Public Safety Committee on Jan. 29th, 2013

[Mark Potter]

I think this is an important dimension, but I think it's important to keep it in context.

I think police officer salaries have been increasing over the past period particularly because of the fiscal situations in most jurisdictions, which have been quite favourable. Collective agreements have been reached on that basis. As that fiscal situation tightens to a considerable degree, that problem will begin to solve itself, because there will be a requirement for all jurisdictions to manage within their resources. We have seen that at the federal government level. We have seen that in terms of RCMP salaries, which sets an important precedent. To a considerable degree, that issue will be constrained through that process.

I would make a couple of other observations. The nature of police work is tremendously complex and challenging. Your colleague just mentioned mental health issues. To have an individual with the right skill set to be able to deal with an individual in distress and to recognize the potential that the situation could range from the individual simply requiring a little assistance and sympathy to a potential violent act—to have the training, the judgment, and the interpersonal communications to do that is tremendously difficult. To get those individuals, to retain those individuals, you need to pay them a good salary.

Having been involved in this issue for some time now, I actually don't think it's a question of police officer salaries. I think it's a question of the salary envelope, the overall amount you are spending on human resources and how you get the biggest bang for your buck. I think a whole bunch of ways you can do that aren't necessarily about reducing police officer salaries—far from it; they're much more about civilianization, tiered policing, technology, and other tools to improve efficiency.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you for that.

It seems to me that this study is a very introspective study. I just wondered if there was an element that could look at policing costs relative to the overall global costs. Is there any element that would take a look at the proportions there and try to suggest some means of giving us a perspective on those costs as well?

[Mark Potter]

I think we have a bit of a luxury in Canada in that we're ahead of this issue. I don't think there are necessarily a lot of issues on which you have an opportunity to see what's happening around the world, to analyze the trends that are happening there and in Canada, to try to get ahead of the issue, and to try to take action before you have to do things in a drastic or blunt way. We're looking at well-considered strategies to manage the growth in policing costs that we've seen in Canada over the last several years.

Policing is not alone. All government expenditures have been going up at a considerable rate, both in Canada and in many other countries. As you look at particular segments of public spending, you see that it's about delving into those areas and finding ways to respond to the fiscal realities through finding efficiencies and improving effectiveness.

We're certainly benefiting, I believe, from the U.K. and the U.S. experience, in that they haven't had that luxury. They were placed in a situation in which their revenue drops for many jurisdictions were so severe that they didn't have the luxury of saying, “Okay, now we're going to spend the time to analyze how we can improve our policing services, look in depth at our police services and how efficient and effective they are, and develop well-considered strategies to respond.” In many cases, they had to respond within a matter of months.

We certainly have seen U.S. cities that have gone bankrupt, and we've seen states in the U.S. that have had to make 20%, 30%, or 40% cuts to their policing budgets within a matter of months. The U.K. is going through a process of a cut of 15% to 20%, depending on the police service.

These are big cuts. We are fortunate to get ahead of those issues. Hopefully the kinds of fiscal realities will not be as hard here, but they are nonetheless constraining, as we see when we look at our overall fiscal picture. It's about giving police services and the broader policing community an opportunity to see what works best and to develop customized solutions that respond to community and resident needs in the time we have to make those adjustments.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Potter.

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

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

I would like to follow up on this issue on bringing in mental health workers, say, to deal with situations that otherwise, up until now, police officers have had to devote a lot of time to.

As you mentioned to Mr. Aspin, finding somebody who is specialized in these areas of course means that there will be costs involved, and probably pretty high costs, because they're specialized, but bringing in mental health workers to do some of the work that police officers have been doing would come out of a provincial health budget, though, I guess. In a sense, it would be almost a cost savings to the police force if there were that kind of substitution of manpower.

There's no doubt that the kind of manpower required in police forces is generally becoming more expensive because, as we were saying before, there's a demand for specialized skills, whether it be to solve financial crime or other kinds of Internet crime and so on. In terms of the supply of manpower, do you foresee that there will be enough of this skilled labour power coming forth in the future, or will there be labour shortages in these areas?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

As with most things, I think there's often always an ebb and flow.

I will comment very briefly on mental health and other calls for service that the police receive. When you look at the crime rate over the past decade, you will see that it has gone down quite noticeably, but calls for service generally are fairly flat. What this says is that there are a lot of other things going on, of which mental health calls are certainly one of the dynamics.

I often think of policing in terms of a river. The police are kind of the last net, in many respects. The more intervention there is upstream earlier on, the fewer the issues that are caught in the net further downstream, which I think is important for costs, for call management, for training, for complexity of the service, and important in terms of sending police to calls that they're not well equipped for, in many cases.

Certainly the issue has been raised in smaller communities and other areas where a lot of those supports don't exist. Anything that can be done in behind the system to improve access and to improve community capacity goes a long way toward improving the overall delivery of community safety, which is what it's about.

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

You are saying the calls are staying constant in number. If the crime rate is going down and we figure out a way to relieve police forces of the need to answer a lot of those calls because they're not always about crime anymore, do you see the possibility that the number of police officers, and obviously the salary commitments associated with police forces, would be dropping in the future? If we're doing a good job, if we take the information we're getting from your study and solve this problem of matching skills with services required and so on, do you see a possibility of the number of police officers going down in the future, to follow the crime rate? I suppose that's almost an objective, really.

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

It's fair to note that in Canada police resources have increased in the past decade in terms of head count. Probably now, because of economic reality and constraint, it will start to go down. That will be an outcome, I think. Perhaps more important relative to your point is that if we look at Canada and compare it in terms of officer-population ratios to many other western countries, we see that we are towards the lower end of that spectrum as it is, so we are starting in a very different place from the U.K. or the United States. I think that in terms of our opportunity to rationalize, to manage calls and so on, we're probably in a better position to do that and to take on some of these initiatives.

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

There are fewer police officers per 100,000 inhabitants than in other countries. Do we have a better ratio? Is that what you were saying?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

That's right, yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Scarpaleggia.

Now we will go back to Madame Doré Lefebvre for five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I think we have had a very good discussion about mental health and the challenges that poses to our police services.

Mr. Graham, since you represent our large national police force, I would like to know if you have done any studies, internally perhaps, on the impact of mental health on your police force. Do you have a different approach in dealing with this issue, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in our population? What are your officers doing? What is their approach?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

Thank you for the question.

The situation looks different in many different jurisdictions, and that relates to demographics, moneys invested in the health system or mental health supports, and so on. Generally mental health, and responding to mental health, has been a concern of the organization for many years. Our emphasis has traditionally been on how officers are trained to be prepared to respond to cases, and also on building strong partnerships and connections in the local community for all the various services that are out there.

It does not look the same across the country. Province by province, community by community, capacity varies, so the responses vary. Some communities—for instance, Halifax Regional Municipality—have fairly robust integrated teams with health professionals. They respond very quickly are very positive. In small communities in the north, many times the police may be the only resource available, as the point was made, at two o'clock in the morning. It's not a consistent picture across the country.

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

You are really making an effort to determine what resources are available in each province, city or town, or at least you are working on it. I find that very interesting.

If it were possible, do you think it would be better to have people specialized in mental health working with the police or would it be easier to train police forces in that area? Is there a solution that represents the best of both worlds? If it were possible, would it be easier to apply a certain model?

[D/Commr Steve Graham]

For instance, in the Halifax Regional Municipality they have rapid response teams, so if the police are called to an incident or come across a case exhibiting signs of psychological distress, those teams are mobilized. They're on the scene very quickly and they work hours that are well aligned with the times when you tend to see these activities. That's a very positive model, and those exist in many other municipalities.

It comes down to local capacity, size, available resources, and what the health system and other social services have the capacity to provide. In rural New Brunswick, those resources are not nearly as bountiful, so the police often respond and will often take individuals in distress to community hospitals, or whatever the case may be, and are often tied up for quite extended periods of time until there's some resolution to the case.

In terms of what could be done, that's more of a discussion for a lot of those other entities and agencies. Having policed in many different provinces, we often work with those entities. We have very strong relationships and partnerships, we're on a first-name basis, and we're all looking to try to minimize wherever possible the judicialization, I think the word was, of mental health.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have 30 seconds.

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

I think Mr. Tupper wanted to add something.

[Shawn Tupper]

Actually, there are two answers to your question. In municipalities like Calgary or Vancouver, it is possible to establish partnerships across the system. But it's a different story in smaller cities: no resources are available for this.

Going right back to the first question of this session, what we see is the need to understand the character of Canada and those realities, because the best answer in Vancouver is partnerships. The best answer in small-town prairie Canada is better training for officers to be attuned to the demands they're seeing when they respond.

I think that's something your study should focus on. There's more than one right answer, and the right answer is going to depend on where you are in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much for that, Mr. Tupper.

We'll move to Ms. Bergen, please.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Thank you very much.

I have three quick areas I want to touch on.

Following up on this issue, I think it would be very important for us to bring in someone from the Calgary police, and possibly Halifax and Vancouver, to hear them. I spent half a day in Calgary sitting around a table talking to the officers about what they do. It's quite amazing. They literally have someone from Alberta Health, the school division, mental health, addictions, and housing. They're not just meeting once every six weeks, but as you said, sir, they're on a first-name basis with individuals, such as maybe someone who has an addiction and is being picked up for petty crimes. Finally this person says they need help—they want to get off this drug or they want to quit drinking—and immediately there's someone there to help. It's not the police officer; the police officer knows who to call.

It's an excellent model, which I think, coming from a small town, can be adapted pretty quickly, because in a small town people are much closer together and we really know who to call. We know who the housing person is in Morden, Manitoba, and who can help get someone some treatment. I think there are ways we can adapt it. It's just seeing how they do it and then adapting it to a smaller jurisdiction.

I hope we can get someone in—for example, Chief Rick Hanson—to explore this, because it's quite encouraging.

I found it interesting that one of their greatest challenges was a very practical one: the privacy issue. It took them a while to start getting things going, because one program didn't want to talk to another one. They said there were privacy issues. That's very practical. They had to deal with that, and once they did, everybody relaxed and agreed to work together.

Mr. Potter, what is tiered policing? You referred to it a couple of times. I hadn't heard that phrase before.

[Mark Potter]

Tiered policing exists in many police services, and it's essentially the top of the pyramid. You would have fully sworn and trained police officers who carry badges, carry guns, have powers of arrest, and so on, and you would have a number of tiers below that. You might have what's called in some places a community safety officer, someone who doesn't have the same level of training and may not carry a gun but who carries out different functions such as neighbourhood engagement, problem-solving at the local level, intelligence collection, and these kinds of functions. They're very much on the ground working with the community and sharing information with police officers who often have to respond to incidents and come into that community.

Then you might have another level below that—volunteers, cadets, auxiliary officers with even less training—doing even more routine functions, such as managing events or securing a site. Those are pretty routine tasks.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Good. Thanks very much.

How much time do I have left, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have two minutes.

[Candice Bergen, Conservative, Portage—Lisgar, MB]

Okay.

Something we haven't talked about at all and something I hear so many times when I talk to front-line officers is the whole issue of the revolving door. They say to us, “We go through the process. We investigate. We follow the criminal. We arrest them. We go through the court system. They're sentenced, and then three months later they're out, and we have to go through it all again.” One of the pieces of legislation we brought forward to address that is Bill C-10, our Safe Streets and Communities Act.

Can you talk about the cost to policing of the revolving door—repeat offenders, offenders who should be doing the time for the crimes they commit but who are instead released, meaning that police have to go through the whole process again—and about how our specific legislation can help reduce that cost?

[Mark Potter]

That's a big one. That's perhaps a little bit beyond the remit that I would be able to comment on.