“How do you stay upright when the very system you swore to uphold begins to shake beneath your feet?”
It’s a question posed by former Ridge Meadows RCMP Superintendent Jennifer Hyland in her new memoir “Tightrope.”
Hyland retired as a deputy chief constable of the Surrey Police Service, but most of her remarkable 26-year career was as an RCMP officer in her hometown Maple Ridge, where she was the officer in charge (OIC) from 2017 until she left for Surrey in 2021.
The former top cop writes about cases and how they impacted her, about personal battles with multiple sclerosis, post traumatic stress disorder, politicians, police politics and more.
And she’s a writer.
Hyland’s prose goes back to journals when she first learned how to print in the second grade – she can look back at diary entries made in crayon. It continued throughout her life.
“Without knowing it was therapeutic and helpful, I always enjoyed writing,” said Hyland. “It was a personal outlet where you could be super, super honest and not worry someone was going to judge you.”
Policing is a lot of writing and reporting, but it’s technical, impartial, and a just-the-facts style.
“As much you did a lot of writing of the story, you were never ever allowed to write how you felt about what you were doing,” she said.
So that’s where journaling came in.
“I wrote about what if felt like to be with victims or their families,” she said. “And sometimes it was coming home and writing about he frustration of the work environment – bosses, politics, culture.
“When I went to write “Tightrope” I had a plethora of things to rely on. Probably a little bit too much – when the first draft went to the editor, I was told I had to cut it in half.”
Hyland’s career started in 1998 with the New Westminster Police Department, then in 2001 she transferred to the RCMP, posted in Surrey.
In 2006, she came to Ridge Meadows as a corporal with the serious crimes section, in 2010 was promoted to sergeant and headed the section. There was a promotion and move to North Van in 2013, but she was back to Maple Ridge in 2016 as an inspector, and the following year was promoted to superintendent and officer in charge.
“The best best years of my policing career, I can say now easily, was when I was the OIC here,” she said. “The team that we had, and who I worked with… there’s so many fond memories.”
There were challenges. A big issue at the time was Anita Place encampment, and the street population in Maple Ridge.
“There was so much toxicity around the homeless camps, and what to do about the camps,” she said.
However, the politics of Maple Ridge were a mere warmup to what she would face with Surrey’s SPS.
“In the book I call my experience here like being in house league hockey, and then going to Surrey was like being in the NHL.”
As Surrey transitioned from RCMP to a municipal force, with ballooning costs, the federal and provincial governments were involved, there was daily media coverage, toxic online commentary, and friction between the SPS and RCMP.
Frontline police work is expected in this kind of memoir, and she delivers in the chapter “Behind the Yellow Tape,” which is about behind-the-scenes policing, and her personal experiences.
“It’s not an investigative step-by-step, but the first time I had to see someone with their head blown off, the first time I had a child abuse case… they are some of the more defining experiences of my career,” she explained.
Hyland stopped Robert Picton from picking up a sex trade worker in New Westminster.
“He called me a blonde bitch cop,” she recalled. “We didn’t know he was the serial killer yet, but we knew he was violent to sex trade workers.”
Chapter three “The silent scars” is about trauma. Her husband Paul Hyland, now chief constable of the New Westminster Police, was shot in the chest just six months after they were married.
“It hit him right in the heart, where his bullet proof vest is,” she said.
It stopped the bullet, and he barely missed a beat.
“He went back to work four days later.”
Early in her career, officers had to be unfazed by trauma.She personally suffered PTSD due to her work on child abuse and sex abuse cases.
“I never broke down and cried, I never shook – I just squashed the pressure down. And it’s a very unhealthy way of dealing with exposure to trauma,” she said.
“It comes for you, at some point in time,” she said. “Those things are going to show up in your dreams.”
“The Ugly Side of Blue” is a chapter that about sexual harassment in the RCMP and Hyland shares eight of the experiences of bullying and harassment as a women cop. She was part of the Merlo Davidson class action settlement over gender and sexual orientation-based harassment and discrimination of female RCMP members and public service employees from 1974 to 2017. There were 2,304 claimants compensated for a total of $125.4 million.
Rather than telling a story in a chronological order, Hyland wrote a book that deals with themes in police work, leadership, parenting and more.
Hyland will be doing book signings to promote Tightrope on Feb. 15, from noon to 3 p.m. at Indigo Books in Langley, and on March 7, from noon to 3 p.m. at Chapters Coquitlam.