Public Safety Committee on Nov. 21st, 2013

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

To make sure I understand: you're talking about division of responsibilities between sworn officers and civilians. We have had some discussion here about other jurisdictions that have adopted two-tiered policing, whether it's different levels of training in police and different levels of pay that go along with that, as a suspected way of saving money.

[Tom Stamatakis]

Yes, and I think the jury's out. This Vancouver program that I talked about is a pilot. It's being evaluated. It's a joint evaluation that'll be done by the Vancouver Police Department and the Vancouver Police Union, jointly funded as well, to determine whether or not you realize those savings.

Some of the research now, for example in the U.K., where they've had this tiered policing for many, many years, suggests it's maybe not quite as efficient as people first thought it would be. You're essentially now deploying the lower trained person first, only to have to deploy a police officer again afterwards. About 82% of the time the calls they're responding to contain some element of criminality that could be, and properly should be, investigated by a trained police officer. So in fact the attempts to be more efficient probably have increased their costs by having to deploy these multiple types of resources.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Fine. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We're substantially over there, so we will slip over to Mr. Norlock now, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Through you to the witnesses, thank you for appearing today.

My first questions are going to be prefaced by saying that I do recall that the truth of the matter is that human resource costs to most police forces—wages and benefits—tend to be between, somebody says, 80% to 90%. In my day around 85% to 89% had to do with wages. That's where salaries and benefits came in.

Also, in the Province of Ontario, I've been accessing and had occasion to be looking at some of the areas where there's contract policing. When somebody says, “Well, policing isn't as big a burden on the taxpayers as other people think”, when you deal with a municipality that's gone from, traditionally, 17% to 20% of their municipal budget being for policing and now 50% just for policing alone, I think that's why we're looking at the economics of policing. We've said all along that this is not just about salaries and benefits, but they play a part in it.

But I think you've hit the nail on the head. What does society expect from its police force? You talk about tiered response. When I ran a shift in the communications centre, tiered response was, if there was an accident, call an ambulance, a fire truck, and the police got sent to it until somebody got there and said, “Well, you really don't need the other guy.” Why did that happen? I think you and I would say that there was an inquest or there was some public complaint or some investigation that led to someone deciding, “Oh, well, if we'd had the fire truck out there right away, this would have been prevented or that would have been prevented.” I always used to say, “Why can't you leave it up to the discretion of the communications person?” And I was told, “That's above our wage bracket.”

Anyway, I want to congratulate you. I can remember being a member of a police force that's currently also a member of the CPA, and before we were a bargaining unit—I was the president of a certain area—we were professionals. You've come here today and shown that.

One police department has hired KPMG. Does your association recommend to its brother and sister associations, as well as take on the responsibility yourself, of sitting down, let's say, with managerial levels, and saying, “Okay, how can we be more efficient and effective and look at reducing costs of policing by doing things differently?” Do you actively do that or do your sister organizations do that?

[Tom Stamatakis]

One of my priorities as the president of the Canadian Police Association is to shift the—and I hate using the trendy buzzwords—dialogue or the discussion or the paradigm—that's the word people like to use all the time—away from an “us and them” approach to a more collaborative discussion such as you're describing.

One of the reasons we took on this WPS, Winnipeg Police Service, operational review and funded the entire review—which was pretty expensive actually and unusual for a police association to take on—was to do just that: to sit down and say, “Let's see what we're doing today and how we can do what we're doing today generally with the same level of funding but better and more efficiently so we can get better outcomes.”

The intent is to use that operational review as a template that our member associations could look at when they're dealing with their own organizations to say, “This is how we should examine our organization and these are the steps we might want to consider in terms of moving forward”, because the operational review I'm referring to includes some really concrete recommendations around how to realize those efficiencies in your workforce.

We've also produced a booklet, which I'd be happy to provide to you. It talks about some of these issues and how we do some research. We make some recommendations, and we take a position as an organization around either community safety programs or body-worn video or whatever. There are a number of hot-button issues we've taken a position on and made some recommendations on, and we've given our member associations the tools they need to go forward within their own organizations to engage in those kinds of conversations.

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

Thank you very much. I'm trying to get my questions in during in the time I'm allotted here and it isn't working too well.

Many communities have groups of taxpayers who keep an eye on budgets. If you had a group of civilians—non-politicians—and you said, “You guys are complaining about the costs of the services we provide. Here are some of the services we provide that I don't think we should be providing, and here's who should provide them because they can do so more effectively, more efficiently, and at a lower cost to you the taxpayer”—because that's who's going to be looking at this study—how would you do that? Or which services do you think would be better delivered by someone other than a police officer?

[Tom Stamatakis]

That's the difficult question, because—

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

It's difficult for you—excuse me for interjecting—and it is for us.

[Tom Stamatakis]

Well, yes, it's probably more difficult for you.

I don't know. Each jurisdiction is going to be different because the expectations in the community will be different. What you have to look at—and I'll go back to the question from Mr. Garrison and my answer there—is what are we delivering? How can it be done as efficiently as possible and how do we make sure the changes we make don't end up costing us more in the long term or result in less service to citizens? That's why we emphasize these efficiencies around the criminal justice system. Why does a police officer need to sit around the courtroom all day long before they can give their evidence? Why can't they just transcribe it in an affidavit and submit it or show up right when it's their time to give their evidence in court as a witness rather than sitting around all day long? There are some real opportunities out there. I can't give you a list of 10 things right now that....

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

Try to work on it.

[Tom Stamatakis]

We're working on it. I can send you the booklet we've produced and the—

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

Please do. Send it through the clerk.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

We're out of time, so we won't even have a start on the first 10, but we'll wait for some information to come in.

We will now go, for the next round, to Mr. Easter, please.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, both, for your presentations.

I'll start with you, Chief Phillips. You mentioned that there are eight communities at the moment without first nations policing. What is the reason for that? Is it an unwillingness by the government to put them in place? Is it a lack of human resources, or is it a lack of financial resources?

[Chief Lloyd Phillips]

There's a variety of reasons, but at the core of it is financial resources. What's required to have an adequate police force to oversee a territory and what is available, or what is offered, basically wouldn't meet the needs of that community. So finance is the primary reason. There are obviously some political issues for various communities that have historically had some problems, which we won't get into here today, but the heart of it is the lack of resources.

As well, the way the current first nations policing policy is written, it's very difficult at times to know who has the first responsibility. It talks about on reserve, where there is supposed to be a federal responsibility and they pay the lion's share of 52% yet when you talk to the province, the province says, policing is a provincial jurisdiction and therefore what we say goes. There's always this jurisdictional battle and then what's the role of the first nation? The first nation is stuck in the middle saying, hold on a second here, we're talking about policing our community, our people, what do we have to say? It creates this mechanism where it creates a dispute on many levels.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I'm well aware of the conflicts between the two, but when we're talking to the Canadian Police Association there are some similarities here. The Canadian Police Association is basically saying that you end up being the first responders to pretty well everything, no matter whether it's a mental health issue on the street or whatever it might be.

My question to Chief Phillips, related to that area in your community, is should we as a committee be making some recommendations on other areas of responsibility for the federal government to first nations, whether it's housing, or other areas that they're really responsible for, to lessen the burden on policing within first nations, because it is the federal government that's ultimately responsible for a lot of those areas in terms of housing, etc.?

[Chief Lloyd Phillips]

The short answer to your question is yes. If you look at the situation within any group in Canada, but especially first nations, with whom it's probably more at the forefront, many historical issues or problems have multi-generational impacts on the communities. It’s all connected. The lack of recognition for many aboriginal and treaty rights lead to the social impacts in the community, which leads to the need for policing and increased policing. Yes, they're all connected. Any recommendations that would work towards alleviating some of these longstanding issues would impact, in a positive nature, all our communities and the effectiveness of policing.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Tom.

[Tom Stamatakis]

I think this is very important for your committee.

In Canada, we have two types of policing. I hope you spend some time trying to address this, which is going to be very challenging. You've got your urban policing that happens across our major cities and then we have our rural and remote policing, which I think is what Chief Phillips has touched on today. I don't think in Canada we've even scratched the surface of the challenges that are faced by our rural and remote areas of the country, the north, particularly in the area of aboriginal policing, policing aboriginal communities. There are big, big challenges related to vast this country is. Places are hard to get to. There are housing issues, and issues not just around the communities that are being policed but also for police officers who are in those communities trying to police, including cultural issues, that have to be addressed. That is a big area and I don't know how you're going to attempt to tackle it, but it's an area that has to be looked at.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Before I run out of time, coming back to the question Ms. James asked, somewhat along the line where officers are spending time doing community policing when they should be actually doing on-the-beat policing, I think that's a tricky area. I don't think there have been witnesses before the committee from P.E.I., but I'm just looking at the work that the Charlottetown and Summerside police forces do in high schools where they do have an officer in the school.

Yes it's not on-the-beat policing, but when a decision was made to take one of those officers out of that school, there was an outcry by everyone because I think the stats will prove that having that police officer there in uniform builds trust with the students and prevents crime before it happens. Have either of you had any experience in that area? Maybe it can be done in a less costly way, but I do think it's a really important area in terms of preventing crime before it happens, keeping people off drugs before they get into drugs, and building trust with the police community.

[Tom Stamatakis]

Building capacity within police services to provide for police officers to have proactive time to engage with citizens in their communities is absolutely critical to successfully policing any jurisdiction, any community. There's no way you're ever going to be effective as a police force if all you do is enforce the law. You have to engage in those kinds of proactive community policing activities, and there are lots of great examples of where that has been effective.

There's a really good research project out of New York. Because of New York's resistance to some of the cuts that occurred across the States, it maintains its staffing levels, and because its police officers had a significant amount of proactive time, it's actually managed to reduce incarceration rates in the State of New York, whereas in other parts of the States incarceration rates have increased dramatically. There's lots of good research out there that makes your point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you, Mr. Easter. We're a little over time here as well.

Now go ahead, please, Madame Doré Lefebvre.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank Mr. Stamatakis and Mr. Phillips for joining us. If that's okay with you, I will make my comments in French. I see that you are putting in your earpieces. That's good.

[Tom Stamatakis]

I'm not going to be able to understand what you're saying. I can't get the translation. I apologize for that.

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

Sorry, but using the interpretation devices is often complicated.

My first comments are for Mr. Phillips. Chief Phillips, thank you very much for joining us today.

I was moved by the comments you made in your presentation, including what you said about all the problems faced by first nations, such as alcohol, housing and social issues in various communities. However, you talked about a reduction in crime over the past few years. That's a light at the end of the tunnel. Here's what I would like to know. If there has been a reduction in crime, communities and police services must have some good practices in place. I would like you to tell me about the various good practices that have been adopted by the police services of Canadian first nations. Why is it important to maintain those practices and what, if anything, have you changed to achieve a reduction in crime?