Tais trio of graduates in
dress unifcrms were in
Class 100 of the Police
Academy in 2004. The
rolice journal The Thin
Blue Line describes

ie Academy as “a
world-class educational
fucility.” Its advanced
trainina has been
welcoined in the Middle

casi, Asia and elsev.hare,

Academy is today” The current Director is Superintendent Axel Hovbrender,
who at the Vancouver Police Department had earned a Governor General
of Canada’s Police Exemplary Service Medal for his initiatives that “have
resulted in improved police-community partnerships and increased safety
for vulnerable victims.” He has a strong link to the Academy’s past. “T’ve
always been interested in police training,” says Hovbrender, who joined the
VPD in 1978, “This move gives me an opportunity to do that.”

He was with the first class of recruits to do all their training at the
JIBC’s original location. As he recalls, they were at Blake Hall, formerly part
of the Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and School for the Blind, which was
barely adequate to house the Academy, Corrections, Courts and the Library
and Media Centre in 1978.

Hovbrender doesn’t look like a hard-nosed cop. He strikes a visitor
as a crisp executive type. He was an advocate of community policing even
as a trainee from 1978 to ’81: it mattered to him that the blind residents of
the Jericho Hill School being displaced by the Institute would have to move,
in some cases as far away as Burnaby. One of his first management-level
assignments after graduating from the JIBC was as the sergeant in charge of
the Sexual Offence Squad, where he investigated charges of sexual abuse of
blind and deaf students at Jericho (there were several convictions). He was
part of the team investigating the terrorist explosion of an Air India flight
from Canada in 1985, spent years with the department's organized crime
unit and was negotiator and senior incident commander for the Emergency
Response Team for more than fifteen years.

Hovbrender sees the main task of the Academy as “transitioning
private citizens into public police officers (recruit training) and training
police officers in dealing with complex police topics (advanced training).
We also provide pre-selection and promotion assessment centres, evalu-
ating a candidate’s core competencies, so that only the best can be recruited
and promoted.”

Courses include both basic policing skills for recruits, as well as
advanced training courses for active police officers in operational, investi-
gative, administrative and communications topics that are crucial to police
and public safety. As an indication of the increased intricacy of policing,
course offerings now include training for officers in such specialized roles
as breathalyzer operator and bicycle patrol officer, and skills such as critical
incident management, DNA trace evidence analysis, strategic intelligence
analysis and police media relations. In short, today’s Police Academy equips
its graduates for the full spectrum of modern-day policing—from beat cop
to the most sophisticated of law-enforcement technical expertise.

In addition to teaching core policing skills, the Academy provides
training and certification for the security industry, including regulatory
quality assurance for security guards, gaming security officers and gaming