Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2013

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you very much.

Through you, Mr. Chair, to the witness, thank you for appearing today.

I was very much interested when you used the phrase in your opening statement, “doing more with less”. That's not something new to me. In the mid-1990s when the federal government reduced by $25 billion some transfer payments to the provinces it resulted in a deployed police force that I worked for doing exactly that. That was the common phrase by our commissioner, “we have to do more with less”, and we did more with less.

One of the items that you may have alluded to but didn't come to specifically is you were talking about all the things that we expect police forces to do. Some of the costs, or the increase in costs, were as a result of specialization. You must be aware, and can you comment on this, that in Ontario the reason we have specially trained officers for investigating sexual assaults.... In domestic abuse scenarios there would be a first officer responding but the follow-up would be by specially trained officers. All of these items come as a result of people like us and more so coroners' inquests, where the result is “the police should do this, the police should do that, and the police need more training for mentally ill people”. All of these things add incrementally to the cost of policing. Then we have economic downturns where everybody's budgets are being squeezed. Then somebody comes up with a bright new idea that maybe the police shouldn't do that and maybe they should be better trained people. So what's old is new again and all those sorts of things and we're back down to the 1990s. Could you comment on that?

Second, there's nothing new in policing about reducing costs. I can recall in my locality where we took three detachments and put them under one administrative roof. I can recall in a budget in a small county reducing policing costs by $5 million by putting fewer supervisors under a bigger administration and therefore being able to keep more front-line officers.

What's all new about this? We've been doing it for a long time.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I think what's new about it is just the fiscal pressures, which I think are much greater. I think the days of the blank cheque, obviously, are over for police services. Some police services understand that. Some police services in Canada have developed the capacity to go before police boards and municipal councils and say, “Here's what we're doing, here's how we're cutting costs, here's how we're monitoring our overtime, here's how we're making sure we are deploying our officers effectively”, and other police services don't have that capacity. As a consequence, those services that don't have the capacity to generate that kind of information and to educate their fiscal decision-makers find themselves in a difficult situation.

You're right, efficiency and effectiveness have been there always, but the public sector in criminal justice, for example, has historically had more challenges in terms of developing the capacity to monitor what they're doing and how they're doing it with what they have, as opposed to the private sector.

The other comment I would make is this. We can't outsource our way out of this issue. I think that while private security has a role to play, while community constable programs have a role to play, I don't think we can outsource our way out of this. I know there's a lot of pressure to start outsourcing more and more as is being done in the U.K. Well, the U.K. experiment is still a work in progress. We're not sure where that's all going to go. They're turning over a lot of these activities to the private sector.

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

We had a chief constable from Staffordshire in here talking about just those things. He gave us some very good meat to chew on, shall I say.

I will go back to funding. Our government put $37.5 million into youth gang funds, $7.5 million into ongoing funding, and then we made a substantial input into the National Crime Prevention Centre. Doesn't the National Crime Prevention Centre do a lot of the things that you say we should be doing? What more could they do? Could we perhaps incent them to do just exactly what you said, a sort of a central agency to look at different ways of approaching policing and crime prevention?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I think their mandate and the work they do are good. Their mandate is primarily crime prevention, part of the policing continuum. My suggestion would be that any project that's funded, whether it's through crime prevention or moneys that are given for gang intervention, absolutely should have an evaluative component. We're not going to build a database and information base about these programs—whether they work, how they work, under what circumstances they work, that kind of cumulative knowledge—unless we build an evaluative component. I'm not saying that pointy-headed academics have to do all the work. I think many police services now across the country have the capacity to do their own in-house evaluations of what they're doing.

The evaluative components often have been missing. A lot of the literature we have in Canada is very descriptive, “Well, we talked to 10 people and they thought it was a really good idea, and it seemed to have a big impact on everybody's lives”. That's interesting, but did it do what it originally said it was going to do?

I would make the pitch here for an evaluative component, and we can start building that information and knowledge base within our Canadian content—

[Rick Norlock, Conservative, Northumberland—Quinte West, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

No, Mr. Norlock, I'm not going to let you go on to another one.

Thank you, Mr. Griffiths.

The last question of the day is going to Mr. Rousseau, please, for five minutes.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much, Mr. Griffiths, for being here.

My first question is about the sharing of responsibilities.

In my riding, in the southern portion of Quebec, there is the Canada Border Services Agency at the ports of entry, the Sûreté du Québec, municipal police forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Because of limited human, material and technology resources, the municipal forces or RCMP sometimes have to support the CBSA.

How do you assess, and what do you think of, the sharing of responsibilities in these kinds of situations, especially since we do not have a truly comprehensive vision for our police forces?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

That raises a really important point. I think that there are ways, if you can get these parties, these different policing agencies, together and if you go in and take a look at that situation you described and ask what they are doing right now, how efficient and effective they are with what they're being given, and then where the efficiencies are...the efficiencies may be in one of the agencies taking certain responsibility and another agency taking another responsibility.

The problem is we don't have the kind of frameworks to look at these and say, are they being effective and efficient with what they have. Then you may be in a situation by saying yes—as we found in Vancouver—that they are being efficient and effective with what they have, and here's what they need to do a better job, and here are the metrics we're going to use to measure their performance.

If you asked me to come into that jurisdiction, those are the kinds of questions I'd be asking. That's the kind of information I would be gathering, to see where their efficiencies could be gained, how effective they are at what they're doing, and whether they are using best practices.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

My second question is about demographic changes in Canada. Immigration, the aging population and even the rural exodus have influenced how police do their work.

Would you say that they have not really adjusted to these changes? Given the decrease and the end of research into policing, is there not a kind of block there? Would you say that police has not really adjusted to all these demographic changes?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

That's an excellent point. With the changing demographics and the kinds of demands that have been placed on not only police services but other agencies as well—and particularly with downloading a lot—a lot more is falling to police services themselves. I think police services are probably doing a better job than a lot of other public agencies.

If you look at the diversity of the officers themselves, we have increasing diversity in the ranks of police services across the country. The RCMP has been very successful in its recruiting efforts for diversity, for example. I think you have more police recruits who speak a second language than you do probation officers, parole officers, lawyers, or defence counsel.

I think the police are doing, comparatively speaking, a better job than many of their counterparts in the criminal justice system. That being said, that has to be built into the kinds of expectations we have of the police and whether the police have resources to deal with these changing demographics.

[Jean Rousseau, NDP, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

My last question may seem a little bit strange, but since I have a professor, a researcher, in front of me, I will ask it anyway.

Do you think incidents such as those of September 11, 2011, changed the priorities of Canadian police, in terms of border, land, air and marine ports of entry? Do you think this put a brake on research for developing a national public safety strategy, or do you think that it is the opposite, that it led to a comprehensive vision?

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Obviously following 9/11, community policing really took a hit. A lot more resources were poured into surveillance and more covert kinds of activities than existed prior to that incident. Now the way it's emerged is there's a new term or a more frequently used term, “community-based strategic policing”, which says that your patrol officers on the street are really your first line of eyes and ears for people who might pose, for example, a terrorist threat or a threat to security.

It has presented challenges, and I think that's just an add-on. That was something that came....it was a new event with a new set of consequences on top of what the police were already being asked to do. So now you have the police being asked to have these very highly specialized units to deal with the security threat, and then at the other end of the continuum you have patrol officers at three o'clock in the morning trying to decide what to do with a mentally ill person sitting in their patrol car because there's no place to take him.

Again, it's that expansion, just by default, with all these incidents, and there's really been no discussion about this. It's just kind of added on, as you suggested.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right.

Thank you very much, Mr. Griffiths. Unfortunately our time has come to a close here today. We certainly appreciate your expertise. We know that you are well regarded, and we thank you for your presentation today and for answering our questions. You've really helped our committee and I appreciate that very much.

We are going to adjourn, and we will see you a week after the break on the Tuesday morning.

Thank you, Professor Griffiths.

[Dr. Curt Taylor Griffiths]

Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed the discussion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

All right. The meeting is adjourned.