Public Safety Committee on Nov. 19th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Welcome, colleagues, to meeting number five of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security.

You have a copy of the orders of the day. We'll be hearing from our witnesses and then going to future business, when we'll be having a report from our clerk as to the status of our witnesses, what would be available and what's not, and where we need to go with that. We will deal with that under future business, so we can get some clarity moving forward.

We also have a motion from Mr. Easter to deal with.

At this particular time, we will go directly to our first witness. I would certainly like to welcome Bob Rich, the chief constable from Abbotsford.

Welcome to the public safety committee, Bob. We look forward to your thoughts, and we know we will have some questions that you might be totally comfortable with. I'm hoping you have an opening statement you'd like to make to us.

[Chief Constable Bob Rich, Chief Constable, Abbotsford Police Department]

I do.

Thank you. I appreciate the invitation to appear before your committee, sir.

I would like to talk for a couple of minutes about what we are trying to accomplish in Abbotsford on the topic of police efficiencies. Just to give you a sense of what kind of department it is, so that my comments will make sense as I go forward, Abbotsford's is a municipal department of about 210 police officers, 300 employees in all. We police a city of 140,000 people in the Fraser Valley. It's a very large geographical area, an agricultural area.

In the last five years, from a community safety perspective, we have seen some great improvements. To give you a sense of it, in 2008 and 2009 we were the murder capital of Canada. We had had a surprising rise of gang violence in the Fraser Valley. In 2009 there were 11 murders, two of them involving very young people, and eight of those murders were gang- and organized-crime-related.

We've done a lot of things in those five years. In 2011 we had no murders; we're at two this year, one gang-related. Our crime rate since 2008 is down by 40%. We now have the lowest crime rate in the Fraser Valley, including all the jurisdictions around us.

But we cost more than the jurisdictions around us. We are funded well enough to have police officers enough to be proactive, and that has been a very key part of our success. For example, last year, although a small department, we executed more than 100 search warrants, going after organized crime and gang activity. But we're very aware that for a community such as ours, we're expensive. We're very aware of the cost drivers behind your committee's even meeting to discuss these kinds of issues.

Our focus in 2013 has been, besides fighting crime, on trying to figure out how we can become more efficient. In the spring of this year, we contracted with KPMG to do an efficiency study of the Abbotsford Police Department. KPMG came in and has been applying processes that they developed in the United Kingdom to have a look at what could be done to make us more efficient.

If you don't mind, what I'm going to do for five more minutes is simply describe what they found and what we think we're going to do about it. What I'm describing is a work very much in progress. We intend to implement a major part of their study next year and probably will contract with them to help us do so, but we are putting in place the foundation blocks to make it happen.

Here are their key findings about what was not as good as it could be in the Abbotsford Police Department, if we want it to be really efficient.

One is that Abbotsford typically sends a police officer to a call to resolve it, even though that's no longer the most effective and efficient way to respond to many calls. The image I want to put before you is that of the 1950s: if you got sick, you phoned the doctor, and he actually came to your house with his little leather medical bag and checked you out. He made a house call.

That's what police officers are doing for virtually every call, and it's an outdated and overly expensive way to respond to many calls for service.

They also found that we had a “clear the screen” mentality. What I mean by that is that the comm centre drives the deployment of resources. If somebody phoned and we created a call, then the driving force was to clear that screen and just get rid of calls. That's what was actually driving things. Instead of an intelligence-driven organization, we had become driven by a call load-clearing mentality.

Corresponding with that, they are saying we are not as intelligence-led as we like to believe we were. We are an organization with three crime analysts. We think we pay attention to what crime analysts are saying: we look at the maps every day; we do all that kind of work. They're saying, you're actually not that driven by crime intelligence; you are not being as agile as you could be, even though you're a small department. That's interesting information for us to receive, when we had a perception of ourselves as being very much intelligence-led.

In another finding that was hard to listen to but important to listen to, they said, you have some patrol officers who are working very hard, but you have a significant number of patrol officers who are not working that hard, and your performance management is not actually dealing with it. In other words, the difference between your top-performing police officers and your not-as-high-performing police officers is far too big. You need to bring up your poorer performers; you need to get more work from them in order to be efficient.

It's not a very sophisticated, complex statement, really, but almost a surprising one for us. We didn't realize the size of the gap between top performers and poor performers.

The last and main point they made is that our policies around how we will handle each kind of crime are not that clear. There is confusion, when a crime occurs, about whether it should be followed up by a detective or what unit it should go to for further work. We're mucking about, when it should be much clearer which crime we stop investigating and which one we go forward on.

So they proposed what they call a new policing model for us to implement. Here are five corresponding key points about that.

One is that we need to have the right resources for the right job. What they mean is that we should handle priority three and priority four calls in a new way. Every call that comes in to our call centre that we decide we will respond to, as opposed to telling people that we aren't going to be responding, is categorized as a one, two, three, or four priority call.

We're all used to this concept. Priority one is an emergency: somebody is breaking into my house. Priority four is: there's an abandoned bicycle on my front lawn; what do I do with it? So the calls run the full gamut, from things that are critical to things that are quite routine. I'm going to talk more about what we do about priority three and four calls in just a moment.

Among the other things they said were that we obviously needed clearer policies on workflow, which I understand, and that we needed to increase our supervision, with better performance management. I'm not going to spend much time on that, but I'll quickly mention that we have introduced a patrol activity report that measures the workload of constables. I'm now meeting every month with the staff sergeants who run all of patrol. We are teaching performance management skills and bringing in coaches for them to increase their level of performance management. So off to one side, we are working on the issue they identified.

They said we should focus on a better quality of customer service, whereby we get back to people on a better basis, and that we need to be intel-led on a daily basis.

Here is what we propose to do. I will only talk for another couple of minutes, but quickly, here is what we are going to implement next year—the significant chunk.

We are introducing a new section to the Abbotsford Police Department. We will call it the operations control branch. Like our other branches or sections, it will be headed by an inspector. They will have the comm centre as part of their branch, but the primary thing they are going to do that is different from an efficiencies perspective is take the 37% of our calls—just over one-third of our calls—that are priority threes and fours and handle them in a new and different way.

We are no longer going to send a police car routinely to those calls. They may attend that call, by appointment, after they have taken all the information they can by phone; or we may simply take the call over the phone; or we may have the complainant, if we need to, attend the police station themselves for an appointment with a police officer. Everything will be done by appointment, rather than have somebody wait for an available police officer to show up, maybe for a number of hours.

Those calls will be handled by a new team, as part of that new branch. That team may have police officers in it—it will have some police officers—but some might be tier two community safety officers and some might simply be civilians. For a department our size, it's estimated that we'll need between 10 and 16 people working in this unit that handles one-third of the calls.

This team will also have the capacity, we are told, to do follow-up on routine crimes. A crime such as a theft with a suspect won't get assigned to a detective and would be assigned to this unit to do the follow-up. Apparently, that's about three to four calls for us a day, and they will have the capacity to do the follow-up on those kinds of calls.

The work this new branch takes off the patrol branch is designed to allow us to become more proactive again, and to increase our ability for patrol officers to respond more quickly to the priority ones and twos, but also to have more time to reduce crime in our community. We've said we want to get to one-half the crime we had in 2008, and to do that we still have about 10% more to go.

KPMG believes that if we implement this, we will have police officers tied up reacting to calls with about one-third of their time, leaving them two-thirds of their time available to be involved in proactive solutions. This branch will also have the crime analysis unit, where we'll take all our crime analysts and have them in one place.

This branch will be responsible for directing our resources on a daily basis, for using the proactive resources we have available in patrol in other parts of our police department, from our bike squad, to our drug squad, and to our crime reduction unit, which goes after property criminals. They will be able to direct all of those resources by using intelligence on a daily basis and trying to make our organization driven more by one central brain and more nimble.

It's yet to be seen—

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Mr. Rich, you are running a little over your time, sir. I know there's going to be a lot of room for explanations during the Qs and As. I wonder if you could just wrap up your presentation in a very short while. The committee would certainly appreciate it.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

That was the end of my presentation. All I was going to say was that what I'm pitching to you has yet to be seen, because we haven't done this yet. We'll see if it actually works.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

We're certainly looking forward to the results of your...I guess for lack of a better word we'll call it an experiment, moving forward, but that's progress and that's what brings results.

I certainly thank you on behalf of the committee for your presentation today, and we thank you for taking the time to appear before the committee.

At this point, we're going to open the floor to a seven-minute round of questioning from the members, followed by five minutes of questioning for the other members.

We will go directly at this time to the parliamentary secretary, Roxanne James, for the first round of seven minutes, please.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd first like to thank our witness for appearing before this committee.

My father was a police officer here in metro Toronto. I actually have two sisters who worked for the police as well; one just retired this year from a division in Toronto.

I would first like to thank you for appearing, and also congratulate you on reducing the crime rate in your particular area. This is a good news story for sure.

I just wanted to touch briefly on this. You were talking about performance issues and being able to monitor the performance of individual police officers or people on your force. KPMG indicated that there was a large gap between the highest performers and the lowest performers.

When we talk about performance, are we talking about underutilization of resources or are we talking about individuals who are just not up to speed with what everybody else is doing? I'm wondering if you could expand on that so I can get an idea of exactly what you mean by low performers versus the high-performance officers.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

When KPMG made the comment, it referred to quantitative measures, to how hard somebody is working as opposed to how well somebody is working. We are looking at both factors when it comes to performance management. KPMG said, “You have officers who are just doing the minimum and you need to get more from them.”

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

When they're just doing the minimum, are they being pulled away from what they should be doing? Is there too much court time? Is it absenteeism? I'm just trying to understand how they can't be pulling their own weight. I'm trying to get a specific example.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

An officer who is not working as hard as others might be somebody who answers the radio and takes the calls they are given. So they are doing a good job of reacting when they are asked to do things, but in fact in an organization such as ours, which does so much proactive work, members who are performing well show tremendous personal initiative. They take on various crime problems. For example, an officer will work up a search warrant or will go and deal with a problem premise. That kind of proactive work isn't necessarily assigned to that person; they are out there digging and finding it. That's what a top performer does. We need to ensure that all 80 patrol officers are performing in that way, and KPMG is saying they are not.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Okay, thank you.

You mentioned that your particular police unit or department actually runs a bit of a higher budget than maybe others across Canada do. We've heard from other witnesses that wages or salaries actually make up on average between 70% and 90% of the total budget. In your opening remarks, you talked about police efficiencies and trying to find better use of individuals' time. I'm just wondering if those are also cost efficiencies that are going to be recognized by moving on the recommendations KPMG has offered to you, or we are just talking about being able to do more with the resources you already have?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

There are two things.

One is that for a new policing unit, instead of simply staffing it with police officers, we will look at staffing it with persons who are not as expensive as police officers, so we'll have a mixed team. There would be cost savings there.

The other thing is that what we are doing and what we have committed to our community is that as our community is growing, we are not growing. We are, on a per capita basis, reducing the number of police officers serving citizens in Abbotsford as we become efficient.

This year our city council will likely reduce our strength by four police officers and one civilian. That has yet to be determined, but it's being considered. As we go forward, our hope is that as the city of Abbotsford grows—and it is growing—we will be able to serve it well without growing.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you. I apologize if you did mention the different levels of expertise you will be assigning for different priorities. I didn't hear you say that it would be cost-efficient as well. I just wanted to make sure that was on the record.

You talked about how the same police officer will respond in the same way, and you mentioned doctors who seem to make health house calls, and you spoke quite a bit about prioritizing the different levels of calls between one, two, three, and four. For example, in Toronto, someone can call 911 if there's an emergency, or they may call a non-essential police telephone line if they just want to report something, as you said, such as a bicycle that's been abandoned on the street. Do you have that sort of set-up as well in your area, that you can call different numbers, or would it all come into the same call centre and then be distributed outwards from there?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

You can phone a non-emergency number. It is being handled by the same call centre. We're actually the only police force in North America that has two-way texting as well. You can also text our police force and we will text you back and have a conversation that way as well. So there are a few ways to communicate with us.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

You're open to everything there.

I had an opportunity to read your bio before coming into committee. You have many decades of experience. You're certainly someone we're happy to have on this committee because you have a wide range of knowledge.

I'm wondering if you can answer this simple question with a yes or no, or if you have time, you can elaborate. Do you think things are taking longer for police officers to accomplish today than they did, say, 10 or 20 years ago? Are there administrative burdens being placed on police officers that...? I'll give you an example. Previous witnesses have said—and we have this on record—that for a simple break and enter, it actually takes 58% more time to process the paperwork and everything else that goes with that than it did maybe 10 or 20 years ago. A DUI takes 250% more time to process today than it did a number of years ago.

Do you agree with that, and what do you think is the reason for that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Just a brief response, Mr. Rich, on this one.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Yes, I completely agree.

It has to do with the technologies we employ, and it has to do with a more complex response that society wants from police and a more detailed response for court processes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much. We certainly appreciate your response.

Mr. Garrison, you have seven minutes.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for being with us today, Chief Constable Rich.

From what you've presented today, what's new here?

These things may be new to Abbotsford, but I know that you came from the Vancouver Police Department, and the emphasis on efficiency while you were there—as a deputy, I believe—sounds very much like what you're doing in Abbotsford. In other words, Vancouver looked at threes and fours about 10 years ago. They stopped sending officers to all of those, hired crime analysts, and put an emphasis on intelligence-led policing.

In the experiment you're doing, what's new to policing as a whole, rather than just new to Abbotsford?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

That's a good question.

Vancouver responds to break and enters in the way you describe. I would say that Vancouver has not gone as wholesale as we're about to do, in relation to priorities three and four. That's not completely fair because in the last little while, Vancouver has hired 40 community safety officers as an efficiency and are responding to more of those calls that way. They are moving towards that, but I haven't been a part of that.

Maybe it's the size of what this is, for a small department, relative to what Vancouver was doing with their break and enters and a few other kinds of calls, so all priorities three and four. My understanding of Vancouver is that when I left, it wasn't all threes and fours; it was a portion thereof, so that's one thing.

We have tried to be intelligence-led, as well as Vancouver is trying to be intelligence-led. KPMG is saying, “You're not really doing that. You think you are, by having your meetings and discussions about various crime types, but you do not truly have a brain that is directing police officers on a daily basis to do different things based on what's actually going on.” They're saying, “You think you're doing it, but we don't think you are.”

What they see as intelligence-led is something different from what we have achieved so far. It's yet to be discovered. But to have somebody take all your police resources, on a daily basis, and redeploy them based on what's going on is probably more similar to what you would see in New York than has been seen at least in the cities I've been around.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Okay. It's very interesting to me that you've had a 40% decrease in the overall crime rate. If policing has anything to do with that, you must have been doing something right.

As part of this efficiency exercise, was there any analysis of how or why that crime rate dropped by 40%? Is it community demographics? I know that Abbotsford is becoming an increasingly middle-class, commuter kind of community. Is it the change in demographics or was it what you're doing as policing that caused that change?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Well, we have over doubled the drop in crime in the rest of B.C. during this timeframe. I would suggest that no change in demographics would account for something like that.

I am a student of Bratton from New York. I believe a police force can make a community safe.

We came in and said that we would make Abbotsford the safest city in B.C. We haven't achieved that yet, but it is a goal we are driving towards.

Abbotsford didn't have CompStat when I came, but it's something we brought.

We have done the things I think you need to do to drive crime down. I believe a police force can make a community safe. B.C. and other western provinces have double the crime rate of Ontario, for example. We have always had much higher crime rates, and I don't think there is any excuse or reason for that. I think a police force can drive crime down to the kind of rates you have in Ontario.

I believe we have done the right things to drive crime down. The list of the things we've done is very long, but we have done things that actually reduce crime. We have taken the chronic offenders and arrested them. In property crime, we have gone after gangsters in a very big way to reduce the violence we were getting from organized crime.

My belief is that there are things you can do to drive down crime in a community. It's not just about demographics or social problems.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

I'm not trying to take credit away from that, but my question is that since you were doing something obviously right, and now you're doing this big reform, how are you going to relate those? How do you not throw out the baby with the bathwater here in the focus on costs?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Right. Well, police managers always have to manage cost along with our primary objective, which is to keep the community safe. The two of them are always the intention.

Our belief is that if we create this branch and do this right, we will actually increase the amount of proactive time that the people who are not in this branch have to drive crime down further. That's certainly what KPMG is saying to us, that if you do this, you will have even more abilities to drive crime down.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

I have one last question, and it's with regard to calls for service. We've heard a lot from other police departments about what we would think of as non-police work, dealing with mental health and addiction problems, one of the primary drivers of calls for service.

Do you find the same thing in Abbotsford?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Absolutely. It's huge. The night before last, we had officers tied up with seven apprehensions under the Mental Health Act. It basically ate almost all our resources for the entire night.

That happens on a frequent basis. It is its own separate problem to be addressed, and it is certainly not something I'm....

We could go on for a long time on that one, for sure.