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Making Mounties: RCMP Training in the 1950s

A Research Proposal

The training techniques of the RCMP have historically been shrouded in secrecy. (Teather 1997: 4)

Through concerned and often brilliant social advertising campaigns, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have emerged since the 1970s as arguably the dominant Canadian icon (Dawson 1998). Today the Mountie in his or her scarlet-red tunic is the third most recognized global cultural symbol after Mickey Mouse and Coca Cola. However, as Canada’s federal policing agency, with responsibilities for both national security and the day-to-day policing of several Canadian provinces, the importance of the RCMP extends well beyond their symbolism.

The RCMP Training Academy (Depot) in Regina, Saskatchewan, has a central place in the history of the force. Since its inception in 1882, it has been the main training centre for the RCMP and thousands of individuals have undergone training there on their way to becoming Mounties. In recent years it has emerged as among the most conspicuously advertised tourist attractions in Saskatchewan. On summer afternoons hundreds of visitors line the parade ground to watch recruits conduct precision drill. Visitors are encouraged to stroll through the museum and gift-shop where they are presented a sanitized history of the force and offered the opportunity to purchase any number of souvenirs emblazoned with the RCMP crest.

Depot has been, however, the site of more controversy, manipulation and occasional violence than is apparent in official accounts. Just meters from the museum and gift shop, for example, lies the unmarked site where Louis Riel was hanged in one of the early defining and most contentious acts of the Royal North West Mounted Police (predecessor to the RCMP). More recently, Robert Teather on his first day at Depot in 1962, was marched out to a field adjacent to the training grounds. There a Corporal pointed to some shovels, a tape measure and brusquely commanded that he was to dig a grave for a recruit from a preceding troop who, finding the pressures of training unbearable, had committed suicide.

Recruits at that time were subjected to a training regime firmly based on a military model (Roth 1998). Today that approach to training is routinely positioned as part of a less enlightened past that has been replaced by more modern police training principles and a formal police curriculum (Himmelfarb 1991; 1992; Sherman 1986). Unfortunately, most contemporary depictions of militarized basic police training are little more than a dismissive caricature, advanced to justify contemporary developments in police training rather than to improve our understanding of the dynamics, limitations and successes of how such training was accomplished in the past.

Despite the immediate intuitive appeal and obvious sociological richness of basic training, it has been subjected to comparatively few scholarly examinations (Dyer 1985; Hockey 1986). The 1970s experienced a brief flurry of studies exploring the types of individuals who entered the military and how basic training might influence their personality (Cockerham 1973; Faris 1975; Wamsley 1972), but this research program faded and has not yet been re-invigorated (Cockerham 2003).

This lacuna is still greater when it comes to scholarly examinations of military basic training of the public police. Such studies are virtually non-existent. Instead, there is a scattered Canadian literature of first-hand accounts of the experience of basic training (McKenzie 1992; Teather 1997). Unfortunately, none of these offer scholarly insights, and instead border on hagiography. Indeed, McKenzie’s (1992: 9) description of RCMP training suggests that membership in the RCMP is the closest thing in Canada to ‘secular sainthood.’

Objectives

There are three main objectives of this study:

To produce a book-length analysis of RCMP basic training in the 1950s. This study will cast a light on a conspicuously under-examined topic in policing studies per se and in Canadian history more generally.

To advance critical understanding of the dynamics of police change. The study will concentrate on 1) changing models of governance and 2) the formation and transformation of a distinctive police habitus.

To connect theoretical literatures on governance with more sociological and historical examinations of the experience of being governed.

Making Mounties is an extension and elaboration of research projects and substantive themes central to my previous research. I have conduced considerable research and published widely on policing and governance. In previous work with Richard Ericson (Ericson and Haggerty 1997) I explored how in the ‘risk society’ the public police have been constituted as objects of governance through new knowledge and information technologies. This project also connects with my research interest in the relationship between the military and criminal justice institutions (Haggerty 1992; Haggerty Forthcoming; Haggerty and Ericson 2001).

Context

The 1950s marked an important point in the history of the RCMP and of public policing more generally. As Reiner (1992) has famously suggested, the 1950s represented a ‘golden age’ for policing. By the 1950s the immediate rush of decommissioned Word War II soldiers into the RCMP had started to subside. While Cold War controversies, particularly the Gouzenko spy scandal, rocked the policing community, policing had yet to be subjected to the types of withering critiques characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s (Canada 1981; United States 1976; 1977). Serious questions were beginning to be raised, however, about whether received police practices were appropriate for a country undergoing rapid modernization.

During the course of their careers, individuals who entered the RCMP in the 1950s ultimately lived through some of the most dramatic changes and challenges that policing has ever seen in Canada. Most prominently, these included the McDonald Commission into RCMP wrongdoing and the subsequent creation of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Many of the individuals trained in the 1950s ultimately rose to senior positions in the force and were vital in initiating and overseeing the emergence of dramatically new approaches to policing. Key components of their belief and attitude structures were forged during their early days at Depot. This habitus carried them through their careers, shaping their relations to any number of developments I policing and society more generally.

Police training has been a topic of considerable scholarly and public discussion in recent years because it touches a pressing political and academic question - how to best effect change in police practice (Chan 2001; Chan, Devery and Doran 2003; Hayes 2002; Otwin 2004). A substantial volume of work has concentrated on transforming policing through advancing new models of policing. These have included professionalization, community policing, problem-oriented policing, zero-tolerance policing and now intelligence-led policing. Advocates for each approach, however, have recognized that the success of any model is itself contingent on transforming police officers such that they learn new knowledges and techniques and embraced new attitudes and orientations. Police training is positioned as the vital factor capable of bringing about such change.

Two approaches to police transformation dominate the academic literature. The first is the ‘professional’ model, which concentrates on rational training procedures. It is articulated most passionately by Bittner (1990), who advocates that policing should become a full post-graduate degree where officers undergo a prolonged education into the philosophies, regulations and techniques of policing. This emphasis on formal education is ultimately an enlightenment pedagogical ideal applied to the police. As such, it tends to be the preferred vision of police transformation embraced by police organizations.

The second model of police change focuses on the centrality of police culture. Here, culture refers to the various attitudes, dispositions, techniques and metaphors that characterize the working knowledge of policing (Crank 1998; Herbert 1998; Reiner 2000; Shearing and Ericson 1991). Police culture is embedded within a distinctive policing habitus, which, following Bourdieu, refers to a series of durable, transposable dispositions that mediate an individual’s actions and the external environment (Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Chan 1996). Such personality structures provides a distinctive ‘feel for the game’ allowing individuals to cope with a host of novel situations. A police habitus is a key component of the informal curriculum communicated during routine encounters with other officers. It often represents a powerful conservative force that tends to undermine the more progressive ambitions of the professional model of police training.

RCMP Depot provides an excellent empirical site for the study of these two models of police change. The 1950s saw the slow emergence of more modern and rationalist approaches to police training, approaches that focused on developing a wider set of police skills beyond military drill, physical fitness and marksmanship. At the same time, decidedly more occurred at Depot than mastery of a set of formal skills and knowledge. Depot continues to be the location par excellence in Canada for the inculcation of a distinctive police culture. From the conspicuous memorial to officers killed in the line of duty, to the extensive iconography of the Queen and the coat of arms, Depot quickly immerses recruits into a broader national culture of policing.

This study of police training has two substantive foci: 1) the governmental practices of police training, and 2) the experience of police training.

At its most basic level, governance involves official reflection on the aims and ambitions of governing, as well as related efforts taken towards managing different populations. Studies of governance conventionally involve an interrogation of the rationalities and technologies of governance. In the context of police basic training, this translates into exploring what constellation of knowledge and techniques was employed to transform citizens into Mounties. It involves questioning how recruits were objectified and made amenable to further scrutiny and transformation. What knowledges and practices circulated in efforts to effect change?

To contemporary sensibilities training in Depot in the 1950s appears to have been characterized by the almost total absence of the governmental techniques and technologies we now take for granted as being intrinsic to police training. Most of the main epistemological and institutional forces of modernity, such as psychology, law, management science and formal pedagogy, had yet to make substantial inroads into police training. There was no conception that recruits might have legal rights and a complete absence of explicit evaluation criteria. Such conspicuous absences raise the question of which collection of rationalities and technologies were used to make Mounties?

At the outset three governmental techniques stand out for further scrutiny. First, governance at that time involved a form of brute physicality. Making Mounties involved targeting bodies. However, this did not represent an absolute sovereign power over recruits. It remains an open question as to what types of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott 1985) were possible in such a total institution (Goffman 1961), or how such practices were themselves anticipated and incorporated into the training regime. Second, recruits were subjected to various forms of psychological manipulation. However, the logic and specifics of this manipulation remain unclear, as these techniques were not derived from an explicit scientific psychology, but rather drew from a form of folk psychology shared by instructors. As such, it is an example of how ‘common sense’ knowledge can become a key epistemological resource in governmental practice (Valverde 2003). Third, governance involved the express aim of disciplining recruits (Foucault 1977). And while discipline figures prominently as an explicit aim of recruit training, it begs the question of how discipline was conceptualized and operationalized in a policing context. Did it differ from military discipline, a discipline that seeks to instill a strict adherence to hierarchy and immediate response to commands, all justified through an appeal to the imperatives of combat (Dyer 1985)? Preliminary examination suggests that while in a policing context discipline was characterized by many of the familiar techniques of hierarchal observation, distribution in space and documentation (Foucault 1977), the governmental ambitions of such discipline were aimed at fostering personal pride and professional responsibility.

The second major focus of this study involves a more sociological and historical investigation into the experience of Depot training from the perspective of police recruits. Who were these individuals and how did they respond to the governmental practices to which they were subjected? This second focus is particularly attractive in that it overcomes the tendency in the police studies literature to treat individual police officers as institutional exemplars – that is, officers are approached not so much individuals as roles. Only recently has there been an interest in examining the personal backgrounds, histories and experiences of individual officers, although this still tends to concentrate on studying senior officers (Reiner 1991; Ziegler 2003).

This study will explore several different axes and processes involved in the development of a police habitus. It will address such things as the racial dynamics of Depot, the place of federalism, and how class, and aspirations of upward mobility, operated. At the outset, however, one topic clearly cries out for further exploration, and that is the construction of a distinctive police masculinity. The ‘machismo’ of police identity is a familiar attribute of police culture (Fielding 1994; Herbert 1997; Reiner 2000), and police training during the 1950s drew from and reinforced dominant conceptions of masculinity. The establishment of such personality structures ultimately contributed to police resistance to various reforms, including the recruitment of women and visible minorities.

How a masculine police identity was fashioned in Depot was often quite intriguing and not necessarily self-evident. Understanding this process requires attending to how police masculinity (or masculinities) were positioned in opposition to three other symbolic groupings: youth, women and other men. The young men who arrived at Depot were intimately aware that basic training was an important status transformation ceremony (Cockerham 1973). The few first-person accounts of recruit training incessantly emphasize that individuals knew (or hoped) that upon completing their training they would no longer be ‘boys.’ Consider the 1963 recruit who proclaims, ‘I’ve not only come here to become a cop, I’ve also come here to become a man’ (Teather 1997: 86). Constructing a masculine police identify also involved enforcing figurative and physical separations between men and women. While women were largely absent from Depot, their presence was pervasive in the form of the institutionalized denigration of women and a series of more curious set of gender performances (Butler 1990). For example, recruits who fought with one another were required to undergo an official ‘marriage ceremony’ to demonstrate their forgiveness. This was replete with a ‘bridal party’ and a white wedding dress worn by one of the combatants. This practice is suggestive of a third important symbolic division in Depot: the relationship with other men. Homosexuality was a highly sensitive topic for the RCMP, and was grounds for dismissal. The force in the 1950s was involved in a Cold-War obsession with weeding-out homosexuals from the civil service that at times became absurd (Kinsman 1995). The symbolic and personal place of homosexuality and homopobia in police training during this period, as well as its relationship to the production of a normative heterosexual, homosocial masculine police identity, remains an entirely unexplored topic.