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.