Terry Gould, an investigative journalist, spent a year shadowing Canadian civilian police trainers (CivPol) as they worked with local police officers in Afghanistan, Palestine and Haiti. His book, Worth Dying For: Canada's Mission to Train Police in the World's Failing States, chronicles the tales of numerous officers he met and their passion for helping create ethical police forces in troubled nations. Sigrid Forberg spoke with Gould about what he found.
How did you become interested in the work of police overseas?
I'd spent over a decade reporting from countries that were basically run like criminal enterprises. What I noticed was that the rulers were employing the police to enforce their own lawlessness. Presidents and prime ministers appointed their closest cronies to top police posts with the understanding that while their salaries would be low, their incomes would be high. In return for support and the sharing of spoils, the police chiefs were granted impunity. The chiefs then sold subordinate commands to their cronies with the same understanding. Midway through that decade, I began documenting the careers of journalists who were murdered in their hometowns in five of those countries. I spent four years on my book, Murder Without Borders, telling their stories. Overall, the journalists were murdered for trying to expose the corruption of their governments and, in almost all of the cases I studied, their murders were arranged by the police who served those governments. I don't want to give the impression that every cop I met was corrupt, but the clean ones were concentrated in the junior ranks. The problem, I realized, was that in societies where impunity reigns, even honest cops eventually join the lawbreakers. The prevailing attitude is, "They pay us nothing, they expect us to steal, so we'll steal."
How did you then find CivPol?
At the end of that decade, I concluded that reforming the police was a key element to reforming systemically corrupt societies. The next question was, "How do you reform entire police forces so that they stand as a check against the predators who are their political masters?" That sounded like a mission impossible to me. But sometimes when a journalist asks a question repeatedly, he meets someone who can answer it. When a student is ready, a teacher appears.
After I published Murder Without Borders, I met a Mountie superintendent who believed there was a practical way to reform police forces that oppress civilian populations. His name is Joe McAllister and he'd served three years in failing states with a little-known federal unit called the International Peace Operations Branch [now called International Policing Development]. I'd known that our officers were training police in Haiti, but I didn't know that they were in far-flung regions around the world, carrying forward a strategic mission: build honest, professional, civilian police services in countries devastated by war or teetering on the brink of collapse. They were known by the acronym CivPol, for civilian police trainers, and at that moment, they were risking their lives in nine red-zone missions, including in six of the top 10 countries on Foreign Policy's Failing States Index. And so I thought, this is a holy cow story: not too many people know about this.
What were you expecting to find?
I didn't expect that there was a band of officers who were committed to promoting what is the foundational principle of ethical behaviour in human history. It's an elemental ideal that's prescribed across time and across cultures. It's the Hillelian ethic: "Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you." McAllister, and most police officers I've met in CivPol, view their mission in terms of teaching overseas police forces how to enforce that Hillelian ethic — it's at the core of Canada's civilian police training missions. Our police trainers want to teach police forces around the world how to enact the most fundamental and basic duty of police officers: keep bad people from hurting good people. As a peacekeeping nation, we used to be famous for keeping bad people from hurting good people. Between 1956 and 1992, Canada was often the single largest contributor of soldiers to United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions, whereas now we're around 70 in the ranking. But that reputation for being on the side of the angels is something Canadians still benefit from around the world, and the reputation is partly sustained by our CivPol volunteers.
I mean, here I'd been covering countries around the globe that were run according to the principle of organized crime, watching their police use torture and murder to crush any possibility of reform, but never suspecting that we had an entire unit that was dedicated to reforming police forces that behaved that way. As McAllister was reflecting on CivPol officers who'd been killed on mission, as well as local officers he'd trained in Afghanistan who'd been murdered, I thought: this is a highly charged tale of international importance, one that involves idealistic men and women who express their deepest belief in action. That's when I decided to write the book.
So where did you start?
McAllister was headed back to Afghanistan and I started going through the paperwork to accompany him. Out of all the countries CivPol was in at that time, I chose three because they were at the centre of world attention and showed different aspects of the mission. I chose Afghanistan because it was right in the middle of a bloody war and most experts were saying that an honest police force would be the single most important factor in setting the country on the path to national recovery. One other important reason I chose Afghanistan was that CivPol was deploying female Canadian police to train male and female Afghan cops in Kandahar, where women had almost no rights. The idea was to demonstrate that, in their professional abilities, women were the equal of men. I chose Palestine because it's one of the most complex regions in the world and both the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis believed that a clean Palestinian police force would be essential to an independent Palestinian state. And I chose Haiti because it was at the top of every survey of failing states, particularly after the earthquake. The country had been traumatized so often by natural, homegrown and foreign-imposed catastrophes that its public services were almost non-existent. Haiti's national police force was considered crucial to establishing a functioning state, and our cops were training police throughout the tormented land. They were living among the population and facing the same risks as the population. In fact, I interviewed two of three Mounties who, not long before I got there, had been captured and tortured by the same violent gang that preyed on their neighbours.
What was it about this story that you felt needed to be told?
Well, the answer is in your question: it wasn't being told. Almost no one knew what our police were doing in all these countries. If you asked the average Canadian, "Have our police served in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Guatemala, Iraq, Western Sahara, the Congo, South Sudan and Kyrgyzstan?" they'd say, "What? I thought they were just in Haiti." If there's one thing that's been heartbreaking to me about this lack of knowledge of what our CivPol officers have done overseas for 25 years, it's been their homecoming. I mean, their families meet them at the airport, but there are no monuments to CivPol officers, there's no Highway of Heroes, there's no day of remembrance devoted to them. They're one of the last vestiges of our Blue Helmet heritage and they're heralded in the countries where they train police, but they're almost unknown back here in Canada. And I would just like Canadians to be aware that, since 1989, thousands of their local police have tried to make the world a better place for tens of millions of people in states in crisis. Many of them come home physically or psychologically wounded and they just go back to work, with almost no public recognition for what they've accomplished in war zones as non-combatant police trainers.
They've had successes, they've had failures, they are still works in progress, but it really is a worthy mission and I believe Canadians should know that the people in the countries where Canadians work really value them. In Haiti, local civilians call our Canadian CivPol officers Canada Bombaguy. It means, "Good Guy Canada." So if you go to Haiti, you're going to be known as Good Guy Canada because our CivPol men and women are down there helping that country set up a lasting institution.