At our Members’ Meeting held Thursday, 11 July 2024, we addressed how our faith traditions relate to policing and the law in our communities. A dozen or so members attending in person and a couple at-tending online, shared the various experiences we’ve had, the expectations we carry and the roots to our attitudes found in our faith traditions. We were able to have our discussion within the context of our recent tour of the Waterloo Regional Police Services Headquarters that had been arranged for Monday, July 8th by Fauzia Wafai, a member of our Steering Committee.
At the tour, Staff Superintendent John Goodman led us through various departments where staff members took a few minutes to describe their area of operation. We spent time in the Communications Branch, we observed some young people from the community participating in summer training pro-grams, we went to the Traffic Department and then Forensics where we learned about fingerprints and footprints. We also visited the Professional Standards Office that deals with complaints, both internal and from the community and, later, we got some good advice about avoiding scams from the Fraud Department.
Our final stop was Community Relations. We met with Geraldine Stafford, Manager of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and she spoke of a number of issues that relate to many of us working for social justice goals in the community. She spoke of their concern about communities that have had poor relations with the police in the past. She told us about the training provided to police staff, especially around under-standing and addressing one’s own biases. She provided some facts that are not well known in the community such as these: there are 350,000 occurrences involving the police in Waterloo each year; 15,000 result in arrests; only 374 of these are events that involve the “use of force” which could include simply withdrawing a gun or a taser from its holster, visible to the public.
Geraldine Stafford took a moment to express her concern about their ability to promote their efforts to the community, trying to assure the public of their efforts, not only for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion but also about the wider efforts to relate more effectively with the community. Some promotional methods aren’t working as well as they’d like so we suggested that congregational online newsletters, which are becoming more prevalent, and our own Interfaith Grand River Newsletter may be useful tools to reach parts of the community. They agreed that a strategy like that is worth considering.
A letter has been sent to Staff Superintendent John Goodman and two others thanking them for the very helpful tour they gave us. In it, we emphasized how we appreciate the efforts of the Waterloo Regional Police Services to improve relations with members of the community, to engage the community more equitably and to invite the community to join them in working together for a better Waterloo Region. We also reiterated our offer to be a resource for the Police Services when dealing with matters that involve religious groups in the community.
We in IGR are looking forward to developing closer and productive relations with the Waterloo Regional Police Services.
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