Off Patrol: Memories of BC Provincial Policemen

Steven R. Hewitt is a graduate history student at the University of
Saskatchewan.

Chapter titles like “The Killer from Iowa,” “For the Flying
Dutchman—A Hangman’s Noose,” and “Tracking the North’s Mad
Giant” bring to mind supermarket tabloids and trashy crime novels. In
this book, they refer to the adventures of members of the British
Columbia Provincial Police. The force, long since disbanded after it was
replaced by the RCMP in 1950, represented law and order in Canada’s
lotus land for nearly 100 years.

The memories of the police officers (many of which originally appeared
in the B.C. Provincial Police Veterans’ Association’s newsletter,
Off Patrol) are of varying interest and quality. While the book offers
little in the way of a substantive history of the B.C. Police, many of
the sections do indirectly shed light on police attitudes toward Native
Canadians, minority groups, and women. Not surprisingly, the police were
unable to divorce their perceptions from those of the society in which
they lived.

Taken as a whole, the collection offers some insight into the process
of policing. For example, three different policemen observed that they
adjusted their law-enforcement activities to conform to the attitudes of
people in the communities they patrolled; thus, on occasion prostitution
was ignored, as were many petty infractions of the law. These
individuals felt that avoiding a “by the book mentality” made the
task of policing easier. Here and elsewhere in the book, the cumulative
portrait is of police officers as human beings replete with flaws, not
figures to be placed on pedestals.