THUNDER BAY - As the Thunder Bay Police Service continues to struggle with declining recruitment and quality applicants, a new outreach initiative is looking west to not only engage potential recruits, but increase the profile of the local service.
“By doing these recruitment outreach initiatives we’re getting our message out there about the Thunder Bay Police Service, what we have to offer, the stability of our service, we are all contained under one roof, and the opportunities that are available with the service as well,” said Staff Sgt. Gordon Snyder with the Thunder Bay Police Service.
A new recruitment strategy is being developed by the Thunder Bay Police Service and Snyder presented the first phase of that strategy to the Thunder Bay Police Services Board on Tuesday.
According to Snyder, analysis of past recruitment has found that the number of applications has been generally declining for the last few years.
“We’ve seen that a lot of our applications are generally within the city itself and not a lot of applications from outside the city limits,” Snyder said.
It’s not just fewer applications coming in, Snyder added, but the quality of applicants is also declining.
“We have seen a high volume of failures with our interview process specifically with the essential competency-based interview,” he said. “It’s been high across the province. It’s not unique to our police service.”
Snyder referenced some of the negative media attention the Police Service has received in the last several years, but he does not attribute declining recruitment to that issue alone.
“We have been seeing declining applications for some time, prior to some of the negative media that has been out there,” he said. “But obviously policing is a challenging career. That is no surprise to anybody. With challenge comes opportunity as well and that’s the kind of message we trying to get out there to potential candidates.”
The first phase of a new recruitment strategy is outreach and the Thunder Bay Police Service has been visiting communities throughout Northwestern Ontario and Manitoba.
According to Snyder, the Thunder Bay Police Service is not widely known outside of the city, which is something the outreach phase of the recruitment strategy is hoping to change.
“What we have found is that our police service is widely unknown as soon as you reach outside of Thunder Bay and especially when you reach Manitoba,” he said. “I think in large part the reason why we haven’t seen applications from outside of Thunder Bay is because of that.”
Recently, the Thunder Bay Police Service visited seven communities and presented to more than 200 secondary students throughout Northwestern Ontario and it has also reached out to schools in Winnipeg.
Snyder said a big part of recruitment for policing is retention, which is why the service is looking west to Manitoba as opposed to Southern Ontario.
“The similarities in culture is much greater between Northwestern Ontario and Southern Manitoba than Northwestern Ontario and the Toronto area,” he said. “We want people to feel comfortable in Thunder Bay and we feel we will achieve that more recruiting towards the west as opposed to recruiting in downtown Toronto.”
The Police Service also visited nine First Nation communities and Snyder said they were very welcomed and people were excited to know there are opportunities in policing for them.
Snyder said the service is looking at an Indigenous cadet program to reduce the employment barriers for Indigenous people. The program would involve sponsoring an Indigenous person to attend Police College as a cadet.
Other barriers for people living in the Northwest include a lack of internet access and the standardized application process, which Snyder said needs to change.
“The application process that is a standardized process that was in place previously is very difficult for somebody from Northwestern Ontario to engage in as opposed to someone in downtown Toronto,” he said.
“We have to change our process and we have to adapt and we have to do things that other police services say in the Toronto area are not doing to get the applications and to be able to recruit from various communities that other police services may not be recruiting from.”
The Thunder Bay Police Services Board will receive another presentation in early 2020 on the short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals of the new recruitment strategy.
