About bob rich
After a 38-year policing career in two municipal departments in British Columbia, and a few years practicing law focused on defending police officers, I am putting this resource online in the hope it will help others think about how to lead well and help them avoid some of the deep pitfalls I managed to drop myself into.
The last half of my career had me in leadership positions. I had lots of chances to try out strategies to try to fulfill the mission, to implement change as the needs of the community changed, and finally, after crashing and burning, to understand how critical it was for a leader to look after their people.
The Vancouver Police Department
I joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1980. I was two inches under the mandatory height of 5’10” and quickly garnered my first nickname - the “albino dwarf”. (I don’t tan, and was the shortest cop my new colleagues had come across.) It was not a modern department. Many of the senior members were large men who were not in good physical condition. Smoking and heavy drinking were common. A union colleague did an informal study and determined that the average member lived seven years after retirement. This meant that, by the age of 60, fully one half of these members would be dead. Two of my team members died of heart attacks in the first five years of my career. One was 41. Oddly, no one thought anything of it.
Later, when I oversaw Recruiting at VPD, I noted that there was a dramatic change around this issue. We were now hiring the "granola-gortex" crowd. Members were into fitness. We had made a cultural transition. Members didn't smoke, they worked out, and they cared about staying physically well. However, a second health crisis lay dormant and unseen.
I was at VPD for 28 years. During my time, I was a vice detective, led a patrol team, a surveillance team, supervised 911 and dispatch, was a union director and president, ran HR and Recruiting and Training, and was the Commander of a patrol district that included Vancouver's infamous downtown eastside, which had over 7,000 addicted drug users struggling to survive on the streets.
For my last five years at VPD, I was the Deputy Chief of the Operations Division. It was my chance to try out strategies to try to drop the crime rate and make the city safer. Some limited success. Part of the push was to try to change our mindset and culture to be an organization that actually strived to make the city safe.
The Abbotsford Police Department
After losing out in a chief's competition at VPD, I applied to be the chief of the Abbotsford Police Department. Abbotsford is a farming community in the Fraser Valley to the east of Vancouver. It is, by area, the largest city in BC. In 2008, when I arrived, Abby was the murder capital of Canada. It got worse in 2009. The problem was gang violence arising from the business of drug trafficking. My job was to get our people to take this gang violence on. We attacked it from every angle. From school presentations to scores of drug warrant executions, we went at it all in.
By 2011, we had had some real success. There were no murders in Abbotsford. To be fair, in the years to follow, a new gang problem arose as new gangs formed, and it took different tactics to squelch this new problem. I give my deputy chief credit for leading much of the work that made that happen.
Not too long after that we asked VPD to investigate a member we believed was corrupting the informant handling process, This investigation was like dropping a rock into the proverbial pond and the ripples, or rather waves, from that rock took years to dissipate. It was during that fallout that that I learned my vision of leadership was too small, too narrow, and was not meeting the moment.
That member was arrested and charged, but we were required to audit our informant handling process and many members were placed under investigation for perceived breaches of the Police Act.
In 2015, things went from bad to worse. The Police Complaint Commissioner decided to go public with the 17 members charged under the Police Act. He gave us 15 minutes' notice before doing a press release. My public defense of our members was difficult as I was one of the 17, having given our union information about one part of the investigation so they would be ready to help defend two members. I was eventually exonerated, but it was not a fun time. Seeing so many good members dealing with allegations that I did not believe were justified was very difficult. I felt like I had failed them.
Two months later, we had a member commit suicide. It was a horrible event. Worse yet, one month later, a second member took her life. I was pretty convinced by then that I was full on failing my members. As time went on, I started paying more attention to how members were doing. I noted we had 11 members off with PTSD. That was 5% of our strength. If 5% were off, how many more were walking wounded? I met with 10 of those members and realized, through their stories, that we were in a mental health crisis. I started to ask how we could change that story. I needed to learn the causes, talk to experts and figure out what we were doing so wrong that members were falling to one side and the other.
We began to look at how we could change to make things better. By the time I left in 2018, PTSD rates were one half of the national average for police, and the rate of stigma (how much you worried about people knowing you had mental health struggles) was also cut in half compared to other departments. Still a long way to go, but a start.
Practicing Law
In 2020, in order to practice law, I had to re-article and re-write my bar exams, as I had been away from the profession for 40 years. I had the good fortune to work for very senior and talented counsel. The firm focused primarily on defending members dealing with criminal or workplace disciplinary allegations. It was a challenge to learn how to provide the best counsel and defence work possible for these members. I was often tasked with doing the groundwork on files as they slowly ground their way through the courts or a police discipline process. This meant talking to members to see how they were. After opening their file and getting things started, I would often ask how much sleep they got the night before. Sleep disruption is one of the most common symptoms a member under stress or with PTSD deals with. The answer to that question helped me to know how much we needed to find support for the member. In many cases, the behaviour that got the member in trouble sprang from their mental health issues in the first place. For others, including those who had acted heroically in the face of great peril, the trauma of that call, and the added stress of being placed under investigation, was the equivalent of placing a piano on their chest. Long-term toxic stress can take members down as surely as PTSD. Imagine when it is both at once.
I learned this. Many first responders were not well and were not getting the help they needed; and that the way our organizations, and “the system”, treated them was often half of the problem.
The Search for Solutions
Towards the end of my time in policing and for some time after, I worked with some brilliant psychologists who had been treating first responders hurt by trauma and other workplace stresses. We did some workshops with both senior and front-line leaders to try to bring light to what was going on with members and to help foster a new way of supporting members. Learning from those psychologists has helped me develop some principles and strategies that I am convinced can make a significant difference. Many researchers, leaders and therapists across Canada are pushing for the needed change. All first responder professions still have a long way to go, but there is progress.
This website is an attempt to provide one more tool to help push along this important change.