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?