Posted August 4, 2011 by Scotty Roxburgh

Good day to you,

I hope you all have had a good summer despite the severe weather that seems to have bounced around the globe.

The global recession has hit us all hard; and as a result of times of restraint training budgets have taken a beating, so much so that Chiefs of Training have not been able to afford to attend an ANRET conference for the last three years and we have had to cancel the last three conferences. This does not bode well for us ensuring that we are maintaining similar, consistent, and defendable standards of training within all of our agencies. We therefore, are slowly reverting back to the time before ANRET was founded in 1985. We should not allow ourselves to reach that point where management, staff and the public have concerns about if we are doing things with the most current technology, knowledge and the best and most safe way ensuring the safety of the public and our staff.  Civil and criminal suits are even more prevalent these days especially when the public walk around with video cell phones and cameras at the ready to capture anything that is slightly out of the unusual. We only have to look at such incidents as the beating of Rodney King in California, the taser incident of Robert Dziekański at Vancouver Airport, the shooting of The First Nation member, John T. Williams in Seattle, Washington and most recently the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver and there are many more incidents to know the power of the cell phone and video camera.