Cst. Teresa Parsons took a moment to sit down with The Observer and discuss life at the Agassiz RCMP Upper Fraser Valley Regional Detachment as a female police officer. Parsons role is varied, and complex as she undertakes her duties with grace, intelligence, and fortitude.
“I work in the general investigation section, so we’re a plain clothes unit, meaning we don’t wear a uniform and we don’t respond to 911 calls,” she said. “We do the longer in depth investigations and we have other functions as well — we are the liason officers to the institutions (Kent and Mountain in particular), the federal corrections institutions, so we do all the investigations that come out of there.”
Parsons provides a mentoring kind of role to the general duty guys for more in-depth investigations, investigations that might be of a more serious nature, including robberies and aggravated assaults. Her tasks involve more time consuming investigative techniques, like search warrant applications.
The 5 foot 2 officer has been in the force for 11 and a half years, and completed her training at Depot in Regina, she also has a Criminology degree from SFU.
Originally from Northern B.C., Parsons, who has been in Agassiz for five years now, finds working in a smaller community more diverse.
“I like the smaller town — I like variety,” she said of the broad spectrum of her duties.
Agassiz is a smaller detachment with nine general duty constables and nine investigation constables, allowing the officers the opportunity to do a lot more in the way of investigations.
“I do everything from drug investigations to sexual assaults to stabbings at the prisons and very often I will put on the uniform and I’ll help out at general duty calls to cover shortages.”
Parsons acknowledges there is a drug culture in Agassiz, but it pales in comparison, to other places like Chilliwack and Abbotsford.
“It’s everywhere — we haven’t seen too much Fentanyl here, we’ve seen a lot of cocaine, crystal meth and heroin.”
Parsons was drawn to law enforcement by a police officer who came to her high school to tell stories of life in the RCMP when she was 14 — stories that left an impression on the youth and helped to determine the trajectory of her career path.
On being a woman in the force.
“I’ve never really had any negative issues around being a female in the RCMP — I think having women available, attending calls, and assisting on investigations helps in a lot of ways because women have a different approach to things than men do.”
Parsons approach to a situation is slightly different than most officers because of her size and she often talks her way through most things.
“I will spend a lot more time talking an agitated person down to a calm state rather than going hands on right away, mostly, because I don’t have the luxury of being confident of going hands on without back up.
According to Parsons the biggest risk about her job is to become complacent.
“Just because someone has been cooperative in the past, doesn’t mean they will be cooperative in the future,” she said.
She warns that her job requires her to stay focused and to treat each situation and encounter with caution.
Parsons job can also be very rewarding, one of the biggest rewards for the officer is seeing justice done, or helping someone solve a problem they didn’t know how to solve.
On the flip side there are frustrations that accompany her position.
The public’s lack of understanding about how the justice system works is one of the biggest frustrations she encounters.
“I think a lot of people make assumptions that our justice system works the same as the US because that’s where all of our television and movies come from and that’s not the case,” she told The Observer.
In B.C. police officers conduct the investigations and recommend criminal charges but it’s the lawyers and crown council that decide those things; often times, police will have done an investigation but won’t have enough for a conviction— that’s the crown’s decision.
“The public often doesn’t understand this and is often upset with the RCMP” says Parsons, viewing it as the police not doing their jobs, which is not the case.
Parsons describes her team as a good one.
“Officers can be a bit like siblings where sometimes we disagree and we don’t see eye to eye on things, but for the most part we are there for each other, we get along well, and we have a lot of fun together.”
In light of national events and police officers being targeted, new training methods and equipment have been implemented, including firearms, the carbine rife in particular.
New training in active shooter situations are par for the course, and long overdue according to Parsons.
Parsons works in plain clothes which means she doesn’t wear a uniform, she doesn’t ride in a marked police car, and she’s not a first responder on scene — those would be general duty guys or girls.
Parsons role happens when a situation is deemed to be more serious or complicated then initially thought, that’s when they call in her unit, or the general investigation section (think detectives).
There was one message that Parsons wanted to get across to the public and that was that police officers want to help.
“Police officers want to do good work — I feel that, that’s not what people think anymore. I think there’s a lot of public concern about police brutality, police corruption and abuse of power, and I think that’s a misconceived notion.”
She attributes some of it to the media, and some of it to officers who have done the wrong thing at the wrong time in the past, and people fear that.
“We are bestowed with a lot of responsibility and a lot of power in our position, but most officers recognize that, and most officers work really hard to make things better — we recognize that if you have to call the police, it’s probably not the best day of your life, and we don’t want to make things worse.”
A typical day for Parson’s starts at 7 a.m. where she’ll go through files and emails and see if there’s anything urgent and proceed with any tasks that have been identified.
She has a partner in the unit, so they work a lot of files together, and they also work a lot of files separately.
This includes writing reports to crown council, search warrants, production orders, or legal applications to gain access to evidence, it might also mean conducting interviews with complainants, witnesses, or victims. It could mean going to a crime scene for an investigation and dealing with partner agencies such as forensic services, and other agencies like search and rescue, and the fire department.
Parsons work with the correctional institutions, Kent and Mountain, involves security intelligence and is based on a need as there’s a lot of assaults and stabbings happening there she disclosed to The Observer.
“We are also trying to do more proactive work in keeping drugs out of the institutions, so when they identify a target that may be bringing drugs into the institutions we are working with them in order to prevent that and to investigate those as well,” she said.
Parsons describes her position as unique, a characteristic that keeps her hungry for more.
“In other crime type positions you focus only on one type of investigation and that’s why I like the Agassiz spot because of the variety — we get to do serious crime stuff, we get to do drug stuff, and we get to do general duty stuff, where we put the uniform on and go back out on the road.”