Well, certainly there is some frustration expressed by our people, but I can also tell you, sir, in my experience in Toronto, people are working hard. They're doing dangerous work, but they're doing it well. I think there's a pride that comes with doing your job well, and my people feel that pride.
There is some frustration when we see these individuals back out on the street, and it's one of the reasons we work so hard to ensure that they are complying with the conditions they're released on and so often are bringing them back in before the courts because they're not complying with their conditions.
I had a situation I had to deal with last year where an individual was involved in a gunfight with the police, where he actually fired on the police, and four days later he was released into the custody of his mother. Within a week, we got him again with a gun. My people were looking at me and saying, “How often do we have to do this? This is dangerous. We want to go home to our families and we're being put at risk by the system.”
I think some of those concerns are corrected through the administration of justice, and that's fine, but at the end of the day, with all of this work, I think all communities, not just police officers, but the citizens of our city, certainly have expressed to me—and I've been in every community and every day go out in the city—that they don't want everybody in jail, but they want the dangerous, violent offenders in jail, the people who put everyone at risk, the people who engage in gunfights in which four-year-olds get shot or innocent children get shot down on the street. They want those individuals out of their community. They want to be protected from them, and until we can do that for them, I don't think we can expect people to be courageous enough to step forward and help us in our investigations as often as we would hope they would do it. We have to provide them with some assurance that the whole system will work for them and that our first responsibility is to protect our citizens.
We have to act sometimes. Individuals may have to suffer the consequences of the choices they make, so that, for the greater good, we can provide a safe community for everyone.