Jamaican Peter Sloly is the new police chief of Ottawa in Canada. He was sworn into the leadership position on October 28, 2019. Sloly, who has 27 years of experience with the Toronto Police Service, replaced Charles Bordeleau who retired in May 2019. Sloly resigned from the Toronto service in 2018 and had been working for Deloitte Canada as its national “Security & Justice leader. Sloly, in an interview with “CTV Morning Live” said he wanted to get back to policing because public service and policing were “in my blood.” He went on to describe his first priority in his new job as “getting to know my people, and getting to know this city.” He also plans to bring some “new ideas” to the issue of neighborhood and community policing now that he is Chief, noting that community policing develops new partnerships that can improve the quality of policing in an area. In terms of the Ottawa Police’s budget, Sloly acknowledged that resources are “not plentiful,” but that they should be sufficient if all parties work together. He does not plan to add new police officers, but wants to understand where the current officers are and what they are doing. Sloly has stated his opposition to street checks and what is known as “carding” of suspects, an activity that minority advocate groups believe represents a type of racial profiling.

Peter John M. Sloly was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1966. As well as being a former soccer player, Sloly served as the deputy chief of the Toronto Police Service (Divisional Policing Command and Operational Support Command from 2009 to 2016, He received a BA degree in Sociology from McMaster University and then an MBA from the Schulich School of Business at York University. He also received a certificate in criminal justice from the University of Virginia, a Incident Command System Certification from the Justice Institute of British Columbia Major City Chief’s Police Executive Development Program, and participated in the University of Toronto’s Rotman Police Executive Leadership Program. Sloly is a graduate of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Academy as well.