Chief Alan Murphy

The Porch is excited to welcome Chief Alan Murphy for a discussion on the Medicine Hat Police Service. The Medicine Hat Police Commission announced this past October that the Chief’s contract has been extended for six more years. Since coming to Medicine Hat, Chief Murphy has focused on enhancing the police service and community engagement.

Transcript

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Biggest challenge we've had probably the last three years and continue to have is just around, mental health and addiction that leads to homelessness that we see on our streets and mostly in, in, in our in and around our downtown. I would say that continues to be the challenge in probably in all cities in our province. So it's not unique to Medicine Hat, but that'll be one of our challenges for certain. This is Bring Back the Porch podcast dedicated to neighborly conversations right here in Medicine Hat. Hi, and welcome to the porch. My name is Lynnette Schneider, and I am very happy and excited to welcome the chief of the Medicine Hat Police Service. Chief Murphy, welcome to the Porch. Good morning. Thank you very much. Great to see you again. Good to see you, too. I'm really excited to have you on here. We know that in the last month, you were able to renew your contact contract here with the Medicine Hat Police Service. How excited are you to continue being the chief? Very excited. Very proud to be the chief for the Medicine Hat Police Service. I was back in, on October 12th. It's been three years since I got here, so, I love living here. It's a great city. And, very proud to continue to be the chief for, the next six years. It's an awesome opportunity. And just to keep building on what we already started, so it's fantastic. So, in the three years that you've been the chief, what do you think has been the biggest change in policing in our in our area? Probably the biggest challenge. You'll go there. Biggest challenge we've had probably the last three years and continue to have is just around, mental health and addiction that leads to homelessness that we see on our streets. And most see it in, in our in and around our downtown. I would say that continues to be the challenge in probably in all cities in our province. So it's not unique to medicine have, but that'd be one of our challenges for certain. So I know that, sort of getting the keys to the shop again as a, as it happens to be, you're going to be leading the team, the men and women of the medicine and police service. Yep. What kind of priorities are you setting, moving forward now that you sort of have six years to kind of set some priorities? Yes. Well, what I'll start is internally. So, internally, we've in the last year or so, in January of 2025, we hired a deputy chief, Rob Sini. So he's in town now. He's he's been with us for, into his 11th month now. So it's been fantastic having a complete team. That's been a blessing. That's been going very well for us. And then that leads us to, be able to do our work a lot, more efficiently. So internally, I would say a big priority is, make sure our training is up to speed where it needs to be in our equipment. And we've. So we've done a lot of work around that. So we continue that and, we also, in the last year entered into a partnership with Medicine Hat College to do our recruit training. So that is an amazing partnership to have locally. We keep the funding here locally. Obviously, that we spend on our training, which is a big deal to me. And I think our community be happy that the money stays in town. So it's been a great partnership with the college this year, and we're actually in our second class already. We started we had one last January, the first class with the college. They graduated from the program in June, and then they hit the street. And we have a second class that started in October here on October 6th. And they are they were in their classroom phase of the training now. So that's been excellent. So, this class specifically, I know our citizens and our listeners might be interested as ten recruits in it. Seven or Medicine Hat Police Service recruits. And two are for the, Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway Police, and one is for the Blood Trail Police Service. We have ten in total, and we also train for the other agencies, as I noted. So, we're hoping to have another class that will start in late September, October of 2026. So, we're continuing to recruit for that class. So for anybody listening, if they have a family member or they themselves would like to be a police officers, great opportunity right now. And our recruiting process is open until March 31st, I believe, of 26. So get your application in. And it's a great career and we want people to be part of this. So it's awesome. A career that has many kind of footprints too, because policing isn't just, the cop on the street. There's other avenues that are, that policing is involved in, whether it's, you know, working with people that are going through a hard time or, you know, drug enforcement traffic or all kinds of stuff. How important is the recruitment process right now? So recruitment is a huge deal. And so I'll, I'll go back one step before I continue on with the answer is we also started a program this year with the Medicine Hat Catholic Board of Education. It's a first responders academy, so we're involved with them as our as the fire department in town. So it's a first responders academy. So one of the big things with recruiting got to start early with people. So this allows people that are students in high school to be part of the first responders. And I think there were 20 plus people wanted to do it this year. And so they can work with the fire department, with the police service and do this program and see if they might want to get involved. And this is a good time early to get them to have a look at it. And we also get to see them as well. So it's good for both sides. That helps with the recruiting later. And it ties into our partnership with the college because the college has a, a justice program. So they can go they can leave high school. I think they can even get some credits towards the college program, go to school there, and then after you're all set for a career with us. So it's good on all sides for our community. It's sort of like a sports team. These guys started started a farm team basically did is kind of, you know, get things going, trying to attract that talent ahead of time. That's right. In the NHL, you know, NHL teams aren't just looking at the Medicine Hat Tigers players. They're looking at kids that are very young in minor hockey, and they know early on who they think someone might be later in their career as a hockey player. So we're doing something similar. Far less of a level that is done in the pro sports, but we're trying to do our own version of that here in Medicine Hat and again, speaks of the partnerships we have. Like, it's awesome in this community to, to do it. And the president of the college, Kevin Shuffle Blossom, and the deputy superintendent of the Catholic Board of Education, Nick, we we asked them and they asked us, do you want to partner with this or like. Yes. And they said the same. We figured out how we were going to do it after, but just the willingness was the part we needed. And that was the easiest part, was that all the parties were willing to do it. Yes. Sometimes just getting the right heads in the right room makes a huge difference in things. Yeah, there's nothing worse than when people's first answer is no. And maybe they can discuss it more and get to a yes. But our answers were yes, and as were our partners. And how do we make it work for everybody? And that's what we did, and I sorry, I forgot to mention Nick's last name is Nick Gale is the deputy superintendent over at the Catholic Board. So, sure makes it easier when all the partners have a willingness to do it. You can get just about anything done when that's the case. So let's let's shift to some of your other priorities that you're looking at within the police service. I know we talked some of the internal ones. Maybe there's some external things that we should, focus on. Sure. So internally I've already or sorry, externally I've already mentioned one. And, it's it speaks to the issues around mental health and addiction and what we see how that plays into homelessness. So very difficult issue for all cities to tackle. Very similar in all cities. You can pick a city probably anywhere in North America, but certainly in Canada. All the things the police deal with in a city every day, all the calls we go to and the things we get called to, I would say 75 to 80% of those. If you went back to the root cause of what led to the issue, goes back to mental health and addiction. So that wouldn't be a surprise to most people listening. But a lot of police work relates back to that. The interesting part is the root cause is not necessarily a police issue, and that's where some of the problems what you see on the streets and when property crimes happen as a result of homelessness and some social disorder issues, those certainly fall into the laps of the police. But all the root causes leading up to that fall into health care. There's mental health, like a lot of different things, but a lot of it starts off as a health issue and social services, various social services and ultimately ends up, as a policing issue at the back end, which is so again, in this community, our partners have been very willing to work together, which is awesome. And we have to have a a peace team. It's called we've had for the last two years. So it's the proactive engagement and community enhancement team. The idea of the peace team is the police service. It's our bylaw team, the fire departments involved. We have usually someone from HHS involved in the mosque and center, lots of other community housing. Is there the idea when people are living, in our river valley or living in tents around town, the team goes there. One, we don't want people living that way. It's a very dangerous way to live. They usually have a heat source to heat a tent, which could be a propane tank or, we've seen in not in our city, thankfully, but in other cities where people have died in those circumstances because they're not supposed to heat a tent that way, obviously. So the peace team goes out. Sometimes community reports encampments to us. Sometimes we find them on our own because they're visible. The team will go out, not let the encampment grow, and then also try to hook the person up that we find there with services. So they're not living that way. And that's where we have all the players there every week. When we do this to it, you might only get one shot to speak to this person to get him some services. So that's the idea. And then the idea if we can get them out of living that way and get them some services, we probably are able to deal with the crime issue. Our health partners can deal with the health issues that are there, but it's a team effort. And in this community it's worked really well. I think I want to say the number this summer. It started on May 1st and went and or sorry, April 1st and goes until just the end of last week. We had almost 800 encampment visits total, so that's a big deal. When I say encampments in our city, they tend to be a lot smaller, but so but and 800 visits to sites that we went to. So that's a big deal for our city. Are they, reoccurring sites or are they like just 800 random? Some are reoccurring. So we track where we're going. Obviously sometimes a site is dismantled and within a few days it's back because for some reason, that location appeals to somebody. And I don't know how many different. And we also track the people we're dealing. So I know who we're dealing with so we can work together with them. So it wouldn't be 800 different people, you know, have a lot of repeat people moving around. Some people want services, some don't. But you got to keep trying because sometimes they need to be at a place in their life and, and how they're feeling that they're ready to accept help. And that might not be today and it might not be this year, but it might be next year. But that's where you got to keep asking. So that's what we do. I'm assuming that creating relationships with, these members of our community, that may have lived here their whole lives or are kind of moving through Medicine Hat at some point in their lives and have now they're here. Creating and fostering those relationships are incredibly important in order to get the trust to to help these people. It's there's no one story of how someone finds himself homeless. There's no I've heard a lot of different stories. We're on the Trans-Canada highway. Sure. So sometimes it's people passing through that find themselves homeless or find themselves in a situation. But there's a lot of stories out there of how it happened. Some are quite sad. Some are completely by accident. Some have been a choice someone's made. There's a lot of different stories out there, but either way, it's, our role to be part of it, to try to end it. Very difficult to get. That's easier said than it is done. But I'm thankful for all the partners in our community because at least we're trying. There's nothing worse than if we give up, because that's what we shouldn't do. So, that's one of the external priorities, is there's something else that you're that you really want to try to tackle in the next six years. Yeah. One that's tied to this, one tied to homelessness is, anywhere encampments are found, property to crime, anybody in any city would know this property crime tends to branch out around these areas. So we like to know that frustrates our citizens. So we want to make that a priority to deal with that. And we are dealing with it in different ways. Obviously, drugs coming in their communities are priority for us, and we are fortunate in medicine Hat to have a partnership with alert that stands for the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams. So we have an alert is a joint partnership of all the policing in the province. So in Medicine Hat, it's Medicine Hat Police Service and the RCMP working together in an office within our building. And they tackle drugs and organized crime in our region, not just our city, but in our region. So, there's another alert team over in. Let's Bridge one up in Calgary, one in Edmonton, Grand Prairie, and I believe in Fort McMurray. So alert is spread out in all different areas to tackle drugs and organized crime. So alert continues to be a priority for us. And that's funded by the provincial government. So thankful for the province's funding of that program because it's critical to our community and our region. I would assume that one of the offshoots from that is better communication within the inter agencies. That if you know, if there's something that they're seeing in Grand Prairie, the chances that Medicine Hat knows about it before it gets here or we're starting to see it here, too, we can make those connections a lot easier than, say, it was before. Alert. That's right. And we did. We do a lot of information sharing around, what drugs are around town, what drugs might be coming our way. So we do a lot of information sharing about types of crime. So a lot of that is shared which is helpful. But yeah, the alert team is a great program. And again, thankful that the province funds that because it's such important work. But it's good for our community. Any time we get to keep drugs and organized crime out of our community, that's a good thing. But again, alert is one of our priorities, along with everything else we try to get done. Well, I'm really excited to see what you can do in the next six years, maybe longer. Yeah. You know, we've we got a great team now and it's you don't realize what you don't have. The reason we took a while to, in Medicine Hat there's been different. The way this the executive office has been built is changed over time. So there's been a chief, a deputy chief and two inspectors at one point in their history, and there's been a chief and three inspectors and no deputy chief. So when I got here, there was a just a chief and two inspectors and no deputy. And the third inspector was vacant. So rather than fill it right away, I wanted to work in the system to see, because I only knew what I brought here from Edmonton, which is not necessarily applicable here. So I waited about a year and a half to see what I thought. And what I realized fairly quickly was that the best model that I thought would work best for this city is the chief deputy chief, and two inspectors. The reason I thought that is because to go from inspector all the way up to chief is very difficult, and you're not set up for success? I don't think so. The succession planning with a deputy in place. The deputy is far better positioned to become the chief than one of the inspectors, better positioned to become the deputy, and so on. So you set yourself up for years of stability, is the idea. And that's why I thought that way. So I'm still a believer in that. It's been great having Deputy Chief Saini with us. He came from originally he was a member in the Brantford Police Service in Ontario for 23 years, I believe, and then he had, about three years as the deputy chief in Nelson, British Columbia. And then I convinced him to come over to the good weather in Medicine Hat. Although the day he came here last fall, I think it was in November. He had a thick winter coat, but it was like -20 that week when he came for a visit with his wife, and, it was cold and although they got lots of snow in Nelson, it generally wasn't that cold. So he asked me about the cold. So we blamed it on him and said he brought it here. I was blamed for the same thing when I came here that I brought Edmonton's cold. Yeah. So we blamed him, which is. Which is easy to do. He was new. So, very fortunate to have him with us still and to be part of this community and this team. So I am very pleased with what we got going on, and we're built to be strong for the future. Now. That's excellent to hear. I'm so glad you could join us today. Thank you so. Much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This episode of The Porch is produced by Lynnette Schneider with the aid of Bob Schneider. If you want to learn more, visit Bring Back the porch.com. Other.