Evidence of meeting #91 for Public Safety and National Security in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was research.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:30 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
I was hoping the professor would answer first.
Do you want to go, Chris, or do you want me to?
9:30 a.m.
Professor, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
Sure.
I think we have a variety of groups that represent different interests in policing, from police boards, police associations, and the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. I don't know that we're going to be able to get rid of them, in a sense, but I think they have to develop partnerships and recognize that they're all in this enterprise together. I think that's beginning to happen. To some extent, I think these were not coordinated, and they were often in conflict with one another.
If Canada is to pull this together and maintain the kind of reputation we have for policing, we will have to see more working partnerships between these different interest groups. Maybe the government can provide some leadership in that.
I'll leave it at that.
9:30 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
I think your question is very poignant because right now this is what police leaders struggle with: How many police officers do I need, and do I have too many or too few?
Again, because I'm proud of the work we've done, and not because I'm trying to suggest we're further ahead than anyone else, in the last five years we've re-engineered our entire organization and introduced a queueing model that enables us to determine exactly.... I can answer that question, and I can tell you exactly how many police officers I need and what I'm doing with them. But the question that needs to be answered is, what do you want us to do? It's not enough to say we have too many or too few, unless we know exactly what our mission is. That's where, in the core of this economic model, rests the community, the governance, the oversight, the values, the principles, and the direction in which we're headed.
To Professor Murphy's earlier point, he is absolutely right that 75% of our patrol response is to non-criminal offences. What we're doing at the national level right now is toying with the idea that while we have uniform crime reporting, maybe we need uniform calls for service reporting as well, so we can really capture exactly the work that's being done.
9:30 a.m.
NDP
The Vice-Chair NDP Randall Garrison
Thank you very much. You're now out of time.
We'll turn to Mr. Scarpaleggia for seven minutes.
June 18th, 2013 / 9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I will continue with that uniform call for service. I'm not quite sure what that means, as opposed to uniform crime statistics. Can you elaborate on that before I go to my round of questioning?
9:30 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
Sure.
Where we would go to a social disorder call for service is a situation in which somebody living with mental illness is walking down the street in the middle of summer, shirt off, waving their arms, and scaring people in the downtown area. No crime has been committed. We're responding to that call. It's a call for service, as opposed to somebody being assaulted.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Right.
I didn't quite get your point about three incidents happening across the country, and then you said something about if you were doing it in reverse it would capture a different conclusion.
Could you elaborate on that as well?
9:30 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
Yes. What we have right now in some jurisdictions.... Using New Brunswick as an example, there is a municipality in New Brunswick where they've created a bylaw to avoid having, perhaps, young people who are in university ending up with a criminal record because they ended up fighting in public when they came out of a bar. They created a bylaw to address that.
There is nothing wrong with addressing that through a bylaw, but it still needs to be captured as a criminal offence.
9:30 a.m.
Liberal
9:30 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
It's a criminal offence.
Or, for example, in British Columbia provincial law enables an officer to suspend a driver's licence at the side of the road after a person blows “fail” on a roadside device. Instead of charging them with a criminal offence of impaired driving, they're handled through a provincial statute that suspends their licence for 90 days or longer and impounds their vehicle. It's a provincial statute. It's still a criminal offence, and we need to capture that and code it as a criminal offence, but it can be dealt with by way of another statute.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
9:35 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
We are missing some of these crimes because they are not being captured consistently across Canada.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
You mentioned you're hiring police officers with postgraduate degrees. This must be putting upward pressure on costs. As you recruit people with more advanced education, presumably you must pay more, or no?
9:35 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
No. There are set grids that are established through collective agreements and they are consistent.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
I thought you brought some really new ideas to the table here that I don't recall hearing, though we have, of course, heard from the Calgary police force and the Prince Albert police force.
Contrasting and comparing, are you doing what they are doing? Are you doing certain things differently? Are you doing some things that they are not doing? How would you contrast and compare what you're doing, which seems to be very leading-edge, with what they are doing, which is leading-edge? Are you all doing the same thing in a leading-edge way, or are you...? Can you learn from each other because you're doing different things?
9:35 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
Yes. It's really the cadence of moving forward and being progressive. What Dale McFee did in Prince Albert was leading-edge, and it was necessary for Prince Albert, given what they were dealing with on the ground there.
We build on that, and in the true spirit of community policing—community-based or community-focused policing—you customize it to what your needs are at the local level. We develop and initiate or innovate, and then we share, because that is what we do. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police and all of the provincial associations of chiefs of police work very closely together to share innovative ideas and initiatives, so that we can learn from each other and then take that back to our home town and ensure it's responsive to whatever our local needs are.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Do you have some kind of hub and spoke model as well?
9:35 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
We have it with respect to our family violence project, and now we are incorporating some of the recidivist offender profiles that have been developed as a result of some technology through programming, what we've learned from Saskatchewan, and at the same time building on what we're seeing locally.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
In your view, can innovative approaches to policing reduce recidivism rates?
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Which reduces the demand for police services and all the way down the line.
You're also doing some economic modelling, which I hadn't heard in our testimony. I don't recall hearing other police forces saying they are doing some pretty advanced economic modelling. Maybe they did and I missed it.
Are you sort of out in the lead in that particular aspect?
9:35 a.m.
Chief of Police, Waterloo Regional Police Service
I think what's happening is that we're all doing parts of it. One of the initiatives we're undertaking in our organization is to try to put some framework to it, try to create almost a visioning model or document, a communication tool. Again, it speaks to the capacity building that's necessary within our own police services.
Some day I'm going to leave this position, and I want to ensure that whoever is coming up can continue and carry that ball forward.
9:35 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
Do you use your economic or cost-benefit analyses when you negotiate with the town council, if that's the way it works when you negotiate your budget with the city? You bring all this and say, “Look, we've put more money in here, but murder rates are down and so on.” You use that, of course.
I was reading something very interesting a little while ago about how cities now, governments in general, are just overflowing with data, which they can't even really analyze and so on.
In the U.S., and I'll just read a little quote, if I may—
9:40 a.m.
Liberal
Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC
It says:
As cities also start to look back at historical data, fascinating discoveries are being made. Mike Flowers, the chief analytics officer in New York, says that if a property has a tax lien on it there is a ninefold increase in the chance of a catastrophic fire there. And businesses that have broken licensing rules are far more likely to be selling cigarettes smuggled into the city in order to avoid paying local taxes. Over in Chicago, the city knows with mathematical precision that when it gets calls complaining about rubbish bins in certain areas, a rat problem will follow a week later.
Is this sort of the direction you're going in?