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Canadians, we have credibility going in. We are given the benefit of the doubt where some nations are not.
So we do still have to prove ourselves but being Canadian, they are more open.
The Canadian International Police Peace Operations Program. Stories of change and impact from deployments around the globe
The intent behind, behind the mission was to the build capacity for policing in East Timor.
They had been colonised for 450 years, the last 25 of which had been Indonesia.
When Indonesia pulled out it left them with no police, no infrastructure, no nothing.
So the UN was there to basically to build all of the infrastructure including policing.
The culture shock of even seeing the country, they had no infrastructure left, or there was little in the way of services, even, even roads.
We would be sent on patrol by the station commander. He would organize who was going where that day.
There were a number of small villages up in the mountains. There would be usually two, two UN police, usually two East Timor police service.
Part of our mission was to field train the new East Timor police service officers that had come out of their training academy.
So we also had full executive power. So we were the police but we were also field training.
You go into the small village, you find the village chief. You meet with him, you ask him how things are going.
And that is very much like small town policing. You go, you might stop and see the Mayor and the Council, find out how things are going.
You stop into the businesses in town. You drop in at the high school. And you just chat with people. That is what you do in small towns.
That is what you do on our First Nations. It’s the same kind of thing.
There was almost more of an adjustment for the other people I was working with from the other contributing countries.
Because Canada is one of the few countries that actually has operational female police officers.
Most countries that were there didn’t, or if they did they weren’t sending them on mission.
So in fact where I was there were two Canadians, one Australian and one Ghanaian female and that’s it. Everybody else was male.
One of the issues that was very big at the time was community policing. Well that is what we have done in Canada forever.
It has only been talked about a lot in the last, say, ten or fifteen years, but particularly in small towns, community policing is what we do.
That is the only way to do our work. So it was easy for us to impart that to them.
It was more difficult for some of the other nations, and in fact, we ended up working with the UN police
from other nations on community policing because it wasn’t something that was done for them either.
The friends that I made there from different countries, all over the place, that I still keep in touch with.
It is the best thing I have ever done. I am beyond happy that I did it. I would do it again in a heartbeat.