as public scrutiny of policing grows, who wants to be a cop?

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Ahmad Zeim Ali remembers the first moment he knew he wanted to be a police officer. He was working as an inspector at the Ottawa airport, not knowing what his career path would be, when an Ottawa Police Service sergeant told him he would make a good cop.

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It was not a career that Zeim Ali would have considered. He grew up in Ottawa community housing, in a neighborhood where many teens, including himself, didn’t always have positive interactions with police.

“A lot of kids my age hated the police,” he said. “It’s almost as if I needed to hear that to encourage me to think about pursuing a career in law enforcement.”

Now, Zeim Ali uses the experiences he had as a teenager as motivation. He wants to be a positive force in the community where he grew up, and he wants to do it by being a good cop.

“I want to go back to where I grew up and go up to the kids and ask them questions and have a normal conversation and show them that this uniform, I’m not a scary person, I’m just like you, I want to talk to you, I want to know what your concerns are and from there we go.” , said.

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Zeim Ali is one of thousands of potential candidates vying for the 80 open officer positions in the Ottawa Police Service this year. As police services face increased scrutiny and community pressure to change, police recruitment is also changing.

Prospective employees are looking more and more like Zeim Ali: experienced, bilingual, rooted in the communities they will eventually patrol and, despite more negative than ever portrayals of the police in the media and online, motivated to improve the institution from the ground up. indoors.

In 2020, a storm of criticism surrounded the police after George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Sergeant Maria Keen, a veteran OPS office involved in the service’s recruiting efforts, recalled how, at the time, there were fears within OPS that the service would have difficulty recruiting.

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“My supervisors, people were concerned and said, ‘How are we going to get through this? Are people going to apply?’” Keen said. “My response and recruiting methods at the time was to tell people, ‘Be a part of the change.’ If you strongly believe that police officers are not doing what they are supposed to do or you criticize them, be part of that change.”

By the end of 2020, PAHO had received 2,700 applications, Keen said; recruitment had actually increased.

“We remove a lot of the barriers to applying. That probably helped,” he said, “because we were trying to expand our recruiting efforts to marginalized communities, communities of color, people who don’t normally think of policing as a career, because we want to reflect the community.

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“I’ve been here 30 years,” Keen added. “The Ottawa police have always wanted to hire people who are reflective of our community, and of course, in the 30-plus years I’ve lived here, the face of Ottawa is changing. There’s more diversity in our city than when I first moved here, so of course we want to do that. The hurdle is, does the community want to accept that?

The OPS classes of 2020 and early 2022 were the most diverse to date; more women and minorities now patrol the streets of Ottawa.

But there is growing concern in police departments across Canada about their ability to continue to attract and retain young officers. At a police services board meeting on May 30, OPS leaders explained some of the challenges they were having with recruiting. Among them: a difficult work-life balance marked by rotating shift work and a desire to commit recruits to a potential lifelong career.

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“We have to evolve as the workforce evolves as well,” interim chief Steve Bell told the board. “Police traditionally haven’t done that. It could be marketed as, ‘Come work for us for 30, 35, 40 years. We are your career from the cradle to the grave. That doesn’t resonate with the workforce like it used to.

“We would love for you to stay with us for a long period of time, but we also know that most people will have two or three careers in their lifetime. We have to adapt to that and respond to that because I think we take away some of our recruiting opportunities when we tell people, ‘If you don’t come here in 30 years, we don’t want you.’”

Now more than ever, potential recruits are aware of how difficult it is to be a police officer. And it’s a job made more difficult, union leaders say, by staffing shortages, which are reaching crisis level in Ottawa, according to Brian Samuel, interim president of the Ottawa Police Association.

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“We are getting busier and busier because the city of Ottawa is growing exponentially,” Samuel said in an interview. “We’ve been telling the police service for the last five years: ‘You need to hire more, you need to hire more. There is a personnel crisis, you are going to have a personnel crisis’.

“Hiring did not meet the standards to replace both through attrition and just through new hires.”

As hiring opportunities for PAHO become increasingly rare, there is competition for job openings. Zeim Ali applied to PAHO in the past but was unsuccessful. She hopes this year that his experience, which includes a police fundamentals diploma from Algonquin College and extensive volunteer work in his community, will set him apart.

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Volunteer experience, now sometimes referred to as community involvement, is key to getting hired in the modern policing world, according to Jill Reeves, program coordinator and academic advisor to the Algonquin Institute of Policing and Public Safety.

Officers, such as in PAHO’s neighborhood resource teams, are increasingly expected to build bridges with communities that may have negative views of the police, either from personal experiences or from witnessing police brutality on social media and in the news.

In his classroom, Reeves said he doesn’t shy away from difficult discussions. “I think we’re very honest,” he said. “I’ve definitely noticed a trend where students are coming to me more and more informed about what’s in the news… They don’t shy away from those topics at all.”

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During their time at Algonquin, in addition to a plethora of courses in criminal justice, sociology, victimology, and fitness courses, police foundation students are encouraged to “get out of their comfort zones,” Reeves said, “and learn all they can.” she can about communities that may interact more with the justice system than others.”

But, even with police backgrounds as a background, it can take years working another job, such as security, before an aspiring police officer is accepted. The application process requires motivation, Zeim Ali said, a quality he said he did not lack.

Before coming to Canada, he spent his childhood in war-torn Iraq and recalled how, amid the presence of bombs and missiles, his family fled to the forest, living on dates and bread. He came to Ottawa in 2004 and feels a deep connection to his community.

“This country and this community has given me so much,” he said, “but more importantly for me, my family, it has given us a home, a safe place to go to sleep without worrying about bombs going off or planes flying around. above. . I owe it to this country and my community to serve it.”