The North Bay Police Service (NBPS) is one of two Canadian police departments to be involved in a training program offered out of Georgetown University.
The ABLE (Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement) Project is a training program run out of the school’s law program that aims to train police on how to intervene in their fellow officers’ actions.
Michael Dazé, deputy chief of the NBPS, says he wanted to get his police service involved in the program following heightened conversations around policing following the murder of George Floyd earlier this year.
“The goal of it is to make sure that as an organization and as officers, we’re trying to prevent police misconduct,” Dazé explained. “What it really drives at is saying that there are ways we can better look after each other to make sure we don’t go down those paths that lead to misconduct.”
Dazé uses the example of a new, young officer not knowing how to speak up when their training officer does something wrong.
“How do we intervene in the situation that is happening and make sure that fellow officer is told that they’re doing the wrong thing?” Dazé commented.
Dazé hopes the application of the training will result in officers not having to think twice about speaking up against someone who outranks them.
“(ABLE) gives the permissions, approval and training to say that you’re able to step in and address something that you think may be going wrong with an officer that has more experience and more rank,” he said.
The Lethbridge Police Service is the only other police force in Canada to be involved in the training program, which services 60 total departments across North America.
The NBPS will have two senior officers get trained through virtual seminars with Georgetown, which are paid for by ABLE. Those two will then train the rest of North Bay’s police officers.
