Public Safety Committee on June 7th, 2012

[Mark Potter]

I'm not aware of the precise data on that question. Part of the challenge of this issue, as my colleague mentioned, is having the right research, the right data on which to build decisions.

Looking at what's happening across Canada and in other jurisdictions around the world is a big part of this, so when you have other witnesses, whether they're criminologists or other police services or associations, we're all engaged in building that base of knowledge from which we can advance.

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

Thank you for that.

We might as well deal with what we do know. When you were comparing salary increases, the police were at 40% and the rest, the private sector, was at about 11%. What were overall public sector salary increases? Were they about the same as 40%? Were they less? Were they more than 11%?

[Mark Potter]

I don't have that information. We'd have to drill down on that.

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

I think that's necessary for us to do.

I have some questions for Mr. Graham.

I gather you've had close to 30 years of police experience.

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

I wish.

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

How many years have you?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

I have 37 years.

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

Even better, you have 37.

Would you not say you've gone through several cycles of austerity and then times of plenty when you got a little extra money so that you could do some of the extra things that police services like to do?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Yes, I would very much say so.

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

Do you recall other police forces doing things like limiting the number of patrols—in other words, having officers justify the number of kilometres at the end of the shift? So if police were told they had 90 kilometres to run on their shifts and they did more, they would have to report.

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Yes, I remember models similar to that.

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

The times of so-called cost-cutting are normal cyclical things governments do.

Does the RCMP police according to the theory of community-based policing?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Yes, we do.

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

Would you recommend that this committee talk to people in the community base maybe, because the community has specific wants and desires for its police force that may not necessarily always be what the police think is good for it? Is that a correct statement?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

That's a fair assessment.

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

I can tell you that there was some discussion. Just to give a small snippet of perception, I can recall an officer saying one time, “Why do we send a police officer to do a report of a stolen car just to verify that Mrs. Jones's car is not in her driveway?” The decision was made that maybe we shouldn't send police, but then we found out that the only time in her life she ever wanted to see a police officer was the day her car was stolen.

So would you agree with me that this is the conundrum we face? They are asked to cut back and then they have to look at the practicalities.

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Yes, and you raise a very good point. If you'll just hear me for a moment, one of the strategies we're using to deal with that—which is why I was speaking about the call management piece—is to put officers in these call centres to call back citizens on some of these complaints and to explain what our response will be, so they had better understand that having an officer at their door doesn't really add value to them or resolve their issue or problem.

We've had a fair amount of success on that. Along with working on crime reduction, we're actually trying to move from community-based policing into an intelligence-led policing model that takes all of the attributes of community-based policing and adds on what technology is giving us now and how we manage and mine intelligence. That creates a much better resolution for the citizen.

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

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Norlock.

We'll now move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please, for five minutes.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Could you clarify that last point about mining intelligence? I'm sorry, but I didn't follow it.

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Well, as an example, if you consider a municipality as an example.... We'll take the car theft case. What happens in a lot of car theft cases is that sometimes it's organized groups that are stealing cars for a purpose: to strip them, sell parts, or actually send the cars to other locations. In other cases, there are joyriders.

Mining the data we have in how the cases are reported and the kind of information we're developing in our investigations allows us to come to some conclusion about what exactly is occurring here. So then we can respond to that, and often we have good ideas about suspects who would be good, prime candidates who could be involved in this.

The best illustration would be in Codiac, in the tri-communities of Moncton, Dieppe, and Riverview. We had cases where they could actually get ahead of the incident and start predicting where the culprits were going to show up. So they would be there in advance of the event occurring and would catch them in the act. When we talk about predictive results from intelligence, that's what we're striving to get to.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

In terms of the lack of data, there seems to be a serious lack of data, as you say. For example, from the year 2006 to 2010, we added I think 6,000 more police officers in Canada. Does that make sense? Is this figure realistic, more or less? Does that make sense to you?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Well, I'm sure that in every case it made sense. The issue is, in the collective, were there other options? I think that's the challenge for modern police leaders.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

No, but what I mean is, does that sound like a correct figure to you—6,000 more police officers?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

To be honest, I couldn't tell you what the position is across Canada. There has been a fair amount of growth.