Features Podcast
Blue Line, The Podcast: Senator Vern White on COVID-19 and the frontline

Dr. Vern White, senator and former police chief, joins us from our nation’s capital for this special podcast episode as we grapple with this unprecedented coronavirus situation. Dr. White is the former Chief of Police in both Ottawa and the Durham Region, and he served with the RCMP for more than 20 years. He is also the lead consultant with Syntax Prepares, an emergency planning and crisis communications agency and he catches up with Blue Line’s editor to share some of his thoughts on policing this pandemic.

Find out more about White’s experience as a chief of police during the H1N1 outbreak, his thoughts on what police leadership should hone in on in the coming months, supporting the larger police family, and how prepared Canadian law enforcement is for something like this.

“I’m not sure you could ever train perfectly for something like this,” he tells Blue Line’s editor. “I’m not sure anyone would have believed we’d have this pandemic in our lifetime, in this way… But I do think it is almost impossible to predict every eventuality; instead we try to prepare for the most likely and I think, as well as we could have prepared, policing has done better than most. The concern I would raise is whether or not we have some of the equipment for a longer period…”

White also touches on the how we need to be looking at preparing for lockdowns:

“If we start to see increased lockdowns — and we potentially will see that, like we’ve seen in other countries — we may see people contravening those lockdowns. Some countries have seen looting, which may see our officers challenged in different ways.”

He also provides his insight on next steps should a number of officers in one agency become infected, necessitating a challenging segregation.

Listen to the SoundCloud link below for the full conversation or wherever you get your podcasts under Annex Business Media: Podcasts.

You can also stream the show here at annexbusinessmedia.com/podcasts or on our own playlist here: https://soundcloud.com/user-381015363/sets/blue-line-podcast .

Did you miss our March 2020 episode with Martin Cronin, threat detection & security expert? Listen HERE.

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