A retired RCMP officer living in the South Okanagan is playing an international role in policing reform.
Norm Gaumont, who spent 30 years as an RCMP officer in communities across Canada, recently returned to his home just south of Vaseux Lake from the Ukraine after spending an intensive two weeks training and mentoring the new police force.
“I absolutely enjoy going to these countries because you do feel you’ve helped and improved a country and you’re part of a process of seeing a whole country changing themselves. It does feel quite rewarding knowing you were, in a small way, part of that process,” Gaumont said.
Young, inexperienced but eager, the new police force in Ukraine has a lot on their shoulders as the international community supports efforts to curb widespread police corruption. The Ukrainian revolution in 2014 resulted in the ousting of former president Viktor Yanukovych and reforms began on the old police force, which Gaumont said was essentially state-owned.
“It was basically on the take on the street. You’d get pulled over, pay me or else, and it was just rampant,” Gaumont said.
On Jan. 15 Gaumont went to Ukraine with six other Canadian officers, former RCMP and Ottawa Police, with Calgary-based consulting firm Agriteam. He was selected out of 79 applicants. The team worked in 10 Ukrainian cities, connecting with nearly 7,000 Ukrainian police.
The international effort has multiple countries supporting police reforms alongside Canadian and independent UN teams. New Ukrainian officers will wear uniforms and boots from the United States, hold first aid kits from Australia and every patrol car is now a Prius, courtesy of the Japanese government. The Canadian government, through Agriteam, helped equip officers with bulletproof vests and body cameras, key in fighting corruption, as well as Gaumont and his team doing a management course providing advice and strategy to keeping a clean police force.
It is an uphill battle for the new force, with 30 to 40 per cent of the old guard disbanded after an intensive vetting process.
“Most of the people coming in were university students who had very little police experience,” Gaumont said. “They didn’t want any of the old police, even if the person passed the vetting, they still didn’t quite trust them. Not to say they never did, but they were very reluctant to put any of the old police in charge of the new police.”
Gaumont referenced one young woman, in her late 20s, who was in charge of over 1,000 police officers. University graduates and younger officers were the only ones left to be able to fill the gap. A quarter of the new force is female as well. By the end of the summer, Ukrainian authorities want to revamp police forces in 40 to 50 cities with similar vetting processes. It’s a tough process with new officers coming in, and not every member of the old force leaving.
“You can imagine the strain on the working relationships between the new and the old. And the new officers get paid considerably more than the old. That dynamic is happening, so they have to proceed very quickly, hence why the training is so important,” Gaumont said. “They had no choice because if they were going to get rid of the corruption they couldn’t continue with the old.”
Gaumont and the team joined the young officers on patrols, coaching and reviewing processes over 14 days, a short amount of time to renew trust in a completely revamped police force. However, the eagerness of the new officers helped make the most of the limited time frame.
“It was very interesting, what we found was the new, young police officers really want to learn. They are very open to new concepts. So I think that was probably the best thing they did was to bring new people in who aren’t attached to the system,” Gaumont said.
After leaving, Gaumont felt progress had been made. The start of a long journey to renew trust.
“The 10 cities where the new police were put in place, you could see a marked difference in public perception, and you had other cities all demanding saying well we also want these new police now,” Gaumont said. “People were requesting it and there was a lot of support.”
They are on the right track and off to a good start after the vetting of the former forces, Gaumont said, but the key is maintaining that integrity into the future.
“It was like anything else, it’s a bit of a love affair initially. It’ll be interesting to see in about a year’s time because they’re all very young. After you’ve been doing policing for quite awhile, that’s the danger of easily falling back into corruption. We talked a lot about that with them, saying we’ve gone a long way here, you’ve got to make sure that you don’t go back into that cycle of corruption, and they recognize that and are going to be very vigilant in making sure that doesn’t happen,” Gaumont said.
The focus was on problem solving, accountability, relations with the public and being open — admitting mistakes instead of covering them up.
“All of this was foreign to them. The old system was basically, you go out and you’re going to collect money for me,” Gaumont said. “What they are now finding is the public is very reluctant to go see the police, so now they very much are going to see the police, starting to trust them again.”
Crime rates are going up since the transition that is to be expected, Gaumont said, because citizens are becoming more likely to report crimes to a trusted police force.
“We talked a lot about problem solving. For them, policing before was very much reactive and if they were going to do proactive policing it was you go out, write a bunch of tickets, and a lot of it was based on getting money back,” Gaumont said.
It is not the first time Gaumont has called on his RCMP experience to aid the international community, working in Haiti, working on a road safety plan in Kuwait and making three trips to China leading up to the 2008 Olympics. The RCMP is looked up to in the international community, working to provide the lessons learned in combining all levels of policing under one organization.
“Not a lot of police forces in the world have that responsibility, all three jurisdictions, that’s one of the reasons we’re sought after is that we have that ability to look beyond borders of jurisdictions, to be able to see the big picture,” Gaumont said.
The training program is a good start, but Gaumont said the Ukrainian police have “a ways to go yet.” Fighting corruption is a holistic operation involving more than just police.
“If the police constantly arrest people, but they’re being released because they are paying the judicial system instead of the police, you’re no better off and you’re just going to end up frustrating the police. So all of that is a dynamic that is pretty unique in that they are taking it on, and quite honestly, I thought they were moving very fast,” Gaumont said. “In Canada you could never move as fast as they are doing there, trying to make those kinds of reforms that quickly. I’m sure there’s all kinds of people in Ukraine who wish it could be done overnight, but there’s realities and it has got to be done step by step.”
Ukraine’s newly appointed police chief is now asking the Trudeau government for more help in reforming the national security force in January, a priority for President Petro Poroshenko’s government.
Gaumont hopes to return and continue the work he and the team started.
“For me it’s a nice way to be able to go in, be able to come back home and go back, but certainly if there was more funding we’d be able to stay longer, but you have to go with what’s available,” Gaumont said. “We’re basically waiting to see what the new Liberal government is going to do. Certainly they’ve shown some interest and it looks positive, but we’re still waiting.”
Gaumont plans to continue passing on his skills to help make the world a better, more accountable place.
