The Ottawa Police Service is in the process of hiring 80 new officers.
It wasn’t a career Zeim Ali had considered. He grew up in Ottawa community housing, in a neighbourhood where many teenage boys, himself included, didn’t always have positive interactions with police.
Zeim Ali is one of possibly thousands of candidates vying for 80 open officer positions with the Ottawa Police Service this year. As police services face increased scrutiny and community pressure to change, police recruiting is changing, too. By the end of 2020, the OPS had received 2,700 applications, Keen said; recruiting had actually increased.
But there is a growing concern in police departments across Canada about their ability to continue to attract — and retain — young officers. At a police services board meeting on May 30, OPS leaders explained some of the challenges they were having with recruitment. Among them: a difficult work-life balance marked by rotating shift work and a desire to have recruits commit to a potential lifetime career.
“We’re getting busier because the city of Ottawa is growing exponentially,” Samuel said in an interview. “We’ve been telling the police service for the last five years: ‘You need to hire more, you need to hire more. There’s a staffing crisis, you’re going to have a staffing crisis.’
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