Professor Pat Finnegan prepares students for the reality of policing 

After 30 years with the Ontario Provincial Police, Professor Pat Finnegan knows that the reality of policing can look very different from what prospective officers imagine. Now, as Program Coordinator for Police Foundations at Loyalist College, he wants students to understand the profession before they commit to it. 

Students often enter Police Foundations picturing arrests, investigations and responding to serious crimes. Then they get into a police cruiser. 

After students complete frontline placements alongside working officers, Pat asks them what surprised them most. The answer, he says, is remarkably consistent. “They thought it was way more about putting handcuffs on people and arresting bad guys for serious crimes.” 

Instead, students encounter calls involving mental health, homelessness, addiction, conflict and other situations where communication and compassion can matter as much as enforcement. 

“The best police officers have high emotional intelligence,” Finnegan says. As someone who spent three decades in policing, that understanding comes from experience. 

Thirty years of experience in the classroom 

Finnegan knew from childhood that he wanted to become a police officer. Over a 30-year career with the Ontario Provincial Police, he moved from frontline policing into criminal investigations, spending 14 years in three detective ranks before being promoted to Inspector and serving as Detachment Commander for the Lennox & Addington OPP. 

During his investigative years, Finnegan was part of the Ontario working group that developed a new Major Case Management course. He went on to become a lead trainer, teaching detectives at police training facilities across Ontario and later delivering training to the Turkish National Police in Ankara and the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary in St. John’s. 

Teaching other police officers revealed something else he loved about the profession: taking complicated ideas and making them useful. “I was in two worlds,” he says. “I was in this investigative policing world, and I was in this teacher world at the same time, and I liked both.” That combination eventually brought him to Loyalist, where he now draws on both sides of his career in the classroom. 

Seeing both sides of policing 

Through placement and community engagement experiences, Police Foundations students encounter diverse aspects of public safety, from specialized police units and tactical operations to organizations supporting people experiencing poverty, homelessness, and other challenges. 

Finnegan describes that range as going from “the tip of the spear to the warm hug.” Sometimes, the experiences students expect to find least interesting become the most meaningful. 

Finnegan has taken students to volunteer with Napanee’s Morning Star Mission, where they spend time around people experiencing complex challenges and help with practical community work. 

Students often arrive more excited about the policing side of placement, he says, then tell him those community-focused days changed how they understood the profession. 

He notes that police officers frequently meet people during difficult moments. “You’re often meeting people on the worst day of their life,” Finnegan says. “You need to be your best.” 

Preparing for more than a job 

That is why Finnegan talks with students about resilience, self-awareness, judgment and emotional intelligence alongside law and police procedure. The technical skills matter, but he knows police services can train recruits in many of those skills again. What students bring to the profession as people matters too. 

It is also why his relationship with students doesn’t necessarily end when the program does. Finnegan says he still hears from former students years later and continues helping graduates navigate the hiring process. 

At the end of one recent class, he shared a final message with students as they completed their placement experience. 

The program, he told them, was always about more than policing. It was about judgment, character, emotional intelligence and understanding the responsibility that comes with serving other people. 

“Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other,” he told them. “And when it’s your turn, take care of the people that you serve.” 

Explore Police Foundations at Loyalist College

Considering a career in policing? Discover how Loyalist’s Police Foundations program combines practical training, field placements and career preparation to help students understand the profession and develop the skills employers look for.

Explore the Police Foundations program