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By STEPHANIE AZEVEDO
Staff Writer
A paranoid-schizophrenic is about to commit suicide. You're a police officer called to the scene. What do you do?
For second-year Police Foundations students that's the question. They are coming together with the Acting for Film and Television program students to train for three weeks in conflict management.
 The reenactment by Police Foundations students helped them learn how to deal with hostage situations. Photo by Stephanie Azevedo
"It wasn't any one person's idea," says
Dean David Veres about the collaboration.
The two programs came
together when Joe Picton, a part-time teacher and police officer, along
with Constable Kris Hamilton, found that community volunteers were
sometimes unavailable. They discussed this with Veres.
"I said, ‘What
about our acting students?'" says Veres.
They called Martin Doyle,
co-ordinator for the Acting for Film and Television program, and began
to talk about the possibilities.
The conflict management classes
began near the start of this semester, led by Hamilton.
Inside the
range the actors are given their roles. The door is opened on the
waiting police students, and in pairs they are allowed into the scene to
take care of domestic disputes, break and enters, highway infractions
and potential suicides.
"Last night we were sluts and pimps, and we
had to make the police as uncomfortable as possible," says acting
volunteer Paige Cody.
"It's a lot of fun," continues Carly Nicole.
Although she is in Early Childhood Education, Cody, her friend of seven
months, convinced her to volunteer. "At first I was just going to
watch."
The two women acted three times during the week, but it was
acting student Shaun Ferguson's first time. Although he specializes in
magic tricks, he says that acting for police students "helps us flex our
improv[ization] muscles."
"You gotta keep at it, otherwise it tends
to decline," Ferguson laughs.
Doyle says the program is "very
lucrative for the actors."
"I think from the point of film and
television that they're interacting with people who are real, so they
have to be real. ... If they're not believable it takes the real person
out of the scene."
For the police students, the scenarios are not
exactly voluntary. They can choose to not participate, but they have an
exam that uses these scenarios. If they choose to take part in the
practice they can choose their partners for the exam.
"We're doing a
practical, pretty much the same as what we're doing here," says police
student Wes Smith.
"If you don't go, you don't get to pick your
partner for the exam," says Antonio Mukherjee.
Mukherjee and Smith
say they expected the training to be like this. For their classmate
Aaron Campbell, figuring out the common law authority, the ability to
enter houses without the permission of the occupants, became difficult.
"At
the beginning it was pretty easy, but it was hard to figure out the
rest ... especially the authority to enter the house with exigent
circumstances." Exigent circumstances occur when a warrant is not
practical because of emerging circumstances.
Mukherjee says the
police course at Niagara College provides opportunities that other
colleges might not have, as the Niagara Regional Police building is on
hand.
"It's a lot of good experience. The police give you one-on-one
pep talks."
There are talks of making the acting-police foundation
collaboration permanent, says Doyle.
"We still have to work it out to
see if there's any way to justify working it into the curriculum."
Doyle
says a similar program exists where acting and police students again
come together to practise report writing. It is not as popular as its
conflict management counterpart though, due to time constraints.
No
other such program exists, as of yet, that mixes acting with another
program, though there's potential.
Doyle cites that customer services
for automotives students, or acting as patients once the nursing
building is prepared are both possible.
"There certainly have been
talks ... but scheduling is difficult," Doyle says.
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