Compassion in the front-line and Winnipeg's new Community Safety Team

Ten years ago, I wrote an editorial, which was published in the Winnipeg Free Press and highlighted the humanitarian culture in our city, and the heart that front-line emergency responders invest in protecting our vulnerable. As the cycle of things go, we seem to continuously revisit social issues and solutions to them. Perhaps the lesson in this is that we need to find solutions for the urgent issues, but then we have to sustain them as well. One constant has been the compassion and devotion of front-line emergency services, police, fire, paramedic, medical staff, and social workers who all carry the burden of dealing directly with social issues and community safety on the front-line. I see now, more than ever, the passion that public safety personnel have for the vulnerable, and the burden they bare, the moral injuries and operational stress that they carry always striving to do more with less. Having completed 34 years in front-line policing, as-well-as my post-doctoral fellowship with the Canadian Institute for Public Safety Research and Treatment, I am acutely aware of the emotional burden that is continually imposed on contemporary emergency services.

??????????? While social justice is not their primary mandate, emergency services are the ones who, day in and day out, strive to help homeless people get in from the cold, protect people suffering debilitating substance-abuse or mental-health issues and advocate for them. In the vast majority of cases, they do their best for people in need. This phenomenon is not unique to Winnipeg, but our history has a particular social-justice character. We are a compassionate city, perhaps because of our diversity and the deep social issues we have struggled with as a community. Ten years ago I wrote (Free Press, 2014),

It is no accident the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the first national museum established outside the Ottawa capital region, was opened in Winnipeg to serve as a beacon for human rights and social justice. This intellectual underpinning is part of our compassionate culture. However, it is the people at street level who actually look out for vulnerable peoples’ basic human rights. It is the people who do the right thing for fellow human beings when nobody is looking that are our real protectors of human dignity. It is the businessperson who volunteers at a soup line and the child who stands up for a bullied peer at school. Each of us plays a part in our own unique ways, but we are all a part of our community. The thing we know for sure is working together we are all stronger. As long as we continue to have problems in our community, we all must ask ourselves what we have done today to help make the situation better. “A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.” (Khalil Gibran). We all know ways we can contribute, but until we act, we know we haven’t unleashed our full potential.

Now we have the City of Winnipeg's new Community Safety Team, stood up to help take the burden along with existing resources, to improve a feeling of safety in the city. With Transit as our first priority, it seems fitting as many of our community's problems are intensified in our public transportation system. The more we all collaborate and find collective multi-sectoral, multi-faceted ways to combine and focus our efforts, the greater synergies and momentum for peace and brighter our future will be. The Community Safety Team was built with a culture of compassion for our most vulnerable citizens, with a goal of connecting people with the right resources, but also with the tools to protect them. Coming from a lifetime of over 40 years devoted to law enforcement, this new team feels like the perfect element to fill many of the system gaps that I've watched grow over the past two decades.