Public Safety Committee on June 11th, 2013

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

We'll resume the session on our study of the economics of policing.

This morning I'd like to welcome Christian Leuprecht, professor, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College of Canada.

We usually ask our witnesses to start with a 10-minute statement. If you're ready, we'll welcome that statement from you

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht, Professor, Department of Political Science, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual]

Thank you, and thank you for having me this morning.

Let me preface my remarks by saying I know that on the one hand, by virtue of working at the Royal Military College of Canada, I'm a civil servant, but I also have the privilege of academic freedom. The remark is important in the sense that what I say this morning is in no way to be construed as partisan, but rather, I trust that all my remarks are soundly supported by evidence and by research, both from within Canada and comparatively. In that sense, I hope these are remarks around which the committee can rally. These are matters that I think, with a little bit of action, can make substantial improvements for Canadians.

I'd also like to remark that this is an area in which we all have a common interest. We are all taxpayers but we are all consumers of security. In that sense, ultimately, if we follow Thomas Hobbes, security is the ultimate public good that a modern state provides. In that sense, if I may say so, we all have a dog in this race together.

You can ask your questions in French, as I am bilingual. I will respond in the official language of your choice.

There are four remarks I would like to make at the start with regard to this particular issue, as to where I see opportunities for the federal government to act. One is at a national level. The second is at the federal level. The third is at the level of intergovernmental affairs. The fourth is at the level of the RCMP, the RCMP as the federal police force, with opportunities there for both improvement and also for benchmarking and trendsetting for police forces throughout the country.

From a national perspective, one of the concerns I have is that policing has become a little like calling Ghostbusters. When we have a problem these days, the ultimate default position is to call 911 and a police officer will show up. We've seen a substantial ever-growing enlargement of policing services and what we make police responsible for. This is not necessarily by choice of the police forces themselves. Rather on the one hand, it is by mandates we have imposed upon them. On the other hand, by having installed a default mentality that when we need someone to solve a dispute or when we have a raucous kid somewhere in the neighbourhood, we call our police force. This has led, over the last 130 or 140 years, to a substantial and continuous expansion of police services.

The most recent expansion has been in the areas of mental health. One of the concerns here is that as the federal government and particularly provincial and municipal governments, which are largely responsible for the delivery of social programs and the supports that go along with them, look to balance their books, we will see cuts in precisely those types of support services. We will likely see an enlarged call volume for non-traditional policing-type services.

This is the same with child protection and child welfare. My wife is a social worker for the Children's Aid Society and there are increasing demands. When couples split up, we now have a police officer standing by, if there has been violence, to monitor the person moving out of the house. These ever-enlarging duties mean that we have a sort of iceberg problem, if you will. The more we impose duties on police services that are non-traditional, non-conventional policing services, the less of the tip of the iceberg we actually see in terms of people who are out in patrol cars and people who are out on the roads. So it's no surprise that people can say they can drive from Ottawa to Toronto without ever passing a police cruiser.

My plea on this particular account is that we need a national discussion on what actually constitutes core policing duties. I don't necessarily have a direct and clear answer for that. As Canadians, we need to decide what are policing functions and what are functions that in many cases are carried out, not only more effectively but more cheaply and more professionally, by other agencies. I'm sure you've talked to plenty of police officers, as part of the committee work, who have told you that they are not mental health workers. When they show up, their training has not really prepared them for that particular situation.

First, we need a national discussion on what constitutes core policing duties. What are duties that police officers are doing—administratively but also on the intervention side—that would be better done by other agencies, or in cooperation with them? Calgary police and Durham police have some models in that regard. That's the first element.

The second element pertains to the federal level. What specifically does the federal government need to do? I'm happy to discuss this more during questions, but in particular, we need a national records management system. Every police force currently has its own digital records management system. These systems, in most cases, don't even talk to one another. So it is very difficult to exchange information. When police talk about paperwork, they mean paperwork. While we have digitized processes within police forces, we don't have a very effective way of sharing information amongst police forces. We also don't have a particularly effective way of sharing this information with the crown, or with the defence, for instance.

You have all seen the television pictures of large police investigations where police officers are trucking out box-loads of paperwork because they have no other method of sharing this documentation. We need a national electronic records management system—a system that doesn't just connect police forces to one another but also connects courts and the Public Prosecution Service of Canada, so that the crown can have access to this. This is not just a matter of cost savings. This is a matter of making our justice system a whole lot more efficient. When we currently schedule police officers, for instance, it is all done on paper. Miscommunication and missed dates cost our courts system and the police uncountable amounts of money.

The other advantage of a national records management system is that when we have large investigations, the police officer would have something known as the advisory crown. This is usually a crown that will help with issues such as warrants. What the advisory crown should really be helping with is the entire investigation and the entire investigative process—to point out to the police officers when there may be pieces of evidence that they still need to gather for the crown to prosecute the case successfully.

With the exception of warrants, what we currently have is a situation where the crown is often confronted with the evidence after the fact. The crown then discovers that there is certain evidence missing, or certain evidence that perhaps was collected in a fashion that makes it difficult to present in a court of law. It's not just about the cost savings. It's about making the entire system more efficient and it's about making sure that in these increasingly complex cases.... Just about every case is becoming more complex, even the simple defences. The defence has an interest in making cases complex, and I will explain in a moment why.

We have colleges for physicians and various professions in this country, but we don't have a police college standard, per se. The country needs a professional standard for police officers. It would cover everything from the way we do tactical training to professional expectations, to professional ethics to the leadership training we expect. If we want to treat policing as a profession, we need to recognize this through a college. Ultimately, we probably don't want the civilian authority to interfere too much in the autonomy of our various police forces, because we want them to get on with their jobs. The way to do this is to make sure that we treat them as a profession.

The third element that I might point out is intergovernmental affairs and intergovernmental relations. In the aftermath of 9/11, we saw substantial emphasis on trying to get lower-level forces, municipal and provincial, to prosecute cases that are national security cases, or cases that are ultimately in the federal government's interest rather than the local interest. As local and provincial governments and forces look to balance their budgets, they inherently retrench to the priorities that are the most important for their particular level of government, and for the people to whom they are ultimately accountable. That means, for most municipal and provincial forces, primarily issues such as organized crime as opposed to issues of national security, for instance.

I have two quick final remarks with regard to the RCMP. The way it is structured with its paramilitary heritage, it looks unique in the western democratic world and the western policing world in the sense that here we have officers who one day are writing liquor tickets and breaking up domestic disputes and the next day are promoted to the white-collar crime force in Toronto because they have done their stint up in the North.

I think the RCMP needs to have three tiers: one that looks after client-based services, namely provincial policing and a few other services; one that looks after federal investigations; and a separate civilian tier that looks after things such as human resources, finances, and policy.

To this effect, I will submit to the committee “Organization and Accountability”, a document from 1999 that explains the way the Department of National Defence is organized to have a civilian part and a uniformed part. While there's crossover between the two, it is important that we separate these functions and that we have separate recruitment streams.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you very much, Professor Leuprecht.

We'll begin now with a seven-minute round of questions. I will just give everybody a slight warning that there is a chance this morning's session may be disrupted by bells. If so, we will probably have to adjourn the session.

We'll start with Ms. Bergen for seven minutes.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Dr. Leuprecht, for being here today.

You gave us a lot of information, so I want to go back, because I actually didn't even have a chance to write some of it down. I'm going to go to the most recent point about the RCMP and the three-tiered system.

Can you just go through your suggestions and take a couple more moments to explain those three tiers you were suggesting?

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

If we want to achieve not just functional efficiencies—performing tasks better—but also cost savings.... Currently uniformed members are performing tasks for which they really do not have a comparative advantage or particular training, nor are they particularly well prepared to carry them out. In particular, we have a deputy commissioner who looks after financial accountability, and we have a deputy commissioner who looks after human resources. Those are ultimately tasks that in just about every department, including the Department of National Defence, are, by and large, carried out by civilians who are professionalized in those particular areas.

I think the RCMP would benefit from being able to invest its resources and its attention into the core function of policing—both the provincial policing part and the federal policing task that it carries out—rather than being distracted by a whole bunch of other tasks that are really purely administrative. I've noticed in the last couple of years that the organization has civilianized a couple of these particular functions. But ultimately, I would envisage an organization that has—and I think the initial spirit of the idea was correct—essentially a civilian commissioner just the way the Department of National Defence has a deputy minister, and a uniformed cadre that looks specifically after the policing functions of the organization.

I also think we have considerable inefficiencies in the way the organization is divided. We don't have clear boundaries, in terms of the human resources side, between the federal investigative functions and the provincial policing functions. In just about every other country we can think of, the functions that the RCMP performs in one organization are performed by separate organizations. We don't necessarily need to stand up a whole separate bureaucracy, but we do need to essentially provide some firewalls within the organization to designate one to look after the provincial policing tasks, and another that recruits directly and has direct-entry opportunities for everybody from lawyers to accountants into the federal investigative branch of the organization.

While there are problems with the FBI and I don't think we can transfer the FBI model to Canada, basically we need an FBI type of organization for Canada that is not tied in to the RCMP's traditional and conventional recruitment and training type of system through Depot. It's highly unattractive to many people who have professional degrees to enter a system that doesn't value people for the professions they have.

It is baffling to me how many people with master's degrees, with law degrees, and with Ph.D.s are out there in the organization, writing traffic tickets because the organization says they don't have enough time in and they need to work their way up through the hierarchy. In other federal investigative policing organizations such as the FBI and the German Bundeskriminalamt, there are direct-entry positions for people who are simply looking after federal investigations per se.

I'll submit this document. I've written on this particular subject matter, and I'll submit that also for the committee's reference.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Thank you.

I also want to go back to one of your other recommendations, the federal national records management system.

Can you compare that...? I know we have CPIC, which, as long as police organizations enter into it, is accessible across the country. What's the difference? You're actually talking about evidence. Can you explain how, if we were to do this federally, we could set it up so it would end up being a cost savings, and not just another level of bureaucracy, another area where police organizations would have to pay in, and some larger ones would see a huge benefit, but maybe not some smaller ones?

That would be my concern.

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

The national records management system is intended for all investigations and all the evidence that is collected as part of those investigations. CPIC just has a very small.... It's simply to reference certain types of offences with regard to offenders.

This idea here is that police forces currently collect, even on these complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations, their own pieces of evidence. They don't have an electronic system to collate this, so they literally exchange—in most cases, not all of the cases—paperwork.

The PRIME and the PROS servers that the RCMP have don't have enough capacity, for instance, to upload large files with regard to pictures, JPEGs, records, and whatnot. So we don't have an effective way, in these increasingly complex investigations, of actually keeping track of all the material that is being collected. When we end up sharing that material, it stays within that one particular police force that is running the investigation or in a sharing mechanism that a couple of the organizations might have worked out for that particular investigation.

We don't have an opportunity for multi-jurisdictional investigations where every police force can enter its records—evidence as it gathers it, its pictures, whatever seizures it might have—into the same records management system that is then accessible to all the police forces working on that particular file, and is also immediately electronically accessible to the crown, to the Public Prosecution Service of Canada. It also makes it possible to release all those records to the courts, and possibly also to the defence, because this way we won't have issues with regard to disclosure, for instance, when we find something at the bottom of some box that we perhaps forgot and that then compromises the investigation. We have one electronic mechanism of keeping records.

While this might not be as important when we're trying to prosecute burglaries at the local level, when we're trying to have national security investigations, when we're trying to prosecute organized crime across multiple provinces, across municipal, provincial, federal police forces, we need a mechanism to keep all that evidence electronically in one place rather than having disparate pieces and then trying to share paper among all these organizations—let alone trying to bring that paper into a courtroom to disclose it.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you very much, Professor Leuprecht.

We now go to the official opposition.

Ms. Michaud, you have the floor.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Leuprecht, for your presentation. It was very thorough and informative.

We recently had an opportunity to visit different places to see how they did things. We went to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and Calgary, Alberta, among other places. You may have heard about the policing approaches those municipalities use, HUB and COR. They require the cooperation of communities and social stakeholders. I was wondering whether you had looked at those types of approaches in your research and whether you could comment on their effectiveness.

If not, did your research identify any tangible reductions in the demand for services or methods used to redirect police interventions, in cities other than the ones mentioned? As you said earlier, this is a serious problem for our police forces. I would like to hear your thoughts on that.

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

Since it's a fairly complex question, I would like to answer in English, if you don't mind, to avoid any ambiguity.

There's ample opportunity within our police services for a division of labour among the functions that police services perform, particularly with regard to the use of special constables. We currently have police officers doing everything from running background checks on people—and of course we're running a lot more background checks—to doing medical training and education and training at Depot and at our police academies, even on matters of criminal law, on things where arguably those officers are hardly the people who are the best qualified to instruct our officers.

I think there's ample opportunity in things like court services, community policing, and public affairs to specialize those functions with either civilian positions or special constables. I point in particular to the British approach, where even traffic police and traffic flows have been outsourced.

I want to differentiate here between outsourcing and privatization versus the civilianization of certain functions. There are pilot projects in the United States that have been highly successful in interventions that are not high-risk interventions. We now send civilian members of the force to do the investigation after burglaries. These members will even bring the insurance adjuster along so you can do all the paperwork there in one go. One of the challenges when we have police officers is that they inherently get called away for other types of functions that they then need to perform.

The one function where I would be reticent to have it performed by civilians or to have it outsourced is actual traffic stops, because these are the actual areas where we lose.... The greatest number of deaths of police officers is as a result of traffic stops, because it's a hazardous work environment, on the one hand, and it's also dangerous in the sense that if you're pulling over someone who might have a record or whatnot, you might put yourself at risk. This is one area where we need the accountability and the high level of training.

But you are absolutely correct. I think we need to think much more judiciously about what functions we can actually have performed by members who may indeed be sworn members, even perhaps including mental health or child protection workers, who might also be sworn members but who don't intervene in a crisis situation with a gun at their side, because ultimately that is unlikely to de-escalate particular circumstances.

So indeed, in the division of labour and the specialization of functions, we have a one-size-fits-all system. It's the iceberg problem, where if we don't think about what tasks we can actually have other elements within organizations perform, we're going to see an ever-smaller tip of that iceberg actually out there and being able to perform the core policing functions.

[Élaine Michaud, NDP, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you for your answer.

You mentioned auxiliary officers. That is one component. On our trip, we were able to attend a meeting of stakeholders who were following the HUB approach. It was in Prince Albert. Representatives from aboriginal communities, social services, health services and corrections, as well as probation officers were together at the table. They discussed specific cases affecting the community and then came up with an intervention action plan fairly quickly, sometimes even the same day.

I was wondering whether, in your research, you had come across similar models elsewhere. If not, could you comment on this specific approach to police work within communities?

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

I know there is a pilot project in Calgary, Durham and Toronto. People there are also trying to adopt a more coordinated approach. Financial savings are not necessarily the main focus.

One of the challenges we have had is that we have securitized many police interventions by virtue of calling police officers to them. I think the greatest benefit of this approach is that we de-securitize certain types of interventions and we recognize them for what they are, which is that these are relationship problems, mental health problems, or public health problems. These are not ultimately functions we want to securitize. When we send a police offer and we securitize them, we have a much greater chance of these individuals ending up in the justice system. In the justice system they're usually not particularly well served, plus it's also the single most expensive way of solving any one particular approach.

I'm not sure, for instance, that sending a social worker with a police officer necessarily generates cost savings per se, especially if you have to call out the social worker, who then works on time-and-a-half or double-time pay or whatnot. Overall, you can provide a much more effective service to the individual, and you can have a much greater chance of keeping that individual out of the security and justice system by having a coordinated intervention that is based on professionals as well as the community.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

There's very little time remaining, so I think we'll go to Mr. Norlock on the government side.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and through you to the witness, thank you for appearing today.

As I'm listening to you, I go through some 30 years of policing and come up with a couple of suggestions.

The citizens of this country are the consumers of public safety, and to me you have to look for a model out there that serves their customers best and find out how they do it. A lot of it comes down to some of the examples you used.

I use the example of Walmart. Go to a Walmart store now and you can get your prescription filled, or you can get your photographs done. You buy your groceries, buy your clothes, or buy your electronics. It's one stop.

I think if we look at it, you're basically selling a one stop when it comes down to records management. When it comes down to records management everybody wants somebody else to pay for it, and I'm talking about different levels of government. How I would sell it is that I'm prepared—at least I think I'm prepared—to look at that as a central location for records. But the people who currently pay for that, in other words, municipalities pay for their large, city police forces to have this records management....

You should sit down with the people who want you to manage their records system, and they're going to pay for a share of that. So it shouldn't be the big federal government paying for everything. It should be currently you incur certain costs so you will incur the percentage of costs on the amount of data you put into this database, which is a records management system. I say this because we have different people who want to push in different directions, and it should be that the users of that system pay.

When you talk about how policemen shouldn't do everything, the customer will decide what they want the police to do. I'll give you an example.

In the OPP, we decided to reduce the number of officer calls. Mrs. Jones or Mr. Jones has their car stolen, and after the telephone triage of the incident, the OPP say, why do we send an officer to go to that door 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 kilometres away, just to verify there's no car in the driveway? Mr. Jones has never called the police in his life for anything. He pays his municipal, provincial, and federal taxes, and the one time he needs a police officer to come and at least share in his disappointment, we're not sending somebody. So there's an expectation that the provider of the service has to accommodate.

I wonder if you would make some comments on what I have just said.

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

With regard to the OPP, the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario just made available its records to OPP officers. This is in regard to drivers' licence suspensions and whatnot, as a particularly useful tool.

But the problem is that the MTO has also now downloaded the inputting of certain types of offences onto the Ontario Provincial Police and municipal police forces for those particular types of records. One of the challenges that now poses is that courts still expect an agent of the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario to provide those records to the courts, usually with a certain type of sworn statement.

One of the challenges we have is indeed that the devil is in the details, with how we work out the user-pay system, and also with making sure that when we provide more digitization to our police forces, we don't then download, on top of that, ever greater tasks in terms of digitization.

As you well know, having served, one of the challenges these days is transcripts for videotaped statements and interviews, which the police have to essentially transcribe, even though it might be the crown that requests them. Why is it that we cannot have a stenographer or whoever transcribe it, for instance? Because there are no resources within the system.

One of the challenges is indeed that we can have a user-pay system, but we also need to make sure that as part of the user-pay system we don't then increase the burden on police officers to input, or to provide data and digitized data that previously they didn't have to provide. I think this is one of the challenges with being called out to certain types of calls. When you would have started your career, a domestic dispute would have been a 30-minute call. Now if there is a domestic dispute, this takes an officer out for the full eight hours or more of his shift, because of all the paperwork and documentation that is required.

I think there is an equilibrium needed here between what serves the taxpayer and the individual who is calling the police force, and the burden it imposes on the police force. This is especially true in times when, for instance, the particular force or that particular shift might already be stretched because an officer is off on court duty, for which he had just been scheduled but for which the police force doesn't have any overtime resources to schedule someone else on that shift, so that particular shift is now down an officer. Weighing these challenges, I think, is much more complex than it appears.

In that regard, I think one of the greatest challenges is the way our court system operates, and the way people systematically—particularly on the defence side—abuse our court system, to continually push out trials for completely dubious and spurious reasons, claiming there wasn't full disclosure, or claiming that somebody needs a translator, an interpreter, or whatnot. So we push out these trials for a couple of years and then eventually, as in Kingston—where a reasonably mid-sized human-smuggling case was recently dropped from the system because it was essentially overdue—they are turfed.

I think there could be a major efficiency here. If we want our police officers to be able to respond to the calls that you've just laid out for us, and if we want them to be there for the taxpayer when his or her car is stolen, we need to make sure they don't get tied up in call after call to the courts, for the same case, in order to then have to defend those who say they need this piece or they need that piece, and we continue to have trials pushed out.

I propose a system where a change in the way the law is written...that both sides have an opportunity to make a full submission to the court, and whatever is not requested in that submission.... It's like walking into the ER, where you need to have someone at the front and a sort of triage person who decides that, okay, everybody has made their full submission, you want an interpreter, or you think there hasn't been full disclosure, and they pass that on to the crown and make sure that the crown checks that they have rightful disclosure. But when you come in front of the judge, this is your one shot at actually coming in front of the judge, so there is no continuously pushing things out.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

We'll have to stop there.

It's now over to Mr. Scarpaleggia, for seven minutes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

You've brought a lot of insight and information into our discussion. You brought a new perspective. As you alluded to in your opening remarks, we've been mostly meeting police chiefs and front-line officers and so on. It's good to have a bit more of a theoretical perspective.

I'm still trying to get a handle on the idea of civilianization. For example, I understand the concept that we can get civilians to be doing things that police officers would normally have done. One example that was brought up was the example from Ontario that Mr. Norlock discussed. I believe it was the idea—and correct me if I'm wrong—that in Ontario if you get your car stolen they could send a non-civilian...no, that's just an idea. You gave another example where there's more civilianization happening.

But let's just take that example. We have one objection, which of course is a valid one to that model. That is, people have their cars stolen, they rarely deal with the police, if ever, and they expect that a police officer will come by because it's a law and order issue. It's a good idea, but then there's some pushback there.

Then we say we could use civilianization for traffic violations. For example, in Montreal, there are special units that only deal with traffic. They're in police cars and they can't deal with anything else but traffic violations, speeding and so on. They may be manned by cadets, but I'm not sure—or maybe not cadets but perhaps a different level of officer, I'm not sure. Then you said that pulling people over on the service road of a highway is potentially dangerous. It's a potentially dangerous manoeuvre. In fact, that's where sometimes police officers get injured and so on. That kind of argues against civilianization. Then we get to if it's a domestic dispute, maybe we don't need to send a police officer. Maybe we need to send someone else because there's so much paperwork involved and statements to be taken. On the other hand, if ever there was a situation where you might like to see a police officer at the door, it would be in the context of conjugal violence.

So I'm having trouble. I understand the concept of civilianization, but everywhere you turn there seems to be a reason why you can't civilianize necessarily or to the extent that one would like.

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

Let me give you a concrete example.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Yes, please do.

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

The Tournament of Hearts in Kingston: it's a curling tournament. There are four RCMP officers on overtime pay doing red serge duty.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Doing what?

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

Doing red serge duty.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I'm not familiar with curling. What's that?

[Prof. Christian Leuprecht]

Okay. This is just to say that the challenge is this. We send four RCMP officers on their regular pay out to do essentially what is a symbolic duty, standing there with the red serge, the boots, and whatnot. This is a function that a retired officer would be happy to do if we paid this individual a per diem, paid them their meals. Why do we need somebody there on the full dime?

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Absolutely. You're right.