RCMP Watch

Here NB

New Brunswick is lagging behind the national standard for numbers of women in policing, following a trend of male-dominated police forces throughout the Maritime provinces.

According to a Statistics Canada survey released on December 15, only 13.6 per cent of New Brunswick’s police officers were female in 2005, better than only Nova Scotia with 13.4 per cent and Prince Edward Island with 12.7 per cent.

Rosella Melanson, executive director of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women said she was surprised by the findings, but that such figures are to be expected.
“It’s difficult to get women into non-traditional jobs,” she said. “It falls to the local police forces to make recruitment and retention of women a priority.

The question is whether or not these efforts have been made.” The irony is that New Brunswick is bucking the National trend.

Overall, Canada’s police forces are composed of 17.3 per cent women, a figure that sat at 10 per cent a decade ago.

Moreover, recruitment efforts by pack leaders like Quebec and British Columbia have led significant growth in the number of female officers nationwide.

“Canada had nearly 10,600 female officers in 2005, a gain of seven per cent from the previous year. By comparison, the number of male officers rose only one per cent,” reads the Statistics Canada report.

The growth can be traced to explicit directives to increase the number of women in policing. One bright light is the Regina Police Service, who produced a plan in 1992 to have women occupy 45 per cent of non-traditional and management roles within the force by 2012. Women occupied 21 per cent of these roles within the institution as of 2005.

These are necessary changes, according to Melanson.

“The interaction between police and civilians inevitably requites some kind of intervention. In our society there are still big differences between men and women. It’s sometimes important in a crisis to be able to be dealing with your own kind,” she said.

But Melanson said the reasons to recruit women into policing can be reduced to numerical logic.

“Some [women] are going to be good at it. Why should we be hiring police from half of the pool, from 50 per cent of the population? If we open the competition to the whole population we’re more likely to get the best people.”

While recruitment initiatives have proven successful, inviting and integrating women into non-traditional vocation remains an essential conflict. Constable Marie Dumont, the community relations officer for a New Brunswick RCMP detachment, said that a life in law enforcement can put a strain upon traditional gender expectations.

“It’s not easy on family life,” she said. “Sometimes you don’t work regular hours, and it’s hard to have a family when you don’t see them, or if you’re not sleeping right or eating right. We have the highest rate of divorce in Canada, 66 per cent.” Dumont said that at the same time, she feels well-integrated and at home in her workplace.

“I’m treated just as well as everyone else. There’s no difference between my job and the job that a man would be given. Gender is not an issue,” she said.

But Melanson said that not all women would share this experience, and that retention of women in law enforcement says as much about gender-role expectations and hiring practices.

“It’s not that women don’t want to go into it; they do. They go through the training and go out and try to find jobs.”

The question of job retention, how women are finding the experience of working on police forces, is really the best assessment the problems they’re facing.

“Entering into a non-traditional role like this one, it’s not unlike entering the military,” Melanson said.