More women needed in Sarnia police: deputy chief

Julie Craddock recalls having reservations about joining the Sarnia Police Service.

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The 30-year policing veteran, mostly with Halton Regional police after about a year with the OPP in northern Ontario, joined Sarnia’s force last year as her first female deputy chief.

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She’s the service’s only female officer in a leadership — inspector and above — post.

The next highest-ranking woman is a sergeant, Craddock said.

That under-representation, she said, gave her pause when she considered taking the job, and leaving behind a service and support network with which she’d spent 29 years.

“I was concerned coming in as one of the first (women) that’s held a high-ranking position, how I would be welcomed in the organization, how I would be accepted here,” she said. “And it’s been a really pleasant surprise.”

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Craddock said she’s felt included, has had senior male officers tell her they’re glad she’s there. People have listened to her.

“For women, for sure there is impostor syndrome, certainly within policing, because it’s a fairly male-dominated profession,” she said, adding she also was her appointment might be viewed as tokenism.

She’s a member of Beausoleil First Nation and Sarnia’s first Indigenous deputy chief of police.

Any worries were quickly dispelled, she said. “It’s not that I’ve been tolerated coming into the organization, I’ve been embraced.”

Sarnia’s service has just 11 female officers, including Craddock, meaning fewer than nine per hundred of the city’s sworn officers are women, the deputy said.

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The national average is around 23 per cent.

Sarnia’s percentage needs work, Craddock said.

“Over the years, we just haven’t been hiring the number of women officers that we would like to see,” she said, adding she doesn’t know why the number is so low.

Part of the challenge in closing the gap is getting spaces at the Ontario Police College, she said.

“We’re competing with services like Toronto and Peel (and) while Toronto might get 100 seats, Sarnia is getting two” because seats are allocated based on service size, she said.

If Sarnia can’t get space for it applicants at the college, they go to other services, she said.

“It is something that we are really working to try and overcome,” she said.

Sarnia currently has 13 vacancies, a combination of adding five new positions this year — boosting the total complement to 129 — and things like retirements and people moving away, she said.

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After a series of emails and phone calls, Sarnia recently won a third seat at the college, she said. They hope to fill the service’s employment gap by early 2025, though more retirements and departures are likely in the interim.

The police college takes new students four times a year, she said.

Interestingly, women are spread across various disciplines in the Sarnia service, from investigations and forensic identification, to front-line and drug investigations, Craddock said.

“Women are doing some really incredible roles that in other organizations, you see not as many women doing,” she said.

Again, why isn’t clear, she said.

“In our units within the organization, women are actually well represented,” she said.

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“We just don’t have the number of women that we need… to be reflective of the community that we police and… to fill some of the gaps in other parts of the organization.”

Succession planning is another important consideration when it comes to adding women to the force, she said, noting her own retirement is likely about three years away.

Hopes are to recruit new women officers and have them rise through the ranks to leadership positions, she said.

“We know that if we don’t start investing now, 15 years from now, we’re going to be having the same conversations,” she said.

Targeted recruitment at job fairs by having women like Craddock represent the organization, and perhaps holding women-only information sessions, are among ideas being considered to attract new recruits, she said.

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“Women have different questions,” she said.

“They have questions about the physical testing,” about the impact of shift work on home life, any benefits specific to women, and career opportunities, she said.

The idea is to give prospective recruits the space to ask those questions away from male applicants, so “they maybe feel less embarrassed,” she said.

It’s important women meet all the qualifications and there’s no affirmative-action hiring, she said. “Because then, you do risk women becoming tokenized.”

Hiring experienced officers from other services also gets around police college space constraints, she said.

The service is trying to spread the word that Sarnia is a good place to work in policing.

“We don’t have a high turnover here,” she said.

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Sarnia’s appeal is something to which Const. Kristen Carter can attest.

She started with Sarnia’s service a year ago after spending five years in the building with Victim Services of Sarnia-Lambton, including three as executive director.

“My working relationship with Sarnia police was really positive and I just saw the professionalism of the individuals here,” said the general patrol officer, adding she always wanted to be a cop.

“When I was ready to start my career in policing, this was my first choice,” she said.

She’s experienced no difference in treatment on the force because she’s a woman, she said.

“Sometimes you can be treated differently out in the community by … different individuals you’re interacting with,” a friend from another police service told her when she was considering joining Sarnia police, she said.

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But that’s been minimal and “similar to the experience you have as a woman in this world,” she said.

Dispatcher Courtney Thornton called the service a “big family.”

The 23-year veteran from Sarnia works on the civilian side, which is 70 per cent female — 62 of 88 positions — Craddock said.

Call volume has gone up “significantly” in the last five years, Thornton said, and calls tend to be more about drugs and homelessness now than bar fights when she first started.

“What’s nice about having a small force is we all know each other very well,” she said. “We’re all friends.”

It seems fitting to recognize what women in Sarnia’s service do, especially with International Women’s Day March 8, Craddock said. “Because I don’t think we’ve done a great job of celebrating our female members in the past.”

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It’s also important to highlight the police service is an organization going through a lot of change, she said.

That includes updating equipment, adding new capabilities such as a dog team and a auxiliary police, and increasing police presence in the community, Craddock said, citing her arrival and that of with whom she worked before coming to Sarnia — as another example.

“We’re trying to modernize (and) part of that modernization process is going to be bringing more women into policing roles,” she said.

About three years ago, the culture at Sarnia police came under scrutiny amid allegations of workplace discrimination, harassment, assault and racism.

A third-party report, not released publicly, found pervasive gossip, but no evidence of harassment, discrimination or violence, the police chief at the time said.

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An Ontario Labor Ministry report found the third-party report lostand the service and a female complainant officer shortly thereafter reached a confidential agreement.

Sarnia hired a new chief in 2022, and Craddock joined a year later.

A board official at the time said the change in leadership had nothing to do with the workplace investigation.

Craddock said she was aware of that history coming in.

“In the back of my mind, wondering how I was going to be accepted, what the experience was going to be like,” she said.

But it wasn’t an obstacle to joining, she said, adding she was surprised to find a healthy police culture.

“It’s not that we walked into an organization that was broken,” she said of her and Davis’s arrival.

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“We walked into an organization that had some issues,” she said, adding the service has embraced a lot of changes.

Police culture generally has changed dramatically in 30 yearsshe noted.

Craddock said she started policing at 18, right out of high school, pursuing something she’d always wanted to do.

“I don’t think there was a lot priority to being a police officer that really prepared me,” she said, even though her father, a retired staff sergeant, spent 30 years with Toronto police.

Craddock’s husband is a Mountie and two of her four children are Nishnawbe Aski Police Service officers.

“The mentality back then really for a young female police officer was to come in and just be quiet, don’t rock the boat; don’t call out behaviors that were wrong,” she said. “And that’s changed so much.”

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When she started, there were just a handful of women in the organizations she served, she said.

Now, women make up a much larger proportion of policing services in many organizations across Canada, she said, and Sarnia hopes to catch up.

Women also bring different qualities to the job, she said.

That includes a greater tendency to humility, she said, adding she tries to be willing to admit when she doesn’t know something and ask for help.

“I don’t necessarily … see my male counterparts always being as comfortable sharing vulnerabilities,” she said. “But I do think that is something that’s important, because it allows other people to say maybe they don’t know the answer, or maybe they’ve made a mistake.”

Sarnia has made her feel authentically included and making women feel that way is crucial to increasing representation in the service, she said.

“One of the best things I’ve had somebody say to me here is ‘I never thought of it this way, because no one’s ever shared that perspective,’ ” she said.

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@tylerkula

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