Public Safety Committee on June 13th, 2013

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Good morning. This is meeting number 90 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, on Thursday, June 13.

We're meeting pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) regarding a study on the economics of policing.

We have our witnesses this morning via video conference.

From the Thunder Bay Police Service, we have Chief John Paul Levesque. Good morning.

[Chief John Paul Levesque, Chief of Police, Thunder Bay Police Service]

Good morning.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

From the Smart Policing Initiative in University Park, Illinois, we have Professor James Coldren, who is the project director. Good morning.

[Professor James R. Coldren, Project Director, Smart Policing Initiative]

Good morning.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

We will begin, as usual, with 10-minute statements from each of our witnesses before we go to the first round of questions.

We'll begin this morning with Chief Levesque. Please go ahead.

[Chief John Paul Levesque]

Mr. Chair, and members of the committee, good morning and thank you for the opportunity to appear before you.

I'm assuming I was asked to appear before you to give a perspective on policing in northern Ontario, with Thunder Bay being the largest municipality in northwestern Ontario. Certainly, we have some different challenges in policing the area.

One of the primary objectives for us in northwestern Ontario specifically in policing is to develop strong and positive relations within our first nations and aboriginal communities. It is a daunting task. It is sometimes incident driven, where an incident will occur, setting us back. It's one step forward and two steps back when something occurs that is not always a positive spin on relations with aboriginal people.

Particularly here in Thunder Bay, our fastest growing demographic is the aboriginal population, specifically people between the ages of 15 and 35. While the rest of the population is aging here in Thunder Bay, the demographic with respect to aboriginals is a younger set.

As northern communities and reserves go, we tend to go. If they're having difficulties in the northern communities, we tend to see the same difficulties here in the bigger city of Thunder Bay. Certainly it is a daunting task for first nations policing to keep up. I know they have difficulty recruiting and retaining people. I know that the recent funding discrepancies have not helped in that endeavour.

One thing I want to get out was the absolute importance not just to the northern communities but to the surrounding communities of adequate funding for first nations policing.

The other thing I want to mention is that as we see more people migrate into Thunder Bay and other communities from the northern communities, we should be seeing funding from the federal level in helping us deal with aboriginal issues. Our population here in Thunder Bay is approximately 25% aboriginal and we do have a lot of interactions with aboriginals. Having said that, we have what's called an aboriginal liaison unit, which only has two officers in it. We could use at least double that, if not more.

There needs to be a recognition that socio-economic situations drive crime and disorder. I'm not speaking solely for Thunder Bay, but certainly it is an issue here. Mental health, addictions, poverty, homelessness, all those drive up crime rates and send us on an array of calls that we consider disorder calls.

Very quickly I will give you a stat from last year. The Thunder Bay police made almost 3,000 arrests of intoxicated persons. That's well above the national average and certainly puts us as number one per capita in Ontario.

Another issue that we deal with not just in Thunder Bay but in northwestern Ontario is domestic violence. We recently did some research on what we do and how we do it, what types of calls we go to, to try to develop a new deployment model. What we saw was that a great deal of our calls—I mentioned the intoxicated persons we have to deal with—are domestic violence calls. We deal with almost 3,000 calls for domestic violence a year in a city of 117,000 people. Again, that is well above the national average and number one in the province of Ontario.

There's no new money. My police services board made it very clear that there's no new money. We had to create a unit by collapsing another unit, so we're using the domestic violence unit to take over from the front-line officers when they get a domestic violence call. We're hoping that will free up officers to do more proactive policing at the uniform level.

Calls dealing with violence, drugs, organized crime, and child exploitation are examples of what the police should be concentrating on, and again, not just here in Thunder Bay but provincially and nationally. However, we're left dealing with many issues that are not core functions of policing, as I mentioned, the disorder issues, mental health issues, things of that nature.

Our resources are being eaten up in many different ways. On the rise are things like elder abuse, youth crime, child pornography and child exploitation, computer crimes and identity theft.

I have to mention that the loss of funding through the PORF, the police officer recruitment fund, didn't help in this endeavour. We lost two officers when we lost that funding.

There's a provincial strategy here in Ontario on child exploitation and child pornography. There needs to be a strategy at the national level to prevent and combat those types of crimes. Certainly, serious discussions on civilianization, privatization, and two-tiered policing need to occur. As an example, we have to do court security and prisoner transportation here in Thunder Bay, so we use seven first-class constables, who make $83,000 a year, and five special constables, who make approximately $70,000 a year. That's pretty high-priced help for guarding prisoners and transporting them from the district jail to the courthouse.

Last, I'd like to mention that there needs to be legislation and capital investment to allow for more technologically driven enforcement of, for example, traffic laws. This would free up officers and add to the public coffers.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you very much, Chief Levesque.

Now we'll turn to Professor Coldren.

[Prof. James R. Coldren]

Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, I, too, would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning for a few moments on matters pertaining to the economics and search for efficiencies in policing.

I thought I might offer a few comments on my background and how I came to be involved in this work of policing. I'm a sociologist from the University of Chicago. I've been doing research, mostly evaluation research, in the criminal justice system for the past 30 years. Since about 1997, I've been involved in research and program development on community policing, strategic approaches to community safety, project-safe neighbourhoods here in the States, and now I'm working on what we call smart policing, which I'll get to in a minute.

In addition to my duties as a professor of criminal justice here at Governors State University, I'm currently the national director of training and technical assistance with CNA for the Bureau of Justice Assistance Smart Policing Initiative.

One of the movements that's under way in policing in the U.S. these days and probably elsewhere has to do with research and measurement. Despite several generations of progress and innovation in policing, precious little is known about what actually works in terms of police strategies and police tactics. There's a long history of what we would refer to as shallow analysis and weak research design in the assessment of police effectiveness. In the last 10 years we have seen some progress in these areas, but there is much more to be done.

I mention this because if we want to understand efficiencies, and if we want to understand the economics of policing, we have to measure things better, and we have to integrate good measurement into the culture of policing. For example, a study in the United States that was published in 2010 examined over 5,000 research reports on the effectiveness of police tactics. This study found that of those over 5,000 reports, only 11 of them had sufficient methodological rigour to warrant confidence in their findings. That was a very surprising result to me. How can we make decisions about efficiencies if we don't know with confidence which police approaches have the effects that have been intended?

I've been involved for the past four years in an approach to policing in the United States called smart policing. Smart policing is kind of a funny name. It's not the opposite of dumb policing. We think it represents a natural evolution in policing that relies heavily on scientific research methods. Simply put, smart policing encourages police agencies to collaborate with researchers in several key areas: crime problem analysis; development of a response; the development of solutions and interventions; monitoring and assessment of those interventions, which we typically call process evaluation, with real time feedback to the police agency on how things are going; outcome and impact evaluation; and very importantly, examining the issue of external validity. If a police tactic or strategy is implemented in one area and researched thoroughly and found to be effective, we have to ask ourselves whether it would translate to any other jurisdiction.

More specifically, police agencies that adopt a smart policing approach engage in one or more of the following approaches through a strategic planning process. One is the deep analysis of crime and public order and quality-of-life problems in their jurisdiction, which often involves the collection and analysis of new data. There's the development of place and offender-based prevention and intervention initiatives. I think more recently we are starting to see place and offender based strategies together. Also, there are improvements and enhancements in crime analysis and intelligence analysis, and rapid delivery of the results of that analysis to patrol, as well as technological enhancements of various kinds.

There are focused efforts at not only developing these new approaches but integrating them into the agency so that they are sustainable.

With respect to collaboration and outreach, I think we have coined a phrase on smart policing. We call it “in reach”. This means if you're introducing innovations into a police agency, you have to communicate and collaborate as much with individuals within your agency as you do with people outside of your agency.

I can also say that if you look at what's going on in smart policing, few of these practices in and of themselves are new or innovative. It's the engagement of the researcher that's different. It's the focus on the elevation of crime and intelligence analysis in the agency that's different. It's the utilization of technology to get better information to cops on the street that's different. It's the assessment of impact using rigorous research design that is different.

I'm not sure how my time is, but I could talk for a few minutes about a couple of applications of smart policing if there's time for it.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

You have about three minutes remaining.

[Prof. James R. Coldren]

Okay, let me mention one. This has been fairly well documented by a researcher from Harvard University. Maybe you've come across him. His name is Anthony Braga. He is the research partner for the Smart Policing Initiative in Boston. He engaged in an analysis of crime in what he calls “micro places” in Boston. He identified over 8,000 street segments in Boston and he was able to collect 30 years' worth of violent crime data sorted and analyzed at these different micro places.

He was able to identify with some precision where the hotspots were in Boston, and it wasn't just the hotspots; it was very small geographic areas that had been hot for the better part of 30 years consistently. The stability of these troublesome areas, these hotspots, was incredible. They developed a safe street team approach, kind of a problem-oriented approach to policing in these hotspots. He studied them extensively. One of the more interesting things he found in studying them is when left to their devices, the safe street teams who developed problem-oriented approaches to these problems were more likely to develop kind of social engagement approaches, and not necessarily traditional police suppression approaches. They were very successful through a comparative analysis in reducing street robberies and violent street crimes by about 17%.

I can just tell you from the work that we've done up there that in the case of Boston, you have a researcher who is embedded in the police organization, who has the ears of the police commissioner, as well as the sergeants, lieutenants, and captains. He does analysis on how things are going in the streets of Boston, and they change their tactics and their approaches based on the analysis that Dr. Braga provides them. That's an example of smart policing.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Thank you very much, Professor Coldren.

We will now proceed to our first round of questions. There will be seven minutes for questions and answers. We'll start with the government side with Mr. Leef.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to both of our witnesses, and welcome today.

Chief Levesque, we've heard a lot in committee from police forces across the country. One of the things that does come up, of course, is the continuing pressure on police budgets and the outstanding request for more resources, both financial and human. The one thing that's been a fairly consistent theme, which you touched on yet again today, was that police are responding to a lot of non-core policing things and have become, over the years, the agency of preferred choice, not necessarily the last or the best. A number of the agencies have been recognizing, despite their wishes for additional financial support, that this may not be the answer in terms of delivering the best policing models.

I know from my policing background in native northern communities in Yukon Territory we would have said that if we doubled our police numbers, we would be able to tackle this issue, but truth be told, when there are mental health, drug addiction and domestic violence issues, there are social challenges that need to be dealt with elsewhere before a police agency is involved.

I don't think you touched on it much in your address, but what's the Thunder Bay police force doing with regard to engaging in an integrated approach with mental health services, with community group social services? You mentioned homelessness and poverty. How do you feel your agency is working on that front? What kind of work is Thunder Bay doing to engage those groups to work with them so that, for example, you don't have officers who aren't mental health experts dealing with mental health issues, and you don't have officers who aren't drug and alcohol addictions experts dealing with common clients all of the time from a purely police perspective?

[Chief John Paul Levesque]

Through you, Mr. Chair, off the top of my head I can think of two initiatives right away.

As the Thunder Bay Police Service, we belong to the Thunder Bay Crime Prevention Council in which 30-plus agencies are involved, mental health, health, addiction services, all those types of things.

The professor touched on research. That committee is run by a doctor. She has a Ph.D. in research and she helps us out with those types of things. That's one thing.

The other side, the addiction part of it, is big for us. I can give you an example. The needle exchange program here in Thunder Bay in 2011 gave out 660,000 needles but only collected 220,000, so we're getting calls to pick up dirty needles all the time. That's not a police function.

The other side of that is that a managed alcohol program started up recently. I mentioned earlier that we make 3,000 arrests for intoxication every year. Probably 50 people make up about 80% of those 3,000 arrests. The managed alcohol program is a 15-bed facility that is trying to get the worst of the alcohol-addicted people into this program and managing their alcohol, thereby freeing up our resources as a police service.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

Thank you for that.

You mentioned the needle exchange program. I'm fairly familiar with that type of program in our territory. I don't know if they pitched it the same way in Thunder Bay as they did in the north, but it was basically promoted in the community as a safe needle exchange program. Their branding was one-for-one needle exchange, which gave the community the perception that before a needle was handed out, a needle was returned by a drug user.

Is that the same way it's sold in Thunder Bay? Obviously, you've indicated that so many are going out but not so many are coming back. Can you touch on that?

Is there a way the government can be involved at different levels, or is there a different education path we need to take to make that one-for-one notion a reality instead of only being a thought? It's not, obviously, only a waste of police officers' time, but it's a serious community safety issue to have needles lying around in the communities.

[Chief John Paul Levesque]

Mr. Chair, I'm sorry I missed the first part of the question. I probably missed the first five seconds of it, but I think I got the gist of it.

I refer to it as a needle exchange program here in Thunder Bay. Clearly it's not. When you're giving out over 600,000 and only collecting 200,000, it's not an exchange program. It's certainly not a one-for-one exchange. Superior Points which runs the program doesn't refer to it as an exchange program. Certainly, a policy that says it's one-for-one, as opposed to handing out to an individual a box of 20 at a time and not getting any back, would be a big help to us.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

You mentioned that your officers are doing court transfers and prisoner transport. Are there available models or other agencies in Thunder Bay, for example the RCMP, engaged in a program to have the correctional staff do that? Of course, that would be hinging on whether or not there are correctional staff available, but can you outsource that particular responsibility at all?

[Chief John Paul Levesque]

Through you, Mr. Chair, there are two issues with that.

First, by law we're legislated to provide court security, not so much prisoner transportation. But as the police agency, we must provide security for the courthouse, as it's in our municipality.

The other part of that is that civilianization or privatization is very tough with police association collective agreements. It's very difficult to bring in part-time policing or other civilian agencies, or to contract out, with the strong language we see in our collective agreements.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

Be very brief, Mr. Leef, please.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

If I don't have much time then, I don't have any more questions.

Thank you, gentlemen, for your time this morning.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Randall Garrison]

We'll now turn to the opposition for seven minutes.

Mr. Rafferty.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you both for being here.

I have a question for Professor Coldren.

Regarding the Smart Policing Initiative, you talked about Boston and the targeted work and measurement that has gone on there. With the way tactics have changed in Boston, would you have any idea whether there is any way to have measured financial savings in that particular case?

[Prof. James R. Coldren]

That's a very good question.

If I would mention one of the challenges we have in smart policing and policing research generally, it's the cost-benefit piece. Boston has not conducted, or at least has not published to my knowledge, the cost-benefit analysis of that part of their work.

We know of several studies that have been done and if the committee hasn't come across them, then I would be happy to provide them. There have been several studies done on the cost of policing and the cost of criminal justice processing for different types of crime. I actually made a few notes about that and these costs range greatly.

One study estimated the cost of a murder at $1.4 million, and another study estimated the cost of a murder at $8.6 million. The implication is if you reduce your homicide rate by 10%, you're potentially introducing $10 million, $20 million, $30 million in savings. But this methodology is not quite refined yet. It's hard these days to put a good confident cost figure on these crime reductions.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Chief Levesque, I want to ask a quick question about the managed alcohol program. It's relatively new; I know exactly when it started because the building is right across from my office. It is a fairly small facility.

Could you say, or is it too early or impossible to tell, whether or not that has reduced the number of calls you're getting to that part of town?

[Chief John Paul Levesque]

Unfortunately, I'm unable to answer that question, Mr. Chair. It's early in the program, as Mr. Rafferty pointed out. A comprehensive study is ongoing and the results of that will be released in December.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

You talked about the domestic violence unit and folding others into that unit. Am I correct in making the assumption that it's not just officers who are in that unit, that perhaps officers travel with mental health professionals, or people who are particularly skilled at dealing with domestic violence? In other words, could you perhaps expand a little bit on the unit?