Public Safety Committee on Nov. 19th, 2013

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

In terms of the mental health and addiction calls—I was a former police board member in a municipality in British Columbia—are you still having the problem of not being able to get someone to take responsibility at the hospitals for those who need to be seen by doctors?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Yes. Our hospital and several other hospitals in B.C. struggle with how many hours it takes before they take them off our hands, absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

We'll go to Mr. Norlock, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Through you, Mr. Chair, I'd like to thank the witness for appearing today.

For me there's a bit of déjà vu in a lot of what you've had to say. The reason I say déjà vu is that I've been with police forces who've gone through some similar things, but one of the things you didn't say, and that we used to not say, was this: What does the customer think about all this? In other words, what do the people you respond to think about all this?

I think you'll agree with me that in the police community we look at solve rates and we look at the number of charges in accident zones. We think that if we solve more crime, the average person who's receiving the service is happy. But that's not always the case.

I'm mentioning this because one of the things we like to do is to have efficiencies. You say, well, we won't respond to some calls, but I'll give you a little example of how customers are not happy—and they pay the freight, right? When somebody wakes up in the morning and sees that their car is not there, sees that their car has been stolen, they will call the police. This particular police force asked, “Why are we sending a police officer to report a stolen car out of somebody's driveway? Why would we send a police officer to a residence to verify that indeed there is no car in the driveway, that it's gone?” But this is what we found out. The person says, “I have never called the police for service before. I pay $3,000 a year in property taxes, and the very day I need to have a police officer come, you don't send somebody to my door.”

This is just a small example.

How do you square that circle, make the customer happy, and then keep them satisfied that your police service is actually doing what it should do?

In other words, I'm looking at community policing. I didn't hear you mention, through any of the questioning, how you relate to your community or your community policing model, which most police forces in Canada, at least eight or nine years ago, were completely devoted to.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

We did a survey last year.... Now, you need to understand this is a community that was seeing a gang crisis in front of them. They were seeing gangsters shot on the street. So for them to see the turnaround in relation to that.... We did a survey last year and our approval rating was extremely high, well over 90%. What was interesting, though—and it really responds to what you said—was that it was slightly lower amongst those who had had contact with us in the preceding year. In other words, people are frequently not happy once they have contact with the police. A lot of times that is because of how long they had to wait for the officer to show up, or because of some of those kinds of issues, or because we didn't solve their crime for them.

KPMG says that if we do this right, we will increase customer service, because people will not be waiting for a police officer. They will be responded to by phone, and we will make an appointment to go see them or we will ask them to come see us, and they will have contact with a police officer at the station. But I believe that some of what you say will be true. I would love to have a doctor come to my house when I'm sick, but he or she doesn't do that unless there's a real critical situation going on.

So there is a balance to be found between customer service and efficient policing, and we must try to strike that in order to handle taxpayer dollars well.

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

Thank you very much. That's what I needed to hear, because that's what was actually done. You do have to train your people on how to respond to the customer, how to show empathy, and so on, and then explain why you're doing what you're doing. Generally that's accepted.

I'd like to go back to some of the questions Mr. Garrison had with regard to mental health and addiction. Just for your edification, and you may already be aware of this, we did see a unit—I believe it was in Calgary with Chief Hanson—in which they had one mentally ill gentleman who alone cost the police department and their taxpayers about a million dollars a year. It was socially disruptive and a whole lot of other things, and they went about solving that. I suspect very strongly that you're aware of that case, and hopefully it will form part of our report on how we deal with mentally ill people.

I'd like to refer quickly to this association with what is referred to as the “hub” principle, which involves utilizing other community resources and having the police meet with them to discuss particular case management. So it moves from the police perspective—although they're always somewhat involved—over to a social agency that is perhaps better equipped to handle anti-social behaviour. I'm wondering if you have considered that concept or looked at it as a way to reduce your costs and/or make yourself more efficient. I would suggest both of those. Have you contemplated that particular program or one like it?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Abbotsford is trying to respond to this issue. I don't think we're as far down this road as some other agencies in B.C. are. We have a mental health officer, a police officer who works full-time on trying to resolve these issues. Her job, for example, is to take a story like the one Chief Hanson provided, about someone who is using a lot of our resources, and meet with all the other social agencies and discuss that case to try to find a resolution for that person so that they are no longer consuming our resources. That has been very successful in relation to a handful of people who were creating scores of calls for the police. We are also finding, though, that there is just an unreal number of people who are suicidal, who are mentally ill, who have to be apprehended. The problem is, we're talking about different people almost every night who we're having to deal with. The number of people who are struggling with mental health issues and who we get involved with is somewhat overwhelming.

Other police departments in B.C. have done very well with—

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Mr. Rich, thank you. We just exhausted our time for that line of questioning. I imagine the issue of mental health will definitely be picked up by other questioners at some point.

Now the time goes to Mr. Easter, please, for seven minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Rich. I thought you had a really great presentation.

Just to finish on the mental health issue first, I'll let you finish your response in that regard, but has having a mental health officer on staff made a big difference in terms of the cost of dealing with people with mental health problems and the cost to the police force? Do you work together to get others involved to deal with those issues and basically get these people out of being an ongoing cost to the police department?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

The answer is yes. It has been successful with the chronic users of police resources who have mental health issues. I think it is quite successful. Other police agencies in B.C. are using assertive community teams, the “ACT teams”, as they call them, in working with the community. I think those have probably had more success than we've had in dealing with that cohort of people using police resources. They've been more organized than we have.

Nevertheless, if we have as many untreated people in our communities as we have, it's going to continue to be a significant drain on policing. I don't think any of these things have addressed this group of people who live in our society and who are failing to get by.

In British Columbia, we have reduced the number of beds for mentally ill people so significantly that we have literally hundreds of people who are not doing well in the community. As a province, that lack of resources being put into handling people who have serious mental health issues has created a reality in which police have become the default mental health workers. Chief Chu and Mayor Roberston in Vancouver have declared it a mental health crisis emergency.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I haven't been on this committee that long, and maybe the committee had previous evidence, but I think that's an area that certainly needs to be looked at: the lack of beds across the country for folks with mental health issues, to basically take them away from being a problem for police departments and others within the community.

Is the KPMG study you discussed—and I congratulate you on that work in progress—privileged information to the department or is it available to the committee?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

So far.... I was actually asking that question yesterday to try to figure out when I was going to get myself in trouble—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

It's not a released document yet because it is a work in progress with a private company. I certainly would not want to withhold from you information that would be helpful to your work, so I would like to find a way to get at least something to you, if that's something that interests you.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

The work of the committee is to look at the economics of policing. In my review of all the work that has been done by the committee previously, there's not actually a lot of material with economic data in it. Anything in that regard I think would be certainly helpful.

We can talk about that as a committee and I guess raise the question, Mr. Chair, if we want some further information from Abbotsford in that regard if it can be made available.

On reducing crime in your own area, I'm looking at the bigger picture as I sit here. Yes, you reduced it. You went after the chronic crime and you reduced the problems with gangs. Has that in effect made these gangs say that things are too tough in Abbotsford so they'll move to the next area? Has there been some of that happening?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Anecdotally, I believe the answer is yes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

So some areas could go up because one area is doing a better job. We have to look at the issue of policing in its whole context, Canada-wide.

I want to come back to Mr. Norlock's point on what do the customers say. That's something, actually, strangely enough, that we get quite a number of calls on in our MP's office. I'm from Prince Edward Island, and people call the RCMP in our case. They don't show up for three hours, or they don't show up at all.

In fact, we had a case the other night. They don't steal whole cars in P.E.I. now. Somebody pulled into a driveway and stole two doors off a new car, if you can imagine that, and the police didn't show up for a while.

I think your analogy with a doctor is a good one. We don't send a doctor to everyone's home. How do you handle that, and how do we explain to the public that it is highly costly to have a police officer go to the door for a fairly minor crime when you could get the information over the phone? How do you intend to work on that?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

Part of it is going to require an education for the public. In this plan that has yet to be done, the belief is that this citizen in the past would have waited for somebody. In P.E.I. they'd be waiting for the officer to come and respond to this call about the stolen doors. In the new model in Abbotsford, the plan would be that after the call taker took that call, within a very few number of minutes that citizen would receive a call back from a police officer, as opposed to a civilian, who would say, “We are looking into your crime and we are doing the following things. A police officer isn't going to come and see you until six o'clock tonight, when you come back from work. So go ahead with your day. We've already taken your information. We are already looking for those doors.”

What KPMG is telling us, and I believe they're right, is that this citizen will feel better about that than if they waited three hours for the police officer to come. They'll feel better having talked to a police officer, to know their concern has been taken seriously, and that at some point, at an appointment time, they will actually meet a police officer. KPMG says, look, when you phone people back and tell them what's going on directly, most citizens respond extremely well to that approach to handling their situation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Rich.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

We have now completed our first round of questioning. In this first hour we have time for a couple more in the second round. I believe we have Madame Doré Lefebvre, and then Mr. Payne.

Ms. Doré Lefebvre, you have the floor.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Rich, thank you for taking part in our hearing today to discuss your situation in Abbotsford. What you had to say was extremely interesting.

Several of my colleagues around the table spoke to you about mental health. You talked about the difficulty of handling individuals with mental health issues. It's interesting that you talked about that aspect.

During the past weeks or months, several witnesses spoke to us about mental health issues and how the community and police services manage that aspect. My colleagues went to several Canadian cities and observed that this was a recurring problem. It is interesting to hear your point of view and to have you raise this issue with our committee.

Several police services in the country and elsewhere in the world work with various community organizations and the health services in their region. How do things work in Abbotsford? Do you work in partnership with the various stakeholders from community services? You stated that civilians work with you at this time to answer certain calls. Do these civilians come from community organizations, or from the health field?

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

No, not in the area of mental health. We are working with people who are part of the health unit in our city, so we are working with people outside of our police department in this area. Our mental health officer's job is to work with a committee of people who discuss the difficult cases and look for resolutions for these people. We have not hired a mental health worker specifically in the Abbotsford Police Department.

The department I came from, Vancouver, has a police officer and a mental health worker working together in a police car almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Because of the far more significant issue that Vancouver faces, they have taken that very significant step.

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

Excellent.

Civilians will be able to do follow-up with police services and take certain calls. You talked about calls that are given a priority ranking from 1 to 4. Who are we talking about exactly? Are these people hand-picked, do they come from certain specific areas? I was also wondering what type of training the civilians who will be working with you will receive.

[C/Cst Bob Rich]

The people we expect to do this work will be a mixed team. There will be some police officers and some communications operators. We hire people off the street, as you say, who have gone through specific testing with us, and we teach them how to answer 911. We also teach them how to dispatch. And now we will also be teaching some of those people how to respond to these kinds of calls, for example, to enter all the basic information you would need on a break and enter and then pass it on to a police officer to complete the investigative part of the process.

There will be a mix of people we have trained ourselves. We hope there will be some community safety officers who have received some police training, but they are not trained to the full extent of police officers and are not as expensive to hire, bluntly, as police officers. There will also be some full police officers on that team who are very experienced and who can provide their expertise to the whole team.