There’s an unfortunate tendency to talk about the cops as some kind of a monolith.
And don’t worry, I’m not about to go on some lecture about how not all police officers are bad. I just mean that we often miss that police forces are complex, political institutions with competing centres of power.
There are the police boards that are supposed to govern these forces and maintain civilian rule over the cops; the police chief and upper management that run the force and oversee the day-to-day operations; the rank-and-file cops who actually do the police work; and the union that represents them.
Even in relatively well-run police forces, there’s inevitably going to be tension between these different levels. But it’s not uncommon for those tensions to turn into outright infighting and backstabbing, which can have profound implications everyday people.
That’s one way to think about what’s been happening in Saint John, New Brunswick.
The city’s police chief Robert Bruce has been in his position since 2021.
And over the last year, tensions that had been building between him and everyday officers have spilled out into the open in dramatic fashion. A police union rep was dragged out of a city council meeting by force. Numerous harassment complaints have been filed against the chief by the officers working directly with him.
And you have a police force where one out of every five officers is on leave, putting a major drain on the city’s resources.
But the chief claims that at the heart of all of this is simply the police union playing dirty, and refusing to go along with the change that is necessary to modernize the Saint John police force and make it more accountable.
So what is actually going on here? And who’s in the right?
Andrew Bates, a reporter from The Telegraph-Journal, joined us in The Hatchet studios in Toronto to help us make sense of this mess.
