I'm executive director of the Police Sector Council. The council is involved in the long-term sustainability of policing.
I thought I'd take a little bit of time today to highlight three critical challenges or issues in policing. It would be very hard for me to hit the whole topography of policing for you in a short period of time, so I'll focus on just three areas.
I think you've met with a number of members from the sector councils in the last little while, so I'll assume that you have a fairly good knowledge of the sector council program. One thing it provides for policing is a vehicle or a forum for all the myriad stakeholders in policing to get together and talk through the issues and challenges facing policing.
Sector councils are a partnership initiative, bringing together all the various stakeholders to a common table. Policing is no different. Our board of directors includes ADMs of policing and justice in every single province, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, Canadian Association of Police Boards, education and training institutes, etc.
When it comes to sector councils, the Police Sector Council is a little atypical. We're a public service sector council, which means we have less opportunity to leverage private sector funding and private sector involvement. Policing is notoriously reputed to be losing money every year, so we end up being fully at the trough for the financial programs of the public service.
We are just two years old as a sector council. We have a 30-person board of directors, including a union representative.
With that sort of backdrop, let me hit on three critical issues. I think other people have used the concept of the perfect storm for you, so I'll pick up on that as well. The three areas I'd like to talk about are the changing—or maybe the unchanging—governance and budget issues; the changing complexity of the police environment; and the changing demographics. Those are three areas that you're probably fairly well familiar with.
First, on changing governance, the fact that we have so many people around a board of directors table is probably symptomatic of the governance issue. Constitutionally, policing is delegated—from federal to provincial, from provincial to municipal, and from municipal to police board, etc. And funding varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The funding that the police in Manitoba have is not the same funding that the police in New Brunswick or Ontario have.
There are over 220 police services currently in place in Canada, with 80,000 police employees; that's both sworn officers and civilian members. They're delivering the full range of federal and provincial policing throughout Canada. That varies in size, from a one-person police force—Gary and Lynne will know of Carrot River, Saskatchewan, for example—to a 23,000-person police force, such as the RCMP.
The budgets and the management models for these folks are equally as varied as the number of people in policing, which means there's also a wide variation in training, education, equipment, professional development, and in fact in the delivery of policing across the country.
The principle to protect and serve has stood us for 150 years, but the capacity to do that is highly dependent on fluctuating tax bases, budget cycles, fiscal pressures, increasing costs, and the time and skills we have to invest in policing—certainly in the new millennium policing.
The other side of this is that citizens probably expect uniformity of policing right across the country. When they have a break and enter at three o'clock in the morning, they're expecting a compassionate and honest professional to step up to the front door and take their case. Unfortunately, depending on where they live in the country, that's not always the case.
In terms of budgets, I have just a couple of quick notes for you. Police expenditures for contract policing—that's boots on the street policing—cost taxpayers about $8.3 billion a year. That expenditure base has grown by about 3% a year in the past seven years. We're in a little bit of a growth cycle, but policing budgets of course reflect the public service budgets and the vagaries of the public sector.
Fully equipping a police officer today costs about 40% more than it did ten years ago, about $107,000 for somebody on the street doing police work for you. Wages and benefits in the police budgets are about 80% of the total cost of policing.
It probably goes without saying that police budgets are not increasing fast enough, and it's certainly not anticipated that they will be doing that in the future. Policing is highly dependent on a fairly inflexible tax base, and I think this has led to significant capacity erosion over the last ten years certainly. Maybe it's time for that governance model to change.
Issue number two is the complexity of the work environment. On page 4 of the brief, I've highlighted the fact that there's not a lot of opportunity for operational efficiencies across policing. I've given you some examples of the shifting operational environment. Crime statistics are certainly dropping across Canada, except for violent crime in certain areas, but criminality is much more sophisticated and technologically enabled, and it respects no jurisdictional boundaries. New threats are emerging for policing to deal with as first responders, threats such as bird flu, civil disobedience, and strained social cohesions in certain urban centres.
Investigations are increasingly complex due to court decisions. Every time there's a court decision or a change in legislation, there's more processing time in dealing with the issues that policing has to deal with. A recent study from B.C. talks about break and enters requiring 58% more processing time today than ten years ago, driving under the influence 250% more processing time than ten years ago, and domestic assault almost 1,000 times more processing time than ten years ago. These statistics give you a sense of selective response in the policing community and declining clearance rates across the country.
Policing is also being carried out under significant oversight and media scrutiny. This demonstrates a fairly dynamic and challenging operating environment, and I think it probably points to a need to address this outside of traditional operational silos.
Next comes the changing face of policing. You've heard from all the sector councils about the youth dearth. In the aging police forces we're going to lose 40% to 50% of our senior managers in the next three years.
Immigration has been touted as a solution in many other areas; it's not necessarily a solution in policing. Today's source countries bring immigrants with an inherent distrust for authority—in fact, often with negative perceptions of policing—and that's difficult to overcome, certainly for people coming into policing, and certainly in trying to get at their children. Recruiting aboriginals is very difficult because of the sovereignty issues around policing.
Passive recruitment is no longer going to work for policing; we have to proactively go after the youth of today. We have a proposal in front of the federal government to spend some money on a social marketing solution.
There are two points, on closing. Having a skilled workforce and a skilled policing workforce is a national issue, a Canada-wide issue, and the sector council helps us address that. I don't think anybody wants have and have-not policing across this country; everybody should have the capacity to have a fully responsive police force.
The second point is that the model we have in policing in this country may need some substantial rethinking, and something like a sector council allows us to do that within a broader umbrella.
Thank you for your time.