Police foundations students impress with showcase presentations

Fourth-level police foundations students received high praise from law enforcement agencies, Carleton University professors and other attendees on April 5 when they delivered their final presentations during an event in the T-building.

This was a “walk about” and networking event where Algonquin College students shared their research with guests from school and beyond.

“This is a great event because you get really nice feedback from other students from all of our guests today,” said Alyssa Ferns, lead professor of the police foundations program.

“It’s a nice capstone or a nice celebratory event where all of the students are on the cusp of finishing their diploma. They’ve all worked really hard on their topic,” said Ferns.

Students chose their topics and conducted extensive and detailed research for their presentations.

Kaydence Stevenson focused on the layers of gender representation in policing in Canada, and her project was inspired by her love of policing as a profession.

“I want to be a police officer and I know that being a woman in policing can sometimes be a difficult subject,” said Stevenson, “so I thought it would be an interesting subjective research to get more information as to why there’s not enough females in policing.”

Harshdeep Singh is a student from India and his topic was understanding the impact of sexual assault on adult survivors in Canada. Singh said that the topic first came to his mind because there are a lot of such issues in India. His research compared the issues in India with the situation in Canada.

“I would also tell people around me about the data from these studies, but they are indeed very shocked when they hear Canada also has a very serious problem in this issue,” said Singh.

Sameer Sharma, an Ottawa police staff sergeant who works in outreach and recruiting, was impressed with the students who researched social media and mental health issues prevalent in the present era.

“I like this because this is the direction we are going with policing. When I first got into the profession, there wasn’t even Facebook, but now we find everything online,” said Sharma. “So, I like where education is going. You can see if it’s matching up with where our vision is going in policing and we see it going in the future.”

The students’ good status and excellent research made police foundations professor Tori Semple proud.

“They showed up looking professional and they knew a lot about their topic. So I’m really proud of all of them actually,” said Semple.

It was the second year of this type of event and Ferns said it will continue in this format for the next year.

“It looks like a big success. I imagine we’ll continue to do it,” said Ferns.