Victoria’s new police chief comes with street cred.
Seconded to Ontario’s organized crime unit in his 20s, Frank Elsner did a lot of deep undercover work, including a two-year period in which he spent just nine days at home.
To infiltrate the underworld, he spent a nine-month period going in and out of prison, sometimes locked up for weeks on end. He emerged from one stretch with a jailhouse tattoo of a shark, a piece of guitar wire serving as the needle.
Once, while investigating a couple of bike gangs — the Outlaws and the Annihilators — the bad guys took him to an old cement factory, decided to see if he was a cop.
“They beat me until I was unconscious and left me there,” the 50-year-old says. “Nobody knew where I was. My cover team had lost me.”
He was discovered in hospital, where he spent three or four days in a coma and was left with busted ribs, among other injuries. Instead of immediately arresting his attackers, he went back undercover, allowed the beating to solidify his story.
Elsner, sworn in at a ceremony in the lobby of Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre on Monday, has to handle a a different kinds of pressure now, the kinds that come with the capital region’s highest-profile policing job.
“We hope you can handle the heat,” Mayor Dean Fortin told him, having fun with the swing between Victoria’s balmy 9 C and minus-35-with-the-wind-chill Sudbury, Ont., where Elsner was chief. Truth is, Elsner does have a lot to deal with: parochial politics, our patchwork policing model, problems with the CREST radio system, rising investigation costs and an entire region’s social woes funnelled into the city’s core.
Elsner’s installation as VicPD’s 13th chief drew a crowd of 200 police, politicians, social services types and, because this is Victoria, a whistle-blowing, placard-waving protester outside (no, she wasn’t from Esquimalt council).
They heard him speak of openness, honesty, the need to put words into action. “Deeds speak.”
He advocates a holistic approach in which policing is just one cog on the wheel. “We can’t arrest our way out of all our problems,” he said, noting that over the course of his career he has busted a grandfather, father and two sons — the revolving door spinning through three generations. Have to break that cycle, bring in all the social agencies, he says. Security isn’t just a question for cops. Education isn’t just up to schools. Health care isn’t for hospitals alone. Have to work together.
In Sudbury, that meant helping prostitutes get ID and career counselling, among other services, the result being that seven of them got off the street in the first year. A John school for their customers resulted in zero recidivism. Refocusing funding on psych nurses allowed police to patrol the streets instead of spending hours on end watching over mentally disturbed people in the emergency room.
Co-operation sounds good, but ours is a community with a history of fragmentation.
Elsner got a reminder of the latter on the weekend. Landing at the airport, he snapped a photo of the “Victoria” sign on the side of the terminal and tweeted “I made it.”
To which Saanich Mayor Frank Leonard cheekily replied: “Not yet. Welcome to North Saanich :)” The airport is three whole police departments away from the city of Victoria.
This is the reality: VicPD has 243 officers to police Victoria and Esquimalt, which have a combined population of 102,000. The remaining 263,000 people are policed by three RCMP detachments and three municipal departments with a combined total of 312 cops.
The budget ratios are just as skewed. This is why Victoria and its reluctant bride, Esquimalt, agitate for amalgamation and politicians in the other municipalities shun the idea as though it were coated in anthrax.
This is neither new nor likely to change, as the provincial government refuses to wade into this particular political tarpit.
Elsner says that’s a problem for the politicians but, since criminals don’t respect boundaries, “We need to leave our shoulder flashes at the door.” Have to acknowledge that different municipalities, different departments, have different cultures, though. “You have to respect that.”
That also applies to Esquimalt and Victoria’s neighbourhoods, each with its own needs. “There can’t be any poor cousins in the equation.”
This is not Elsner’s first experience with B.C. After his family emigrated from Germany when he was two, he grew up in the Okanagan, then spent a couple of late teenage years on Vancouver Island, working three jobs at the same time — stocking shelves at the Nanaimo Woodward’s in the morning, delivering carpets for a store in Parksville after that, then selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners at night.
He then left B.C. to join the RCMP. Thirty years later, he’s back.
