Robert Chrismas - Canadian Policing in the 21st Century: A Frontline Officer on Challenges and Changes

Have technological advances and increased access to informationhelped government agencies like the police or have they overwhelmed them? The benefits and impacts of new technology aredebatable, but the dramatic changes it has created cannot be overstated. In recent decades police agencies have changed in almostevery aspect, from demographic composition to enforcement andprevention strategies to the roles they fulfill in society and the challenges they face. This book grew from my reflections on how policing has changed over the past twenty-five years of my career. In 1989my recruit class in the Winnipeg Police Service (WPS) learned towrite reports on manual typewriters, using little-remembered equipment such as carbon paper and white-out. Today, police officerscannot function without advanced skills in the use of sophisticatedcomputers and communication devices. We now take for grantedtechnologies that we could not have imagined twenty years ago.

In 2009, while on vacation in Florida, I used a smartphone toanswer phone calls and e-mails from people in partner agencies whowere assisting me on an important major investigation that I wasoverseeing. An issue that in the past would have had to wait untilI returned from vacation was addressed without missing a beat. In2012 my teenage children talk, Tweet, Facebook, and Skype in realtime with people from all corners of the globe through Internet connections and video cameras built into their cell phones. Recently oneof my daughters, who had misplaced her cell phone, used the computer in our kitchen and a global-positioning application to track itto a point in the opposite end of the city, where she had forgottenit in her boyfriends truck. In somewhat the same way, smartphonesnow provide people with the tools to track other peoples movements. Imagine this technology in the wrong hands. Some businessesare now operating without offices, with employees in opposite corners of the country or around the world meeting and operating asavatars in virtual office environments. Such changes affect interpersonal dynamics and relationships in fundamental ways. The technology that the police have to work with has advanced beyond ourwildest imagining and yet organized criminals often still have theadvantage, operating without the constraints that law enforcementagencies face, such as jurisdictional boundaries, laws, bureaucracy,and operational costs.