When Const. Maria Keen decided she wanted to be a police officer, she didn’t tell her parents. When they found out, after she had joined the old Nepean Police Service in 1992, she was, in her words, “disowned.”
“My parents were ashamed, shunned by the Filipino community,” she says. “My family wanted me to be a lawyer. In my culture, women don’t become police officers.”
Keen’s story is not unique. A misunderstanding of policing in Canada is a major reason why police departments have trouble recruiting visible minorities, say multicultural groups and the Ottawa Police Service.
The issue of recruiting constables from minority groups has taken on even more importance in light of a study released by Statistics Canada that predicts the number of visible minorities in Canada will double by 2031.
Ayman Al-Yassini, executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, says the study shows that diversification of the country’s police forces is more relevant today than ever before.
“There’s an imperative here,” says Al-Yassini. “We have to prepare ourselves as members of society and as members of the police forces to learn to live with this coming demographic shift.”
“Minority populations can be hard to break into,” says Ottawa Police Chief Vern White. Immigrants coming to Canada are disillusioned with the policing profession because “in their home countries, police officers aren’t viewed as ethical or trustworthy individuals.”
White points to the example of a young Romanian woman who wanted to be a police officer, but was turned off the profession because her only experience with the police in her country was one of extortion and violence.
“In a lot of these countries, there are no distinctions between the police and the military and this colours people’s perceptions,” says Keen, the first visible minority woman to work as a police officer in Ottawa.
“If your only experience with the police is having your kid brother dragged out of your house and beaten up, then of course you’re not going to trust them,” she says.
Tensions between the police and Ottawa’s visible minority groups exist, in part, because of highly publicized incidents such as the May 2009 beating of Lebanese cab driver Sami Aldobani by an off-duty police officer.
Fred Awada, executive director of the Lebanese and Arab Social Services Agency of Canada, says he “encourages the ongoing and upward trend” of community outreach by Ottawa police.
“In order to overcome cultural barriers and traditional mistrust between police and visible minority communities, it’s important that the police co-ordinate and co-operate with these groups and become more representative of communities they serve,” says Awada.
Staff Sgt. John Medeiros, who serves in the Ottawa Police Service’s diversity and race relations section, says the police are always looking for ways to connect with the city’s visible minority groups.
Initiatives such as the “Flag and Banner Program,” in which police officers attend multicultural events in the city, are used to celebrate different communities and recruit from traditionally marginalized groups.
“If people from Jamaican, Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Haitian backgrounds see their own represented in the police department, then these people feel more comfortable and there’s more of a rapport with the police,” says Medeiros.
Keen, who’s taught police foundations at Algonquin College for the last three years, says she’s noticed the police department’s work paying off.
When she was a recruit 18 years ago, she says the student body was about 90 per cent white and male. Her class is now about 75 per cent white and male.
“This is evidence that our community outreach is working, slowly but surely. When we go to Filipino basketball tournaments and Sikh temples, young people are seeing that, far from being something shameful, policing is an honourable, rewarding profession,” says Keen.
“These numbers are just going to go up. The young people are convinced. Now we just have to work on the parents.”