Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2013

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

Yes.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

—it's been mixed results. A lot of it is a reflection of larger issues that may be going on on that first nations reserve, in terms of leadership issues, capacity. Over the last couple of decades in particular, I know the RCMP and the two provincial police forces have really worked to help build that capacity and to assist autonomous first nations police services.

I think it's a matter of continuing to provide them with support, not only fiscal support but support in terms of leadership development, succession of leadership, and ensuring that they aren't isolated. Sometimes they tend to become isolated, not only because of their geographic isolation but also because they don't tend to be part of the discussion, as you mentioned. There's a number of different ways that initiative of autonomous first nations police forces—which, as you mentioned, is tied into the larger issue of self-government—can be enhanced. We have examples where it has been.

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

Providing support is an interesting thing to say because of what's happened over particularly the last two or three years. I'm going to use northern Ontario as an example, with a few quite large first nations police services—one that deals with a number of first nations communities along the road system and the other one that is predominantly fly-in. Of course, you can imagine the financial issues that you have to deal with and that sort of thing. In the past, the Ontario Provincial Police in northern Ontario have been very supportive of first nations police services—and continue to be—but as their budgets get cut back, their ability to get into communities to help a single police officer, for example, or to get into a community where there is no police officer to help the first nations police service is becoming more problematic. I wonder if you could comment on that.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

Because the policing environment and the dynamics of policing in remote and northern communities is so different, any budget cutback has an exponential impact. When we're in the southern regions, some of it is muted and diffused a bit because there are other resources in place. But the impact and the hit—what it means in terms of policing in some of these rural and, as you said, fly-in communities—is exponentially greater. There are some models they may want to look at. Alaska, for example, has a village public safety officer program that's been very effective.

It requires us to take a look at some alternative models for having an in-community police capacity beyond just fly-in. There's a potential for that type of approach.

But I agree with you that when you get a budget cutback, the impact is going to be exponentially greater, particularly in communities that have high, I would just say, “trouble” in terms of the dynamics of what's going on in that community and the high needs of that community in terms of attention and people having access to assistance.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Griffiths.

We'll now move to Mr. Gill, please, for seven minutes.

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

Thank you , Mr. Chair. I also want to thank Professor Griffiths for joining us this morning.

I understand, Professor, that you have vast experience with countries around the world and their policing systems. Which country would you compare Canada to, and I'm wondering if you could describe why?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

That's an interesting question, because they're all so unique. But the one that comes closest to us, in many respects, is Australia. For example, we were just speaking about the Canadian north. Australia, obviously, has a large land area and small population.

The challenges of policing the northern territories are very similar to the challenges we have in policing the Canadian north. The temperatures are a little bit different, but the demographics, the social issues, and the geographic issues, as I said, are very similar, so I would say Australia.

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

Thank you.

I'm also wondering if you are able to discuss the findings of your Vancouver Police Department's staffing deployment study, in which you were able to conclude that the force could hire 122 officers, as opposed to the 400 recommended, while still ensuring public safety and efficiency.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

The Vancouver operation reviewed the template for the kind of research that needs to be done in any police service when we start talking about the economics of policing. That review was triggered by an ask of over 400 officers by the Vancouver police to the municipal council, at which point the municipal council said, “Well, wait a minute, let's take a look and see what's going on with the Vancouver Police Department”.

Police services need to be able to answer a couple of questions before they ask for any additional resources. First of all, how are they using the resources they have? Are they making the most efficient and effective use of the resources they have? Second of all, do they have the capacity to monitor that on an ongoing basis? So you get away from this endless series of asks to municipal council of “We need 100 more, we need 200 more.” And then the municipal council will say, “What did you do with the last 100 we gave you?”...“Well, they're out there, they're busy, they're policing.”

We went to the Vancouver police and we took a look at a number of different aspects of that police service. We looked at overtime usage, we looked at civilianization, we looked at patrol deployment. Another area we looked at, which is rarely looked at, which actually eats up most of the overtime in most police services, was specialty units.

With respect to deployment, one of the things we saw very early on was that Vancouver police had a 13-minute response time to a priority-one call. That would be something like a domestic assault in progress. The best practice is about seven minutes. Either one or two things is happening here. Either Vancouver doesn't have enough officers to get to that scene in faster than 13 minutes or they're not deploying their officers effectively and efficiently.

The request for 122 officers came from our analysis of how they were deploying their officers. We concluded that they were doing the best they could with what they had in this instance. They just didn't have enough. We went back to municipal council and said, okay, municipal council, what do you want to buy? You represent the citizens of Vancouver, what do you want to buy for a priority-one response? You have 13 minutes. Do you want to buy 11 minutes, 10, 9, 8 minutes? Then we provided the decision-makers with actual information that they could use to make a decision. So they decided to buy 10 minutes for now, at that particular point in time. Okay, you want to buy a 10-minute response time to a priority-one call, you'll need 122 more officers. They'll come back next year and they'll track this and show you the outcomes of having those additional 122 officers.

There are a couple of things that go on here. First of all, the police service develops the capacity to know what it's doing with what it has. Second of all, as importantly, municipal councillors, who often, through no fault of their own, don't know a lot about policing other than what they read in the media or see on television, get educated in terms of effectiveness and efficiency issues, and actually have some information they can use. But that's unusual. Usually budgetary decisions, as I mentioned in my opening comments, and policy decisions are made in a complete information vacuum. So that's how the deployment study developed in Vancouver, and that's what its objectives were. That can be replicated anywhere.

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

How much time do we have, Mr. Chair? Two minutes.

A couple of weeks ago I think we heard from our departmental officials regarding the police summit last month. One of the things that came out of the summit was the achievement of the catalogue of initiatives, best practices, being developed and I guess this will be shared across the country. I must say I was somewhat surprised that this was not already in place.

My question to you is this. Are you aware of any other country that has this so-called catalogue? How may this benefit police forces?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I think we have some good touch points in other jurisdictions. I mentioned the Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency. I mentioned a couple of platforms in the United States where they have these materials. One of them is Crime Solutions, and there are a couple of other ones where you can go online and they will provide a summary of a particular strategy and then have a number of different indicators about its effectiveness. You either get a green check or a red check against it.

Again, that's really good generic information to have. I think we can benefit from that. What I would like to see us do is build on that information that currently exists and create our own in Canada, because we have some unique aspects of policing in this country that don't exist, for example, in Scotland. I think we can use what others have done as a foundation. It's easily accessible on the web.

Right now, the problem is we don't have any place in Canada to bring all this stuff together, even in a central server, that would be accessible. As a result, we're relying a lot on U.S. research, U.K. research, Australian research, to make policy decisions in Canada. I don't think that's a very helpful situation. But, yes, there is.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Gill and Mr. Griffiths.

We'll move to Mr. Cotler, please, for seven minutes.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dr. Griffiths, you mentioned the concern with respect to downloading, and you also said—not necessarily related to it, but I'm trying to make a connection if there is one—that we have not yet defined what core policing is all about.

I'm wondering whether the problem of downloading is making it more difficult to define what core policing is all about, because core policing becomes more diffuse precisely because of the downloading.

I'm wondering if you might respond to that.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

Absolutely. The whole issue of downloading really struck me in a northern jurisdiction where I was working. If people in a community called the social services line after five o'clock, on weekends, or on holidays, they would get a recorded message that said, “Hi, you've reached social services. We're not available. If you have an emergency, call the RCMP”. That really started getting me thinking about the downloading situation.

Municipalities often raise the very legitimate issue that a large portion of their budgets is being eaten up by police services, but the reality is that municipalities are generally only responsible for policing and fire and rescue. All the rest is provincial. As I mentioned, when provincial governments start cutting back, the cities eat it. Really. I think there needs to be a discussion between municipalities and their respective provincial governments about what the police should be doing and what capacities the police should have to develop to deal with it.

I should also point out that many police services have experienced challenges in trying to develop these collaborative relationships with provincial counterparts. There are often difficulties, and the police have been at the forefront in many jurisdictions of trying to develop these collaborative partnerships so they don't end up having to deal by themselves with, for example, the issue of mentally ill people on the street.

I think there needs to be a dialogue between the municipalities and their respective provincial governments. I don't think that dialogue has occurred, and I think the police end up having a lot of things put onto them just by default, at the end of the day.

And I do agree we need to have a discussion about what core policing is. Right now core policing is very broad, and it's not just about crime rates. It's about providing social services; it's about a lot of other things other than crime rates. That's the reason for my comments about getting stuck in this notion about whether crime rates are up or down and so whether we need fewer police.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I wonder if I might ask you something about an area in which you have a particular expertise: the whole notion of restorative justice.

This used to be a concept about which there was a good deal of discussion and even modelling, 10 to 15 years ago. There's very little about it now. It may be this is also a casualty of what you described as the dismantling of our whole research capacity, which included the dismantling of the Law Commission of Canada that had recommended a good deal about the matter of restorative justice. I'm wondering what you might think if we went back, if we revisited it, if we invoked it, whether this might help to make policing more efficient and more effective.

And because I may not have time for a third question, I'm going to try to relate this to it, although it may not be all that related.

Yesterday a report was issued that was titled, “Those Who Take Us Away, Abusive Policing and Failures in Protection of Indigenous Women and Girls in Northern British Columbia, Canada”. It had to do with the whole question of the disappeared and murdered aboriginal women on what has come to be known as the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia. What was disturbing about it was the two main themes that came out of it. One was that the RCMP appeared not to be protecting the indigenous women, but moreover, they also at times were themselves involved in violence against indigenous women.

Now I'm trying to link it maybe. Would a restorative justice approach be relevant here? I'm just linking it so I can put the two questions to you. They need not be related.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

How long do I have?

On the restorative issue, I think that again there are initiatives going on in restorative justice on a community-by-community basis across the country from the southern regions to the territories.

Unless you know the actual people who are involved in those initiatives, you'll never see the report. You'll never have access to who they are. Someone who's interested in northwestern Ontario and who is doing the same thing would not even know who's in Yukon doing it. Again, that's what I would make the pitch for, a clearing house of information, ideas, and people. So if somebody wants to develop a restorative initiative, here are the people who are involved in it.

There's work out of the U.K. and they actually say, “Here's a project. Here's what the results were. Here's where you can get the report. Here's who did the study. If you're interested, call them or send them an e-mail”. Really it's a matter of facilitating these connections.

Restorative justice plays out in all sorts of different ways across the country and it's evolved over the last number of years. Police have been very involved in many jurisdictions in restorative justice, in running family conferences. School liaison officers pull in kids and run conferences and mediations. Again, it's under the radar. I think there is potential to do more, but with restorative justice, a lot depends on the community context.

What we saw across the north with circle sentencing for example, is that some communities have the capacity and/or interest to become involved in these, and others don't for a variety of reasons.

You have to make sure that the capacity is there in the community to do it. I hadn't really given much thought to connecting it to the report that came out yesterday. I've read through the materials, and using restorative justice as a way to address the issues that were raised in the report, I think, remains an obvious possibility.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Professor Griffiths.

Just on that, I think in your response to Mr. Cotler's question, you were talking about the clearing house for information and you said there is a report in the United Kingdom about how the project is evaluated, how it worked, and how it didn't work. Do you know how we could access that report?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I don't have the link with me today, but if you give me a contact, I can send that information to you this afternoon.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move back to Madam Lefebvre for five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Griffiths, thank you very much for your presentation today. You have brought some extremely interesting elements to the committee's study.

There are so many things. It is difficult to go over everything in five minutes.

You said something that struck me in your opening remarks. You spoke about the fact that we should be asking ourselves what the police should do and should not do, and what kinds of things police should not do.

Do you have any interesting solutions to suggest to the committee?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I think a number of initiatives would be helpful. First of all, as I mentioned, there needs to be a dialogue between the municipalities and their provincial and territorial governments about the downloading issue.

Second of all, there needs to be a mechanism to bring in the community to these discussions. My experience in doing community group work and running focus groups in communities is that most people have no idea what the police do. They rarely see the police except on a traffic stop and they talk about whether or not they got a traffic citation, and everything else comes out of the media.

When you run a focus group with people in the community and you present to them the fact that they have to make choices about what their police service is going to do and that there are limited resources, when you bring them into that dialogue, you see that they have some really good ideas about how to do that.

My comments at the beginning of the session today were that the communities generally had been excluded from these discussions. Particularly the visible and cultural minority communities are generally absent from these general community, open-mike meetings, which I find not particularly useful or productive.

I think there are a number of things we can do to help define what it is. It's going to vary community by community; there's no one generic model for what the police should do or not do.

The other thing is that in some communities, the councils are willing to pay more, for example, for a “no call too small” approach, where police officers are maybe not literally getting cats out of trees, but are responding to all calls. It's going to be community-specific but I think the community needs to be provided the opportunity. As I just mentioned, I'm not a big fan of open-mike community meetings, because you miss a lot of the key elements of the community who won't show up there.

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

I see.

You mention communities. I have a lot of questions about organized crime, street gangs and the mafia, which are present throughout the country. At a certain point, there was also the problem of the Hells Angels, who were practically operating at a national scale. I have questions about youth involvement in the vicious cycle that is organized crime.

Do we have the right tools to help our young people not get caught up in this vicious cycle? Do you think there are initiatives, a better way of doing things?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

Your point is well taken.

The objective is early intervention and prevention. Identifying at-risk youth is not difficult. Most police officers and social workers.... They usually come to the attention of various agencies and personnel. It's a matter of coordinating that response. Historically, there's been a lack of resources put at the front end of the system. We do spend a lot of money at the back end of the system if you look at what corrections cost in terms of running a correctional system; multi-millions of dollars. We don't put the money up front. We have examples of programs that divert kids who are vulnerable to being recruited by gangs. There are examples of programs that are designed to get kids out of gangs. But they are very sparsely funded and they're not very well known.

Again, because we don't have this central clearing house we don't know where to go to find out where to start. We end up talking to somebody in Los Angeles. That's interesting and there may be some commonalities. But I think there's enough that we should be focusing on solutions here. We can certainly be informed by other practices. There are specific program examples that should be part of a readily accessible online access tool.

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

Could you give us a few examples...

Oh, I see that my time is up.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Sorry about that. I almost gave you seven minutes instead of five; that would be a terrible thing.

We'll now move back to Mr. Norlock, please.