Peel Regional Police display strong leadership in their community

 July 08, 2019

Peel Regional Police provide policing services for the Peel Region in Ontario, Canada. They are the second largest municipal police service in Ontario after the Toronto Police Service and forth largest municipal force in Canada with over 2,000 uniformed members and close to almost 1,000 support staff - and they take women's equality very seriously.

“We encourage all of our employees to work together to create a workplace with balance. Our organization is inclusive and believes in equality for all and we ensure that our employees reflect the rich diversity of our community. Equality for all is everyone’s fight, not for just one day, or for just one person,” says Chief McCord (pictured below).

An impressive International Women's Day video

For International Women's Day, Peel Regional Police created an impressive video. While policing remains quite a male-dominated profession, women play major roles and bring unique and valuable professional qualities to law enforcement so the video was very gender inclusive, impactful and reflective of the diversity of Peel Regional Police. It was important to showcase to their Peel community that women of all ranks are changing the landscape through their chosen profession of police officers or civilian employees.

Additionally, the video also served as a recruitment video so women who may or may not aspire to be police officers might one day observe women who are successful in their endeavours and see that Peel Regional Police is an organization consistently working towards gender parity.

"As we move forward, it is important for us to assess, acknowledge and be open to change. We have conducted an assessment with our partners from the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion, to better understand our workplace. I am excited to assist our organization with their ongoing development and implementation of our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy," said Mark Figueiredo, Co-Chair, Diversity and Inclusion Project Team.

Geting the message out

To create visuals for the #BalanceforBetter campaign, the team at Peel Regional Police canvassed employees throughout the organization. Over 60 employees travelled to the Headquarters building in Mississauga and volunteered two hours to videoing for International Women's Day and support the cause. Production value of the video was enhanced by the slow motion videography which invites the viewer to experience Peel Regional Police's shared values. The video also reflected Peel Regional Police's values in line with the values of IWD. 

The organization fully leveraged all of their social media platforms - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Linkedin - and ran a special feature story on their website peelpolice.ca to actively engage members of their community for IWD. The video and a special IWD email were distributed to Peel Regional Police's 3000 employees on IWD with an additional video message from Chief Chris McCord. Employees also re-posted on their own social media accounts to further amplify their commitment. The video and further supplementary messaging saw significant reach, garnering over 10,000 views and over 22,000 engagements. 

Showcasing the progression of women in policing

A key goal was to provide impactful visuals without spoken words to demonstrate that Peel Regional Police can only achieve #BalanceForBetter if everyone participates. The message resonated internationally with their people coming together adopting the identifiable #BalanceForBetter pose. 

Peel Regional Police also wanted the progression of women in the field of policing to be evident by ensuring that they had representation of women at all ranks such as Deputy Chiefs, Inspectors, Staff Sergeants, Detectives, Officers, Civilian Employees, Cadets and Auxiliary members. It was imperative to engage male counterparts and show support in challenging the status quo to ultimately forge greater equality for women.