Age: 38
Job Title: Detective, Edmonton Police Service
Why He’s Top 40: His rehabilitative and preventiveapproach to policing has been recognized internationally.
Key To Success: “The traditional ways of doing business just don’t cut it anymore.”
Though James Clover says he’s just doing his job, Avenue and a host of others say he’s raising the bar.
For his work with Edmonton Police Service, the detective was twice nominated for the Kiwanis Club of Edmonton Top Cop award, won a technology award from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police for a parole intelligence program he helped design, and was recently awarded the Australian Government’s Endeavour Executive Award, which sent Clover Down Under to shake things up.
“Melbourne has been having a lot of problems with sex offenders,” says Clover. So, he helped set up the city’s sex offender registry programs, in the vein of the programs he helped design here.
Clover, who cites his RCMP father as the reason he joined the EPS, thinks differently when it comes to cases of sex crimes, focusing more on preventative measures and rehabilitative strategies for offenders, rather than just waiting for crimes to happen and throwing the bad guys in jail. “The best way to manage people is to support them,” he says. “Hundreds of offenders get released back into the community all of the time, but you don’t hear about most of them because of the support and rehabilitative work being put through.”
He says schooling and housing programs that reduce reoffending risks make the most sense. “It’s just good business.”
And “good business” is a term he carries over to much of his work. When he looks at things like risk assessment and rehabilitation, he thinks of them as if he’s paying for it out of his own pocket. If you prevent crime, he says, “then you’re not filling the jails and spending millions of dollars there, you’re actually saving money by helping people.”
Though he says EPS is ahead of the curve when it comes to community focused policing, he thinks it’s what is needed to be done to improve the city. “I try to do what I think the public expects me to do.”
