Police Chaplains Today

A few weeks ago I spoke at a Zoom retreat for police and their spouses. The topic was Resiliency/Trusting in God. There were actually a few people who heard about the upcoming sessions and complained to the organizer for one simple reason: we had the audacity to be helping cops. After hearing about that I knew that the topic was an appropriate one for the season most cops are going through today. I taught from God's word because it has plenty to say about the topic. Some of you may be surprised to hear that because many police services still believe that only mental health professionals should be made available to their men and women. It is a barrier that is extremely difficult to get through because it has been in place for many years. The stress being put on police families today is something never seen before although the instigators of this have been working long and hard to see this day. I won't get into the topic of enablers but we all know that the media in general, is n...

If you are White and want to crucify every cop that puts on a uniform, please play along with me for just a few seconds. First you need to establish your utter distain for the racism evident among police everywhere, especially in Toronto, where the Ontario Human Rights Commission proudly announced that Toronto cops shoot and kill Black people with regularity. The fact that this narrative is an absolute lie does not matter because we don't care about the truth. OK, so here we go...Ted Bundy was a serial killer in the US. He was a white man. As far as we know, he acted on his own when he kidnapped, raped and murdered innocent women back in the 1970's. We all agree that he was a terrible human being. Now, based on the logic and careful examination of the facts by all pro-athletes, BLM, media, politicians and apparently everyone under the age of 30, police officers are all racists. In Toronto they also have no training on how to deal with emotionally disturbed individuals and even ...

I am a white man and perhaps that makes me privileged although in all honesty I do not even know how to gauge that. Regardless, this blog is not about me but it is about the entire human race.  A question that I have had since the beginning (this time around) of the Black Lives Matter protests and violence and in some places, false narrative concerning our police in Toronto, is what people actually think the solution is. If people really think racism is going to go away because of classroom time or training for our cops, we are truly living in a dream world. In the Old Testament, the actual problem comes to light for anyone willing to admit it. Jeremiah 17:9 says,   “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? Racism and bigotry is not just a policing problem in the US and beyond. It is an issue all over the world and has always been. This is in no way an attempt to downplay the pain being felt in the Black ...

I saw a friend of mine post on this topic today and realized that with all the discussion and protesting about racism, I have a story to tell that most of my friends are unfamiliar with. Even some of my Estonian friends don't have a similar story to tell of their ancestors. If Black Lives Matter then hopefully so will the lives lost to Communism during and after WW2. Russia invaded Estonia in 1940 and the immediate goal was ethnic cleansing. By the summer of 1941, thousands of Estonians had been designated as enemies of the Communist state. It is important to remember that Russia and Germany began the war as allies after agreeing to split up Europe through what was known as the "Molotov-Ribbentrop" pact. Estonia fell to the Russians until Germany decided to take it over in late 1941. What we are remembering today are the deportations of thousands in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania. This is the story of the Alkok family. My grandfather (Ado Alkok) ...

The past couple of weeks has been hard on the emotions for this old white guy. I have discovered that going on social media can be very dangerous if you do not "totally" agree with the masses that are BLM and their old and new followers. Racism has come to the forefront of everyone's conversations and that is good, except where it is not. Let me try to explain. Here in Toronto, over the past two months, citizens captured 3 separate confrontations on their cell phones between emotionally disturbed black men and cops. At the time most people were saying how well our cops handled the situations. One had a guy running after someone with a machete (in our division where I am chaplain); the second had a black man throwing rocks and smashing the windows of a police cruiser  and eventually trying to strike the female cop with the same rock; the third was just north of the city when a black man approached a cop sitting in his vehicle and attacked him, continuing to do so by stom...

With all that is happening in the world today it is often difficult to see anything good. The narrative is often controlled by the media and even social media. I work in both of the North American hotspots: policing and long term care. Not too many positive things being said about either and yet many people that I know personally, are doing a wonderful job showing what the normal is. Good people dealing with the worst situations and often without the support of others. There are many Blacks who are justified in their anger but I will not accept the way some are expressing that anger. There are many family members who are angry about long term care and how their loved ones are being treated. The system is broken in some places but not in all and yet many of the staff are feeling the brunt of the accusations. Many are so tired they can barely stand and cops are putting their lives at risk and all they get is grief. In later life I have learned to break things down to the lowest commo...

I have to try really hard to keep my feelings to myself in regards to some of the posts made by my contacts on social media. So instead of losing some friends, I felt it best to give each of them an opportunity to see the light through some truth rather than conjecture. I am a chaplain in two long term care homes here in Ontario. In case you have not been following the news, LTC has been hit very hard with the COVID-19 pandemic. As I write this blog, there are well over 200 homes with outbreaks related to this coronavirus. There are hundreds of deaths in this province alone because as we have learned, the elderly are a prime target of the disease. Now for some clarity of how these seniors contracted the virus. To put it simply, it came from outside the LTC homes, either by family members, staff or contractors. The other possibility is from residents who had been on an outing with family members or in a hospital. No resident just picked up the virus sitting in their room with no out...