Public Safety Committee on Jan. 31st, 2013

[Dale McFee]

I echo what Tom said. Obviously most jurisdictions in the country have looked at all three of those, including criminal record checks. Obviously some work has to go into that.

An interesting one if you really want to look at revenue, if the issue is revenue.... I think you've heard all three of us say that maybe we need to focus within and see how we redirect resources first. I've been a big believer that if we're going to get into evidence and outcomes and we're going to pay for those things that have been evaluated and so on, then if you want to take the driver of our business, put a 1% tax on alcohol at $200 billion a year. That would be $200 million, and you would pay for everything and then some. The problem is you would have to make sure it was focused on the things that matter.

[Ryan Leef, Conservative, Yukon, YT]

I appreciate those comments. Thank you.

We heard a great discussion on collaboration and on working with the diversified agencies that exist in a community. I can say from my past experience that our being the front-line police somewhat contributes to our being the agency of choice. You talked about priorities being set by trends or modelling or municipal-federal-provincial priorities. Ultimately, as Mr. Stamatakis pointed out, it really boils down to calls for service and what people are calling in about. When police respond and then we deal with the aftermath or the consequences of responding to that call, we can't just shut that file down; we have to carry on. There's certainly a level of frustration across Canada, and you hear front-line police officers say, “You know, we shouldn't be doing this. Why are we engaged in this activity?”

As a former police officer, I know the contributing factor in this situation is that the information gets shared upward to our agencies, and we're very reluctant to bring it back down. There are models in our country in which there have been exceptions. They've been positive, as you've indicated.

Is it a legislative shift? Is it a policy shift? How do we make sure that when we as front-line officers are complaining about doing work that we don't see as being direct police work or that we see as being something that should be integrated with the community, we're not contributing to our being that agency of choice by not sharing the information downward? I think a lot of agencies, at least those at the territory level, if you talked to them, would say they put the information up, but it's not reciprocated well.

Do you have any comments?

[Dale McFee]

That's a big point. When we designed the new model we're looking at, privacy was everything. Honestly, privacy was more of a barrier than it was an enabler. Everybody respects privacy. Everybody has legislation. I think there's a huge piece to enable that to happen. Absolutely, because without that information-sharing, the whole picture of being able to ask what you can do to help is problematic.

The other piece to that is we've got a five-year victimization survey compared to a one-year real-time crime stats study. The perception and the reality are out of whack. You know it yourself; if you put a five-year study to a one-year study, it's apples to oranges.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

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

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much, and thank you very much, witnesses, for being here today.

I have two questions that I'd like to squeeze in. One for Mr. McFee, but that will be the second question. The first one is for Mr. Stamatakis.

As all the witnesses are aware, when it comes to funding police services, particularly from the province and the federal government, all police services are not created equal. I'll use the example that I know best, which is the Nishnawbe-Aski Police Service, a first nations police service in northern Ontario. The pay is less, the benefits are inadequate, and the working conditions are very poor. As a consequence, officers' health is a big concern. As well, many communities are left without policing services, and many officers spend an extra week, two weeks, three weeks in a community before a break because there's no one to replace them, and so on.

When it comes to the economics of policing, what happens in a police service like this is you have high turnovers—you also have poaching from other police services, but I don't want to get into that—which create a real problem in terms of where money is spent. Of course, it's spent training officers continually, on a continual basis.

I wonder, Mr. Stamatakis, if you'd just take a moment to maybe give your thoughts on first nations policing in Canada and what that means in terms of where we're going in the future.

[Tom Stamatakis]

I completely agree with your comments. We're right now engaged in a research project in which we are spending a significant amount of time looking at rural and remote policing so that we can address some of these issues, or at least start to have a conversation around these issues.

Some of the frustrations for me and for the members I represent who work in the kinds of communities you're talking about—first nations, with difficult working conditions and lots of funding issues—are exactly the issues you identified. The concern I have is that we're having this big discussion about the economics of policing and finding efficiencies, but it's all centred around the piece of our country that runs along the U.S.-Canada border, the southern piece, and then there's this whole other big part of our country in the rural and remote areas that's not part of the discussion. That needs to be part of the discussion when we talk about the economics of policing because there are some real challenges in those communities. I acknowledge that for sure.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Stamatakis.

Mr. McFee, on maybe a more positive note, I wonder if you could just take a few moments to talk about the Prince Albert model as it concerns urban first nations, and the initiatives there.

[Dale McFee]

That's a great point.

First nations are obviously overrepresented in the issues, but it's not because they're first nations; it's because they're marginalized for the large part. When I came back from our research in Scotland, it was important that we brought first nations leadership right into our model, and they're part of the model. That governance model, and the actual working group, has first nations leadership right in it. They're part of determining what the priorities are for the community. They're determining the solutions. The COR has its tentacles into other hubs in the north, which is the feeder system, which are also first nations.

In this particular model, if you think about franchising and you build a master franchise, you need to be able to support five or six other smaller hubs. The hubs are basically just a new way of doing business, of which first nations are a huge component.

I really want to emphasize as well, myself being Métis, that our issues aren't first nations in Saskatchewan. Our issues are the marginalized, who are overrepresented by first nations. The reality is that if we can deal with those components, we can make a lot more progress and get our way through this. That's exactly what that's designed to do. Certainly we have that leadership in there now, and it's making a big difference.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Okay, thank you.

Do I have a moment left? One minute?

I wonder, Mr. McFee, if you would also comment on the same question I had for Mr. Stamatakis concerning first nations policing, and some of the funding issues they're concerned with.

[Dale McFee]

I fully agree with you. It has been a long-standing issue with CACP. First nations deliver quality police services at the level set out for them in their mandate. They play a large role in our policing umbrella. They police a lot of those difficult areas. I fully agree that they should be using the same rules, have the same pay rates, and have the same expectations as other police services across the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Mr. Payne, please.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for coming today. It's an important study that we're doing.

My question is through you, Mr. Chair, to the witnesses. I know that we've talked about different things that we need to do in terms of police modelling. One of the things our government did this last February was announce the next phase of the youth gang prevention fund. I'm wondering if both Mr. McFee and Mr. Stamatakis could tell us if they've seen any impact from that. Also, how would that help in terms of your overall policing costs?

[Dale McFee]

I can't say that I've seen that yet. Maybe Tom has more comments in relation to that.

I can say that anything that tackles youth gangs collaboratively we'd be supportive of, but I personally haven't had a chance to review it. I apologize.

[Tom Stamatakis]

What I would say is that I know your government has made a significant investment in policing through the police officers recruitment fund, and different provinces have used the funding they receive in different ways. In some provinces, including British Columbia, those investments went to the creation of integrated units specifically targeting gang and youth crime. It has made a significant difference.

Now, I'm also not familiar with this latest initiative, but obviously any investment that can be made and any attention focused on youth and gang crime are critical.

Getting back to an earlier comment around police officers in schools and to Mr. McFee's comments, the most important thing when it comes to youth crime and youth involved in gang crime is intervention at an early stage.

Embedding police officers in schools provides the kind of collaboration that we're talking about here. Teachers can identify the kinds of issues that a police officer wouldn't typically see: the student not showing up at school, not completing homework assignments, showing up with inappropriate kinds of things like money or clothing, or just behaviour out of the ordinary. You have that kind of collaboration with the police officer embedded in the school. You establish relationships and credibility. You can intervene and maybe direct that youth's attention to more productive and positive programs.

There are huge savings if that youth then doesn't become one of the chronic offenders we've talked about here today, one who ends up being one of the 75 or 100 people who are responsible for a significant amount of crime in a community and who create a lot of victims in our community.

This is the kind of thing that we need to be talking about. I don't think there are simple solutions of just saying, “Let's get somebody else involved in the schools. We don't need a police officer there.”

The fact is—and I alluded to it in my presentation—that police officers have the training, they're accountable, and they have the skills that are appropriate to use in a first response. The issue is, what do we do after that? That's where we need to bring in these other resources, or other people with other kinds of training, so we can have a more effective response.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

There was another point that I wanted to talk about. I don't remember, Mr. Stamatakis and Mr. McFee, which of you talked about special constables. I'm wondering if you can tell us what those roles are. Do you see that as beneficial in helping to reduce overall police costs?

[Dale McFee]

Go ahead, Tom.

[Tom Stamatakis]

I think we need to look at all models of service delivery and of utilizing different responses, but we need to be careful. Although there are programs in this country and other countries that rely on community safety officers and special constables, there really hasn't been a lot of good research or evaluation around the efficacy of those programs and whether they actually reduce costs.

We have had special constables, peace officers, and community safety officers in this country for many years. I'll use Edmonton as an example. They have a number of layers of what you could call “police response”—people with peace officer status, special constable status—so you have a whole bunch of organizations with their own infrastructures that are being funded in some way by the taxpayer. The question is whether that is the most efficient way to respond to a policing problem or a community safety problem.

Recently a study in the U.K. examined 12 million incidents. They found that 83% of them had some element of criminality; it could have been a crime that had been committed. What you need are the discretion, skills, and training of a police officer to do the assessment. When their community safety officers were responding to those calls, that person was then calling the police officer to deal with the situation because there was an element of criminality in it.

That's the million-dollar question. We need to do the research and the evaluation to determine whether it is actually the best way to spend our dollars, or are we actually adding layers of bureaucracy and infrastructure that ultimately make it less efficient?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You're taking time from Mr. Gill. We're out of time.

[LaVar Payne, Conservative, Medicine Hat, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

I did that yesterday. I don't want to do it again to Parm. It's not a good way to welcome him to our committee.

We'll go to Mr. Gill, please.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank our witnesses for taking the time and being part of this important study.

My question is for Mr. Mukherjee. You mentioned in your remarks that you were able to cut about 10% of your budget, which is just over a billion dollars for the Toronto Police Service.

I'm wondering if you could shed more light on that and give us some details. You mentioned there was a hiring freeze and a freeze on promotions. What other areas were you able to find the savings from, and has this impacted the police services in any shape or form?

[Dr. Alok Mukherjee]

Thank you for that question.

We had to look at a range of approaches or strategies. Last year when we started talking about achieving this 10% target, I wrote a discussion paper for our board, essentially saying we need to approach what we do differently. There are functions that include human resources, business processes, alternative delivery models, and delayering of the organization to the extent possible because, as you know, in the police organization you have multiple ranks. The question arises as to how many of those are really needed.

I proposed a comprehensive model. We took interim measures to meet the 10% target, and of course, one of the things we had to do was to say we'd hold off and put a freeze on hiring and take a look at the appropriate number of police officers that a city the size of Toronto needs.

We have retained an external consultant to come in and take a look at the numbers issue. That relates also to the issue of functions. What are the functions for which you need a uniformed police officer? It is typically the case that often police officers are deployed in administrative functions. Do you need them to do those? If you have 5,600 police officers, wouldn't you prefer 95% of them to be out on the street doing what they should be doing, which is community safety?

As a result, we've been looking at functions that police officers do not need to perform. We've been looking at levels of supervision. Do we need six layers of supervision? We've looked at the span of control. What is the span of control? Do we need the 2IC, the second officer in charge, in every police division? Is there a size that justifies that?

We're taking a good look at the organization and at achieving efficiencies by streamlining old accepted practices. Then we raise the question of functions that we do not need to perform. Mr. McFee mentioned a little bit about this. We are looking at, for instance, functions in our core security services. The chief proposed taking 85 core security officers out of that unit and using them in police divisions and replacing them with partial privatization, because those are very rudimentary functions. We talked about the low-level functions. Our sense was that we can achieve efficiencies by outsourcing those functions.

You are looking at background reference checks that Tom mentioned. We have a team of people doing nothing but receiving applications from members of the public to run background checks. They are permanent employees. They involve lifetime pensions, benefits, and so on. We raised the question of whether we can outsource that. There are companies that are doing that function online. There may be certain types of background checks that must be done by police officers or police personnel; for others, we don't need to get involved.

It's a comprehensive attempt to re-engineer and redesign the organization, to deploy the maximum number of police officers to policing functions, and to give up functions that are not core to policing. We're looking at core in two ways: core to the duties of the police officer and core to the functions of the police service, and we're looking at which of those functions can be done by police officers or by somebody else.

We have implemented and are continuing to develop a combination of approaches, and we are bringing in some external expertise to assist us in those reviews and to develop ongoing changes. We achieved the 10% with some stopgap measures, but obviously we cannot permanently maintain a freeze. One year down the road we will have to lift that freeze. If we have not used that time to bring in permanent sustainable changes, we will be back to where we were.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We will now move back to the opposition and to Mr. Garrison, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to say again that when the summit started and we saw some of the media reports on the minister's statement, we were quite concerned on our side that there was an excessive focus on police salaries and on the police efficiency work that I know is already going on. It is quite refreshing to hear the kinds of ideas that were being put forward about building safer communities and the community safety approach. What's very useful for me as a committee member, and I suspect for others, are some of the concrete examples you've been giving.

I want to ask about mental health. Sometimes people ask why police officers are dealing with mental health issues. I'd like to give each of you a chance to talk about the integrated approach in mental health and the role of police in that.

Perhaps we'll start with Mr. Stamatakis, since we always forget the person who's not in the room.

[Tom Stamatakis]

I take a bit of a different approach from a lot of people in the police sector and police community.

The fact is that there have been a number of public policy decisions made across the country in different provinces around mental health and how to deal with it. Most of them involve deinstitutionalizing people suffering from mental health issues and integrating them into the community, which is fair enough, but the consequence is that in the first instance when those people suffering from mental health issues are in crisis, the police have to respond. I think we do a very good job of it, and it's an appropriate response.

The issue is, though—and I think it was alluded to already—to create the partnerships whereby we bring in the professional people who have the skills and the training to deal with mental health issues in the long term, after we deal with the crises. What we need to do better, whether it's through policy change or legislative change, is deal with some of those privacy issues and some of the jurisdictional problems that prevent those partnerships from continuing. This would allow us to pass those people off after we deal with the crises so that there's a meaningful solution and intervention.