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.