Public Safety Committee on Nov. 5th, 2013

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's fine.

First, is any research being done on the economics? Maybe it has come from a previous witness. To be quite honest, I'm just getting up to speed on this particular study. In terms of the amount of time—Larry mentioned it. That seems to be one of the complaints I hear, the amount of time spent on paperwork, what police officers figure is useless paperwork, but in terms of the cost of policing, how does the human component, if I could put it that way, compare with the equipment infrastructure costs?

Chair, I look at the Hill, and one day I counted 14 RCMP cars sitting idle on the Hill.

How much money is spent on basic equipment infrastructure technology versus people who are out on the street policing? Is there any way we can get that information, or do you have it?

[Mark Potter]

I think you've raised an issue that's pretty complex in many respects. It gets at the issues of technology, of how you're deploying your police officers, of tiered policing, and the use of civilians to provide support to police.

I know a number of jurisdictions have looked at models whereby the police, who, as mentioned, are highly trained to deal with a wide range of outcomes and scenarios whenever they are called to an incident...that's their main value added. They can deal with everything from trying to talk down a person to using lethal force, and no one else can do that, so that's a tremendously important skill set. You want to ensure that those individuals are deployed to the right sorts of tasks.

Having that sort of individual with those complex skill sets writing reports and spending six or seven hours on a “driving under the influence” charge is not necessarily always the best use of that officer's time. So how can you adjust the processes by streamlining them, how can you use technology more effectively to convey the information throughout the process, and how can you engage other individuals—civilian support staff—who can take on some of those functions? There are examples when the police might be called to deal with a particular incident. They will contain the situation, they will get it under control, and then you might have a community safety officer, an auxiliary police officer, or a civilian take over the process and wrap it up by preparing paperwork and so on.

I think police are experimenting with different approaches, and the U.K. is a good example of this, to ensure those highly trained resources are deployed in the circumstances and the amount of time they are required to be deployed, and then you have others who can back them up and support them to deal with the more routine paperwork, administrative tasks associated with providing the sort of support the court system and citizens expect them to be able to convey.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Is any work being done on the number of inefficiencies created for police officers themselves by the court system? I think Larry outlined it.

I have talked to police officers who have gone back and forth to court when they should have been on the road. Yes, sometimes it's on their day off, but it ties up a phenomenal amount of time with what I would say are a lot of inefficiencies within the court system itself.

Is there any data, or is there something we can be recommending in that regard to make the two work together more efficiently?

[Mark Potter]

I'd refer to what's happening in British Columbia. They have taken a pretty careful look at their justice system. There have been a number of reports, including those of Mr. Cowper, and the government has developed an action plan on that basis.

One of the things they are looking at is the integrated management of the entire court system and how that links to the police interface to ensure that all the processes and all the technologies are as efficient and streamlined as possible. Often when you have these silos, you create procedures that are not efficient.

One of the very simple things they look at is things like scheduling of officers to make court appearances, and ensuring those schedules are done in such a way that they meet court needs while also meeting the officers' needs, in particular scheduling them, not through overtime but when he or she is on a regular shift, and asking them to come in when they know they are not likely to be as busy.

Perhaps more fundamentally, particularly for minor matters, use technology, use video conferences, have them potentially in their car or in the station providing testimony. This can't always be done in more serious cases, but a lot of the matters they deal with are fairly minor, and having them sit in a courtroom is not a good use of their time in many cases.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

On page nine you mention that in Canada there is minimal related research capacity, no central repository of accessible research information, etc. Are there other countries that we can look at where that kind of system is working well and that we can use as a model in that area?

[Mark Potter]

I think, as you heard from Professor Curt Griffiths from Simon Fraser University, who's actually on our steering committee and a very prominent academic in the field of policing in Canada, we are well behind all of the G-8 countries in terms of our research capacity, the infrastructure to support it, and the existence in many countries of repositories.

As mentioned to this committee previously, there is a website in the U.S. run by the Department of Justice called crimesolutions.gov, and it's a tremendously useful and user-friendly site. Basically, if you want to look at crime prevention models, for example, it will give you a long list of all the crime prevention models that exist, both in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Most importantly—and this is where we want to get to ultimately with our index—it will give you information on independent evaluations of those programs. You can look at a program such as the broken windows program in New York, which has been around for quite a while now, and see how effective it is. It has had a lot of attention in terms of some of the very positive outcomes that it's contributed to in the New York area, and it's been applied in many other jurisdictions now. But what is the independent evaluation saying about that and many other programs?

It's got a nice user-friendly format, where if there have been a number of positive evaluations, it will get multiple tick marks and it will be a green sort of emblem, so you know if you're looking to implement a program like that to get at the roots of crime and crime prevention, particularly in crime hot spots, what the tested and true methods are out there. Many police services, particularly the medium and smaller ones, don't know where to turn to find that kind of information. By having a database of information, with contacts, with actual people, they can call up and say, “Look, I read about your program. It's got a lot of positive evaluations, and I'd like to talk to you more about it, so perhaps we could meet.”

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Potter. I appreciate that very much.

We ran a little over on that, so we will now go to Madame Doré Lefebvre, s'il vous plaît.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Potter, it is a pleasure to welcome you to our committee once more. Thank you for coming to answer our questions. I enjoyed listening to your opening remarks.

A number of my questions have to do with those remarks and with what my colleague Mr. Garrison said about First Nations. Let me start there.

Could you tell me if, at the end of the month, First Nations' police associations will be invited to meet with the provincial ministers at their meeting in Whitehorse?

[Mark Potter]

Thank you for the question.

I don't believe they will be there because this is a ministerial meeting of federal-provincial-territorial ministers of public safety and justice. To be completely honest with you, I'm presenting on this topic. I'm not involved in organizing the whole event, and I think there are 30 to 40 agenda items the ministers will be discussing.

I don't believe first nations representatives are actually direct participants in the meeting. However, having said that, I know that particularly in my area and in many others, ministers do look to officials and have the high expectation that they will have engaged with a whole range of communities, including first nations communities when they bring forward proposals. That's often an issue that is raised. I know from previous discussions among ministers that first nations policing is a top-of-mind concern.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you very much.

A lot of your opening statement was based on three pillars. For the second one, I noticed, you mentioned new models of community safety. My question is about the funding of that initiative.

Do you have an idea about the type of funding that will be required, given that our police service funding is under specific attack? What do you have in mind when you mention that pillar?

[Mark Potter]

I think that's a good question, and one that I'm not really in the best position to answer. I can refer to the testimony from Dale McFee, who is now the deputy minister in Saskatchewan for public safety and was the head of the Prince Albert Police Service, the service in Canada that brought that model over from Scotland.

I know from talking to Mr. McFee and reading about the hub and the community mobilization initiative that certainly to start it's not a tremendously expensive undertaking. Really, it requires a police service to commit one or two of your police officers on a regular basis to participate in ongoing meetings with all community and social services agencies. They will meet once, twice a week to review cases, to review situations of at-risk youth, at-risk families, and the kinds of interventions that might be most helpful to those individuals. So it's a couple of individuals from your police service, the time they're spending in these meetings, and some administration or clerical support around that to organize the meetings.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. More fundamentally, these models are about working with communities more directly and more proactively. That ultimately requires considerable resources from the police.

There are the hubs themselves, but then there's the whole philosophy of community and neighbourhood policing and proactive and integrated policing, which requires for many police services quite a shift in their orientation to devote a considerable portion—and I've heard figures of 30% to 40%—of police officers' time to engaging with community members, not to respond to incidents, but just to spend time in the communities talking to members of the community, understanding the challenges they're facing, gathering information on what's happening in the communities and helping them to adapt to some of the challenges they're facing, providing information on social service supports that are available to them and directing them to those agencies. There are various steps, shall we say, in terms of taking a model like the hub model in Saskatchewan and effectively applying it.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you very much.

How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

You have about 30 seconds maximum.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

This will not be easy to do in 30 seconds.

You said some extremely interesting things about this, Mr. Potter

I'm looking forward to that meeting to see what's going to happen in Whitehorse.

Are the provincial public safety ministers at all open to this?

[Mark Potter]

Absolutely. This will be the third time I've presented to ministers, and they've been tremendously supportive. This is a pretty interesting issue on which ministers and yourselves are, frankly, getting ahead of an important public policy challenge. I think that shows a lot of leadership from all governments and parliamentarians.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Payne, please.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Chair. My question is through you to Mr. Potter.

It's nice to see you back here again, Mr. Potter. It's a really interesting study that we've had here, and we've seen a lot of interesting things from various communities right across the country, and also down south, where we attended as part of our committee.

One of the things I've noticed in my local community that has been reported many times is that the Medicine Hat city police are the second-highest paid in the country, which I find quite outstanding, actually. That obviously relates to a number of questions that we've seen. You've talked a bit about those, that when you talk to these officers they say they get really frustrated at having to go to court and then it's remanded for whatever reason, and they're going back two or three times. And a lot of times this is on overtime. So you're not just talking about regular salary; you're talking whatever it is—time and a half or double time, depending on their circumstances. So certainly some improvements from the court side....

You also talked about getting rid of the silos and working together. I think that's a really important aspect.

However, I want to touch on some of your comments in your opening presentation. You were talking about shared information on policies, practices, the efficiencies, and you did talk about the launch of the index in August. I'm wondering if you have any further thoughts that you wanted to express to us on those particular ideas.

[Mark Potter]

Thank you.

I'll start with your first comment. It echoes a number of your colleagues' comments about court time and the efficiency of using officers in that way.

I don't want to sound like a broken record, but the index, the sharing of best practices, can be a tremendously helpful way for all police services to deal with that issue. If there are police services in Canada or elsewhere that have found the right approach to engage with the court system and use their officers' time as efficiently as possible, it's very helpful to share that information so that you don't have every jurisdiction and every police service trying to figure this all out for themselves. We have seen examples...simple matters of establishing liaison with prosecutors and the administration to ensure the scheduling is done in a way that works for both parties. At the national level, there are justice reform initiatives under way to ensure that technology can be more widely used in cases and to allow officers to appear through video conference where that makes sense to do so.

Really, what we're looking at in Canada is recognizing that there are different jurisdictional responsibilities. It's not for the federal government to dictate the operations of particular police services, but I think where it makes sense to share information, to collaborate, and to talk about what's working well in one place or another, it can be tremendously helpful to the policing community.

Frankly, we haven't had the infrastructure to do that in this country. We haven't had the willingness to engage in that kind of sharing. But that's changing. That's one of the big outcomes of the last few years of the summit, this committee's work, the greater public profile around policing costs, and improving efficiency and effectiveness of already very strong police services in this country. How we can continue to meet the high expectations of Canadians and to make policing ever more efficient is ultimately the goal of the strategy.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

I understand that through some of these processes, the technology and information sharing, we can save upwards of $1 billion. I'm not sure if that's an appropriate cost, but maybe you could comment on that.

[Mark Potter]

I'm not sure anyone has broken down the $12.9 billion that we spend annually on policing, for example, how much of that is officers attending court on overtime or what have you. I haven't seen a study that does that. I think it would be tremendously difficult to break the data down to that level of information. It may exist, and perhaps some police services do track it. Certainly anecdotally we hear, as you've all heard, many examples of police officers spending a lot of time waiting around in courtrooms and nothing happens.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Potter, could you make a quick comment on the funding for youth gang prevention? I believe the funding we put into it was $37.5 million and an ongoing amount of about $7.5 million. How do you see that as being part of this solution that we're looking at?

[Mark Potter]

I think the federal government—and, frankly, all governments—has tried to take a balanced approach, whether it's strengthening laws on the one hand or focusing on crime prevention and support to communities on the other.

We have the National Crime Prevention Centre in Canada; I think that's what you were referring to. They have a number of programs. I'm not directly involved in that, so I can't comment on the specific numbers. My colleagues in the Department of Public Safety run that work with a number of NGOs and other community organizations to ensure these programs are available to help at-risk youth and families and put them on the right trajectory, get at the roots of crime, which is ultimately where I think we all want to go.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Rousseau, s'il vous plaît.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for joining us today, Mr. Potter.

I have two concerns on which I would like your comments. You mentioned the collaboration, the cooperation between all police forces. In my riding, the Border Services Agency, the RCMP, the municipal police force and the Sûreté du Québec often have to cooperate on various activities and when joint action is called for. The people I talk to tell me that they lack the resources to accomplish the tasks that the various police forces should be sharing. They do not have the human resources, or the financial resources to be involved in some situations and to respond to the requests.

Could you comment on that?

[Mark Potter]

I think once again I'd make the caveat...and I don't mean to sound unhelpful, but for a federal government official like myself to comment on the operations of particular agencies, whether they're federal or provincial, is not entirely appropriate.

I do know, in talking to many different police services and agencies and provincial and municipal governments, that there's a sense, with the $12.9 billion we're spending annually, that there's a lot of money spent on policing, as well as on border services and elsewhere. The question is more how are we using those resources and ensuring...before you begin asking for additional resources?

We see this particularly in the case of municipalities, where they're regularly going to their police boards and their city councils and saying, we need more resources for this, and increasingly city councils are saying, okay, but we'd like to hear how you're achieving your results with what you have and what you are doing to employ those resources more efficiently and effectively. If you can then demonstrate to them...and Vancouver is another good example of this. When they ran into a fiscal crisis their municipal council pushed back on their increasing requests for resources and more officers, and said, hold on, you need to show us how you are achieving the results with what you already have.

It's about gathering data on results, presenting that to your city council, and ultimately allowing them to make the decision. I know in the case of Vancouver they basically went to their city council and said, look, with the front-line policing resources we have right now we can give you response times to priority one calls of 15 minutes. If you want that response time to be 10 minutes, then you're going to need x number of resources. That's a public policy strategic direction decision that a council, a police board, is able to make.

The police can lay out the implications of particular funding situations. The groups you've talked about, for example, I think have a responsibility to go to their funders and say, here's what we're doing, here are the results we're achieving, and here are the things we've done to improve efficiency and effectiveness. If you want us to do more and if you want us to focus on these particular areas, these are the implications and these are the resources we're going to require.