I absolutely agree. Police services need training. We've been working in the Canadian Violation Link Coalition. The coalition has been working very hard to bring that to fruition. I gave a presentation to the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police in November and they are primarily on board with the training. We would like them to come on board with all eight of our objectives that we're working on right now.
To give you an example of how we are not trained, my superintendent attended the 2017 Canadian Violence Link Conference and afterwards he came up to me and he said, “I did not know this stuff”. We have a superintendent of a police service that doesn't know it. His wife works in our sexual assault section and she didn't know it. There's an absolute need. When a victim comes forward, whether it's a child's guardian or a partner assault, they will charge all the human offences but they forget and leave off that.
One of the things that we're doing is that Crown attorney Dallas Mack, who was a longtime dangerous offender application Crown attorney in Ottawa.... We need all these offences, even calls for service, documented properly now because, particularly with gangs and people like that, these offences take place from ages 15 to say 25. The dangerous offender applications don't happen until 10 to 15 years of criminal activity. There's a lot that goes into a dangerous offender application, but if you don't have all those offences and all those calls for service documented properly and the patrol officer is recognizing them when they go to them on the road, which they don't now, then that compromises the dangerous offender applications 10 years down the line. There is an absolute need for training.