Clark identifies the perfect management and recruiting model for police as the Canadian Forces. His adaptation of military philosophy is at best facile and at worst dated. Mobile Command was created in 1966 “to provide prompt deployment for low-intensity operations against protracted revolutionary war.” To say, as Clark does, that this 44-year-old military model has any relevant application in current policing against terrorism and organized crime is specious, to say the least. Law enforcement is about justice and the rule of law, not rapid deployment.
To laud armed forces recruiting campaigns – “fast-paced dramatic television ads with no dialogue, just a sonorous beating soundtrack” – as the antidote to comprehensive policing hiring strategies is equally superficial. Police officers generally function alone, not as part of a formation, with a plethora of responsibilities and legal restrictions governing their conduct and actions. The expression “independent agent of the Crown” is not an idle phrase.
That is certainly not to say there aren’t elements in Clark’s work that are both provocative and entertaining. I heartily recommend reading his thoughts on the legal system, “a miasma infecting the courts … so troublesome and deeply rooted [as] to cause much angst for some of the greatest legal minds in the country.”
His chapter on new media is equally fascinating: “The result of newspaper mergers, depleted newsrooms and concentrated media ownership … has unarguably limited and homogenized what passes for news today, blurring the line between information and entertainment to produce and publish an infotainment hybrid.”
Are Canadians, as Clark hypothesizes, facing a doomsday scenario in policing? I think not. As he himself allows, “The best cops can’t not be cops. It is who they are, and policing, which translates for them into helping others, is what they want to do. Nothing will prevent that, not even the changing face and new challenges confronting them in the future, just around the corner and further down the road.”
All in all, like the very complex and demanding public service that Clark attempts to analyze – the Canadian police – Thin Bruised Line is 10:8 … in service. Robocop does indeed have a human face. And a soul.
Chuck Konkel is a serving Canadian police officer and organized-crime expert. He has written two novels and is at work on his third.
