It may be nearly 1,000 km away, but a program already in place at Lethbridge College may become a vital component for the yet to be developed Grande Prairie Municipal Police Force.
During Monday’s Grande Prairie City Council meeting when the decision was made to transition away from the RCMP to a municipal police force, the Lethbridge College Cadet Training program was brought up numerous times as a potential solution to recruitment and training
Dean of the Centre for Justice and Human Services at Lethbridge College, Trudi Mason says she has been in “discussions with the Grande Prairie team.”
“Chris Manuel [Executive Director of Emergency &Enforcement Services for the City of Grande Prairie] approached me to start discussions in the fall to see what it would be like to have a cadet class in Grande Prairie,” Mason says.
Mason says the conversations looked at how the faculty would manage a cadet class in the city, and if the training would be done in Grande Prairie or Lethbridge.
READ MORE: City moving forward with transition to municipal police force
“Grande Prairie Police Service would host the cadet class, and we would provide a faculty member from our team to go to Grande Prairie and work with them,” Mason says. “ We do have all the curriculum in place and we always provide a liaison to our agencies that works very closely with them, so it’s certainly a very doable collaboration and I hope we are able to move forward with it.”
The one-year program works with departments in Southern Alberta including the Medicine Hat Police Service, Taber Police and Lethbridge Police Service, but they also train cadets from Manitoba First Nations, Blood Tribe Policing, and CP Rail.