HQ Magazine Winter 2024 - 2025

Billie Jean King, the iconic tennis star, stated these famous words back in the 1980s and the sentiment and reality of what she meant couldn’t be more relevant for police leaders in today’s challenging environment.

It’s safe to say that the landscape of police recruitment has changed dramatically in recent years. In fact, what once was a stable and steady pipeline of candidates has transformed into a much more complex and challenging process. Police services across Ontario are grappling with issues such as declining applicant pools, heightened public scrutiny, competition with other sectors and changing expectations of recruits themselves. Addressing these challenges requires not only a

Nobody said modernizing policing legislation in Ontario was going to be easy. The province’s Future of Policing Advisory Committee (FPAC) was established in 2013 to develop a plan for the effective, efficient and sustainable delivering of police services. The FPAC informed the Strategy for a Safer Ontario, and this ultimately led to the 2018 passage of the Safer Ontario Act (SOA). By the end of 2018 following a provincial election, the SOA was retracted, and in February of 20

The unique nature of police work sets it apart from other organizations. Today, police services face a wide array of challenges, including optimizing resource allocation, streamlining operations and addressing growing demands for transparency and accountability (McIntyre et al., 2023). Rapid societal changes have heightened the need for more agile, integrated and aligned approaches to managing police resources and initiatives. Traditional strategic planning often lacks specif

The way we measure crime in Canada is flawed. Traditional police metrics focus on counting criminal and non-criminal occurrences, equating volume with public safety. This approach provides a one-dimensional view of a multidimensional issue. Crime volume measurements are susceptible to both internal and external influences, leading to skewed data. Sherman (2020) notes that police efforts concentrated on a specific concern, or private resources dedicated to loss prevention can

Inside Owen Sound Police Service’s new emergency communications centre