The Iceman cometh

In describing the sport that afforded him history-book status after his American ice hockey team slayed the ‘unbeatable’ Soviet Union at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Mike Eruzione proclaimed: “Hockey is a metaphor for life. You have to be willing to get knocked down and get back up.”

As someone who played one of the toughest games before entering one of the world’s toughest professions, Dale McFee would feel the inspirational weight of those words.

Edmonton’s incumbent Chief of Police, who played for the Prince Albert Raiders, a major Canadian junior ice hockey team, in his late teens, showed early steel by passing his police physical exam while nursing a broken collarbone, sustained while playing ice hockey. And his tenure in one of Canada’s most high-profile law-enforcement positions comes during a moment in history when policing has been under great scrutiny.

“We’re trying to make sure that we’re writing our own story,” McFee says in response to the global ‘defund the police’ social media movement.

“We’ve got to make sure that safety rings are paramount and that we’re looking at policing from a holistic or multidimensional lens. Change is not something we should fear; the right change is critical to the safety of our communities.”

Putting people first

Indeed, McFee is far from a dogmatic law-and-order dinosaur. He views the business of policing through a modern prism, leveraging an innovative, decidedly people-centric approach to address the biggest issues affecting Edmonton’s almost one million residents: namely mental health, addiction and homelessness.

“We do everything with empathy and accountability,” he says. “Empathy for the people who need it, and accountability in giving them a connection to services, from the health system to the justice system.

“If you make the first call meaningful, there’s a good chance you can stop the 10th, the 50th, the 100th call. Some of these people have been in and out of the system hundreds of times in a year. The right response at the right time increases our chances for success exponentially.”

Having nurtured successful small and medium-sized businesses of his own – sidelines that have afforded him the chance to lecture on leadership both nationally and beyond Canadian borders –McFee has no qualms about reaching out to the private sector for allies to assist in building these connections.

“We partner with a lot of people and now we’re trying to focus on the right groups. And that partially comes down to common goals, common objectives,” he notes.

As such, McFee has leaned on mathematicians and economists for a different perspective on rehabilitation; recruited epidemiologists to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic; worked with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) on ‘firearms recognition’, whereby shell cases have their own DNA; collaborated with crowdsourcing platform HeroX, through the world’s first community safety and well-being accelerator in partnership with the Edmonton Police Foundation and AlchemistX, to champion the use of GPS trackers inside liquor bottles to combat a spate of store robberies – which, it turns out, was not just petty theft but entwined with organized crime.

Putting data to work

Where the technology has come into its own is in Edmonton Police Service’s adoption of rapid-DNA tech, developed by ANDE Corporation, a system that enables the police service to process samples in mere hours, rather than having to wait for more than six months, as was the case in days gone by.

“You need data,” McFee affirms. “Without data, you can’t frame the right question, and without the right question, you won’t arrive at the correct answers or solutions.”

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But data on its own is only as good as the tools to understand and process it, and for these, the Service relies on private sector partnerships.

“We’ve got all kinds of different technology solutions that help us better investigate,” McFee explains. “Now we’re studying how we look at cold cases through AI. We’re doing genealogy, missing cases, murder cases. We’ve got to use what’s available to us. Most of that stuff comes from the private sector.”

Community focused

Although McFee is passionate about the way data can help prevent and solve crime, he’s also aware that old-fashioned community engagement is the foundation of good policing. For his commitment to community and innovation, he was named Citizen of the Year by the community of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is one of only a few Canadian police chiefs to receive this honor.

McFee also knows that community engagement is the key to economic success.

“You won’t have economic growth unless you have safety, period. If your community’s not safe and people don’t want to work or live or invest there, you lose opportunities,” he says.

“We need to get this right because it’s not just about me, it’s about our kids and our grandkids. If you can put profit and outcome for people in the same sentence, then you’ve cracked the secret.”

Central to this is redirecting vulnerable individuals toward services rather than incarceration, and taking an ecosystem approach to issues such as homelessness, mental health and addiction, helping to reduce demand on the health and justice systems.

“One solution won’t work,” McFee insists. “Pick any wicked problem, and what do you need in the ecosystem to create the change in the environment? You don’t write the policy and then figure it out. It’s working with all levels of government and private sector – as often, the innovation comes from the private sector.”

These relationships will only result in sustained success if they’re established with clear outcomes in mind, constantly evaluated and adjusted where necessary. But with more than 3,000 employees on the books at Edmonton Police Service – 1,000 of whom are civilians – and solid private sector backing, McFee is now equipped with the tools to reach such outcomes.

“Let’s focus on leadership and how we build leaders to follow in our footsteps, and how we make this sustainable,” he says. “But at the same time, it’s not about a title. To use an old hockey analogy: We play for the crest and not the name on the back.”