By Avery Mullen
In 1998, Jim Hoskins spent 12 hours laying on his stomach, negotiating with a hostage taker through a door because the man kept hanging up his phone.
The two doctors who had been taken prisoner both survived the encounter, as did their captor. Hoskins, a retired Halifax Regional Police officer now running for mayor, tells The Macdonald Notebook that he plans to bring the same talent for bridge-building and conflict resolution that served him well as a hostage negotiator to city hall if elected.
“It was touch and go because he had a pistol, and he had a tape recorder taped to his chest, taping the whole thing,” recalls Hoskins.
Hoskins, who eventually became a staff sergeant, spent 36 years in policing. As well as attending hostage situations, he held community liaison roles, and in the years following amalgamation, built and led the team in charge of the force’s internal audits. That process involved reviewing the day-to-day practices of each section of the police department.
Hoskins has overcome a late start to his campaign to win invitations to nearly all of this fall’s mayoral debates. He says his political aspirations are driven partly by his concerns about a decision by the regional council to transfer some policing responsibilities, such as mental health crisis response, to other types of government services, as well as by talk from advocates of potentially restricting firearm usage by police.
As an example, he cites the task of helping a mother and her son retrieve a stranded cat. He characterizes it as an example of the bridge-building work that is not officially included in police officers’ job descriptions, but which helps build ties with communities.
“They’re going to divide the work ethic to this: cops will be trained so much that they’re going to look at you and your son, say ‘It’s not our job,’ and move on — instead of being a real public servant,” says Hoskins.
“And that is not a good thing to gain public trust.”
Compounding his reservations about the new policies, he says, is a general sentiment he sees amongst the public that calling the police is a reasonable first response to most emergencies. If city hall shrinks the remit of the HRP, he fears it could lead to a mismatch between public expectations and the services police actually provide.
“If you’re going to do that, you’d better have the resources readily available like the police are,” he warns. “If you want to send a social worker to a home at two in the morning, you’d better have those people available. And I bet you (the municipal government) are not going to be able to do it.”
Hoskins is referring to a 2022 report ordered by the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners and titled Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM.
Clocking in at 216 pages, the report was co-authored by a committee with members such as activist and former Halifax poet laureate El Jones, who chaired the process, and Dalhousie University political scientist Julia Rodgers, among 12 others.
The report is broadly skeptical of firearms in policing, but stops short of explicitly recommending they be banned, instead advising that the board of commissioners conduct a generalized review all of HRP’s ‘use of force’ policies, including with other weapons, like pepper spray.
More significantly in terms of near-term policy changes, the report also advises shifting responsibility for some tasks to other community service providers, like social workers.
Halifax Regional Council has announced plans to switch from police-led wellness checks to a model that relies on civilian employees, potentially including experts like social workers, following a strategy pioneered by the provincial government for regions outside HRM.
Hoskins prefers an alternative approach of community-focused policing, with officers embedded in specific neighbourhoods to build trust and support local residents and businesses.
“I was a commander at one time in charge of everything in the North End of Halifax, down to Point Pleasant Park, and that included the business sections, of course,” says Hoskins. “So I was big on having ‘beat’ people on Spring Garden Road and that area, on Barrington Street and in the North End.
“That’s having a police officer walk the beat, into the stores and what have you. I’ve noticed that businesses are asking for that again, and because of Covid and the staff shortages, they don’t have many beat people out there anymore.”
Hoskins promised that if he is elected mayor, he will push for police to receive funding for services like beat officers, but also aim to limit city hall’s involvement in the day-to-day operations by asking the provincial government to introduce a moratorium on politicians serving on the board of commissioners.
“My job is not to tell the chief what to do, my job is to bring the attention of what the public wants, and then say to him or her, ‘I’ll give you the resources,’” he says.
“But the first thing I’d do as mayor is go to the province and say, ‘I don’t want any politicians on the board of police commissioners.’ I want to spread it out, get a diverse group of people that represent the community and have more citizens on that board.”