Something's gone terribly wrong with how we train our police

Me and the Farm Manager were somewhat acquainted with a local kid who had dreams of becoming a cop. That’s not a bad dream to have; hell, any kind of dream for kids today is a good dream to have… these are tough times for dreamers.

So this skinny brown kid heads off to one of the many colleges offering the “police foundations” course. That’s an invention of the community college system intended to offer pre-police-training training to aspiring police officers. Thirty or forty years ago these programs did not exist. Now they are ubiquitous.

The community college system spews out at least ten times more “police foundations” graduates than will ever find real policing jobs. Most of them will spin their wheels in various iterations of security guard work. It’s a hyper-competitive job market for “police foundations” grads.

We saw a picture of our skinny brown friend after his first year of police foundations. This skinny kid had morphed into a hulk. He was massive. Massive in a way that just screamed ROID ALERT. I don’t care how much time he spent in the weight room – his new physique could only be the result of steroids.

Police college is a hyper-competitive environment. It stands to reason that people will do whatever they can to stand out. Only the buffest and toughest police foundation grads are going to be the ones getting interviews for real police jobs. Every student will do whatever they can to be seen as the buffest and toughest.

Naturally, normal looking smart people are going to miss out. That’s why sheer adrenalin and raw stupidity took over when our local cops had that murder suspect cornered on the GO bus last night.

Once they knew, or thought they knew, that their suspect in this murder investigation was on this bus, all they had to do was meet the bus at Union Station and quietly have a couple of officers accost him. That’s how a reasonable person would have handled the situation.

But no, since this operation was in the hands of roid-addled hyper-macho crime fighters, they had to close off one of the busiest highways in Toronto, inconvenience thousands of people, endanger the lives of the other passengers on the bus, and create worldwide headlines that universally lampoon police stupidity.

It all comes down to police training.