Vancouver Police Department pushing for independent police academy

The B.C. government has announced it is expanding space at the Justice Institute of British Columbia, enabling it to train 50 per cent more new recruits.

On the same day as this announcement, Global News has learned that the Vancouver Police Department is working on opening its own police academy.

“The VPD has been a strong advocate for expanding police academy capacity for years,” Vancouver police Chief Steve Rai said in a statement.

“While the recent increase in seats is a step in the right direction, it still falls short of meeting our operational needs.

“To address this ongoing shortfall, we are seeking approval from the province to establish and operate our own training academy.”

Rai said the Vancouver Police Department is positioned to train its own recruits to ensure they meet workforce demands that are unique to Vancouver.

He said this will also free up more space at the Justice Institute.

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Independent MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale, Elenore Sturko, said there are pros and cons of the Vancouver police having their own police academy.

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“Having on staff, having training officers there and being able to meet their immediate demand for training and do it in-house would have benefits for each of the municipal police forces,” she said.

“However, the idea of having a Justice Institute actually is supposed to take the burden off of police forces and to offer a unified training across the province, across our region. And so there’s also downsides to that.”

Sturko said it would be important to make sure that the application process does not pit police forces against each other and everyone needs to have equal access to training facilities if they want to become police officers.

“When you look at other jurisdictions, or even if you look the RCMP, they have unified training across their force, so no matter where a person is deployed, they’ll be able to work seamlessly with other officers who have similar training. So I think that having sort of training that’s not unified, moving it to other, municipal forces, you know, as long as the curriculum is the same, they’ll be able to work effectively together.