By Joanne Stassen
Two male police officers knock on the door of an Ottawa house. A woman opens the door, takes one look and slams it in their faces.
The police officers become suspicious. What is she trying to hide?
In fact, the woman is Muslim. When she answered the door she wasn’t wearing her hijab, the head covering her culture demands she wear in the presence of men. When she slammed the door, it wasn’t because she had anything criminal to hide — she was just running to cover her head.
To Staff Sgt. Scott Nystedt, who heads up the diversity and race relations section of the Ottawa police service, making sure the police service reflects the ethnic and cultural diversity of the city’s population is not just about meeting the principles of the Police Services Act. It’s about misunderstandings like this one.
“When I get a complaint about an officer, the vast majority of the time it’s based on misunderstanding, miscommunication and misinterpretation,” Nystedt says. “If there is an officer there who can understand the culture from the inside, it can help prevent those situations.”
That makes someone like Sundeep Singh the kind of recruit the Ottawa police are itching to get their hands on.
Singh is an 18-year-old high school student who works several mornings a week at the Greenbank Road police station as part of his co-operative education placement. Singh is a bright, fit young man whose parents immigrated from India before he was born. He’s serious about becoming a police officer.
“It’s been a dream of mine for a long time,” Singh says.
“I’d like to do what they do, help and protect people, and keep the community a good place to be.”
But Nystedt says visible minority applicants like Singh are rare commodities — and applicants who have recently immigrated are even more rare.
Part of the reason could be the admissions process, Nystedt says.
The English test can be a challenge for people who grew up speaking English, let alone someone who grew up speaking another language altogether.
However, Nystedt says the screening process isn’t keeping people who are determined to be police officers out of the force.
“We hired a lady from India,” he says. “She failed the written test several times. But eventually she passed.”
The bigger problem is that visible minorities and immigrants are simply not applying.
“I do recruit interviews,” says Nystedt. “Most of the applicants we get are white males.”
Riad Saloojee, a spokesperson for the Canadian branch of the Council on American Islamic relations, says he thinks there are several reasons why people within his community aren’t rushing to apply.
“You have to look at what Muslims come typically to study. It’s been my experience that parents usually want their children to be an engineer, a doctor or an academic. There isn’t a strong emphasis from parents who want their child to be a police officer.”
Saloojee says some immigrants, Muslim or otherwise, may also need time to settle into the country before they consider policing as a career.
“I think it’s fair to say that this cuts across all cultures. It takes time to adjust not only to language, but to the concept of becoming a guardian of the public order. That’s what policing is and it takes time for that to develop in a community.”
Nystedt agrees.
“Traditionally, it’s not a dominant career choice and it’s taking a lot of time for that to change,” he says. “We’ve got to get the communities believing it’s something they want to do.”
Compared to police services in other cities, Saloojee says Ottawa “is quite progressive in its efforts to build bridges with immigrant communities,” — bridges that might make young people from immigrant families and visible minority groups more likely to consider policing as a career.
As Nystedt explains what those bridge-building efforts are, he occasionally jumps up and pulls papers from the bunker of filing cabinets that line the back wall of the office. A pile of documents, brochures and information packages quickly builds up on the desk.The pile represents just some of the work Ottawa Police Services are doing to make policing more attractive to minority youth. There’s a community action committee that brings together the police; visible minorities and aboriginal communities; a scholarship designed to attract visible minority and aboriginal women; and a mentoring program for at-risk teens.
The mentoring program pairs up minority youths with police officers.
“It’s youth-directed,” explains Zoye Coburn, a trainer and outreach worker for the diversity and race relations section. “It’s up to the youth to decide what they want to do. They may want to ride around on patrol with an officer. They may want to see what the identification labs are like.”
Coburn says spending time with police officers helps young people understand the role police play in the community. It helps them see police officers as people. Police officers, meanwhile, get to know young people and learn more about the cultural context they’re living in.
The mentoring program is also a recruiting tool that has benefited other law enforcement services. Coburn says several youth who were involved in the program in 1999 have now joined the RCMP, the provincial police and the Ottawa Police Services.
Police officers also visit schools and English-as-a-second-language classes.
“People taking the classes are ecstatic that the police would come at all,” Coburn says. “They get to see officers joking and answering questions. The comments we get are that the police in their country would never do this.”
Coburn describes these visits as “tangible activities” that help newcomers understand the role of the police in Canada. She says these visits may also encourage recent immigrants to consider policing as a possible career for themselves or their children.
Nystedt says they have had some success in attracting officers from newer immigrant communities and they hope to build on that. The Ottawa police service recently hired Mahad Hassan, their first Somali officer. Considering there are now more than 8,000 Somalis in the Ottawa-Hull area, Nystead says the hiring was long overdue, especially since the first wave of Somali immigration began over a decade ago.
Nystedt recalls an encounter between an Ottawa police officer and a Somali man.
The officer had beckoned to the man, not realizing the gesture was an insult in Somali culture.
The man was offended by the gesture, and the officer didn’t understand why until his partner explained it to him.
“Obviously, being Somali, Const. Hassan would be able to provide this information regarding the culture,” Nystedt says. “Having an officer from that community is very helpful.”