The Globe and Mail

In a grim, not-too-distant future, the city managers of a large North American metropolis beset by financial ruin and unchecked crime turn to a mega-corporation that privatizes their police force and offers the ultimate solution to their criminal dilemma – a law-enforcement cyborg, or Robocop – “guided by four programmed directives: to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law and a fourth which is ‘classified.’”

The last directive provides a cunning computer safeguard, which prevents the cyborg from ever turning on its inventors. Ultimately, natural justice has a delicious way of intervening: Robocop overrides his prohibition and eliminates his evil creators, allowing a momentary and poignant glimpse into his human roots as he goes off to enforce his lofty and timeless mandate.

Doug Clark, an award-winning journalist who admirably wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to street officers, attempts to tackle the daunting task of analyzing Canadian policing as we enter the 21st century. Thin Bruised Line outlines an imminent “near perfect storm” in the profession as aging officers are plagued by poor leaders, unrealistic expectations and increasingly complex laws.

In a way, it is tempting to see parallels between the film Robocop and Clark’s apocalyptic vision of Canadian policing in the 21st century: his sense of a widespread disconnect between senior officers and the rank and file, and between those who make the laws and those who enforce them.

It is tempting. But it is wrong, and for the very reasons Clark uses to buttress his argument of an essential and faltering pillar within Canadian society: the uniformed police officer. If anything, there is a palpable disconnect between the living organism that is contemporary policing and the endless reports gleaned from consultants and academics who seem to act as the touchstone for those in the police leadership who seek a law-enforcement Nirvana.

Clark writes about policing in Ontario but deals only with the city of Ottawa

In that light, Clark would have been better served if he had analyzed the increasing propensity in all forms of leadership to rely on – and even defer to – the work of hired top guns, who were once themselves in the policing profession and are now securely winkled away in the comforting confines of academia or the PowerPoint world of the corporate boardroom.

Increasingly, the growth industry of law-enforcement consulting and scholastic analysis is at the root of a number of mixed messages, and is too often used to replace the reality of the law-enforcement professional.

In tackling the multitude of issues facing the Mounties as they attempt rebirth, and to understand the paradigm shift in Canadian social fabric and the complex dynamic brought into the disciplined service of policing by the Millennium Generation (among his themes), the author has bitten far off more than he can comfortably chew.

As a case in point, Clark writes about policing in Ontario but deals only with the city of Ottawa. Obviously, the work should have far greater reach; to say that the focus of policing in Canada’s most populous province “remains in traffic patrol” would certainly strike a thinking person as odd. Certainly one glaring omission in the book is the lack of any analysis of the challenges faced by – and the groundbreaking work of – the six municipal police agencies in the Greater Toronto Area, which represent 20 per cent of Canada’s police strength, protecting one-fifth of the country’s population. Without assessing these organizations, the book is, more often than not, merely a rehash of Senate hearings and professorial writ from selected settings.

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.