Evidence of meeting #71 for Public Safety and National Security in the 41st Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was officers.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
How concerned are you about a bubble down the road when you have a hole in recruiting like that, because that will create a bubble 20 to 25 years down the road?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
Absolutely. I think that is the single most serious strategic threat we have.
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
And I think that is why I've been very keen to begin any form of recruitment to deal with that threat.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Okay. I think that's wise.
When you talk about capacity building in KPMG and passing that capacity building down to your force, is that limited to a certain number of people in specific jobs, or is it something you try to instill across the force?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
It's a limited number of people because the work is very specialized around business process mapping and then there's the re-engineering of that.
We have a team of about 15 people now who continue to work on that and other things around corporate improvement for us, and they have all been trained. KPMG sat alongside them to learn that trade.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
And they are carrying on their regular police duties while they are doing that?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
They are not police officers. They are members of the police staff.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
I understand. Thank you.
You mentioned single crewing. There's obviously some risk involved with single crewing. How much single crewing do you do and how do you determine whether it's going to be dual or single? What's your assessment of the risk?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
We do risk assessments, and I encourage supervisors to do dynamic risk assessments.
On the issue around threat to officers here, I can't speak in terms of comparing it to Canada. What I can say in the U.K. is that overwhelmingly our officers are unarmed, but they have protective equipment. We work on the basis that if they are going to an incident that appears as though it carries risk to it, we would send a double-crewed vehicle. We have them available to us, but they are very much the minority. Ordinary patrolling is usually undertaken by individual officers, and the evidence is over a period of time that the risk is minimal.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
You talked about time wasted in the arrest and processing cycle and so on, and that's the same challenge our people face here.
How much were you able to reduce that by? You talked about that, but how much were you able to reduce it?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
We were able to save—and again apologies, I don't have the figure here—many thousands of police officers' time over a period of a year, not just through that process, but also in terms of how we dealt with calls for assistance.
We recognize that in many calls for assistance, the member of the public was more than happy for that to be dealt with by a telephone resolution rather than the deployment of officers. We have watched very closely our public satisfaction levels, which we measure after every contact, and they haven't slipped as a result of that.
We looked at things like how we deploy officers to incidents and how we manage public interaction, so we've introduced a diary arrangement, managed appointments, where that is appropriate rather than an immediate response. Obviously there are times when we need to respond immediately, and we do that. Again, it's saved thousands of officer hours.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Thank you.
Your approach to the neighbourhoods is the right one, as per your comment on this, the political dimension. If people are happy in the neighbourhood and they have access to police officers...but if they're unhappy, that will filter up. If they're happy that's probably a good political move, writ large, I would say.
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
Yes.
When I was able to say at the beginning of this process that we wouldn't lose any neighbourhood officers, that went down very well with local communities.
The reality is, and I passionately believe this, that everything we do in terms of the big stuff—counterterrorism, murder investigations, serious and organized crime—is all predicated upon solid relationships with our communities. Those relationships are developed by local neighbourhood officers.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
It's the “fixing the broken window” approach from New York City years ago.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
You're outsourcing a lot of back-office duties and so on. Is there any concern that some of the those duties might have been useful in taking somebody off front-line policing, who may be in a period of stress for whatever reason, to allow him to do something a little less stressful but to bring him back later? Do you have any concerns about losing that flexibility?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
Yes. That's a really good point.
We've chosen not to outsource a lot of our functions here in Staffordshire at this point. I'm not ruling this out for the future. For the time being, what I wanted to do was to make sure we reaped all the efficiency benefits we could before we engaged a private company to come and take those efficiencies off us and claim them for themselves.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you very much.
Our time is up.
We'll move over to Mr. Cotler, please, for seven minutes.
February 14th, 2013 / 9:15 a.m.
Liberal
Irwin Cotler Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being with us today.
My question is really this: as a network of some 40 individual police forces rather than a national police service, how do you address—you were referring to these issues, so I thought I would ask how you address them—national concerns such as terrorism concerns? This would be in terms of matters of information gathering, intelligence sharing, and coordinated enforcement, etc.
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
The vast majority of policing in the U.K. is delivered by the 43 separate local police forces in England and Wales. There are only two parts that would have, to use a Canadian phrase, a federal approach, I suppose in that sense. There is a national approach to counterterrorism, which is led by the Metropolitan Police Service in London. Its assets are deployed around the country in counterterrorism hubs. My police force is in the Midlands of England. We have a counterterrorism hub that works with us very closely.
Also, overlaid upon policing, we have what is currently called the Serious Organised Crime Agency. That will disappear this year, and we will have a national crime agency developed. That will deal with the most serious and organized crime that goes across borders.
Broadly speaking, we have two approaches that we have. One is that we need to collaborate, and we do collaborate with other forces that abut us because criminals don't respect our boundaries. We also need to engage, and do engage, with a national counterterrorism effort, which sits on top of us and the National Crime Agency.
Liberal
Irwin Cotler Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Would you assess the terrorism threat as increasing or remaining the same, and in what manner has it changed over the years?
Chief Constable, Staffordshire Police
It certainly has changed. Over 20 years ago when I joined the police force, the terrorism threat was principally around Irish republicanism in the U.K. It has now unquestionably moved across to radical Islamist threats. That definitely has a significant footprint in the U.K. In my own force, it has a significant footprint. It is an abiding threat. It is not going away. I think it will be with us for a generation. We need to build our policing intelligence and operational response around that threat.
Liberal
Irwin Cotler Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Do you have recommendations you can give to us on that issue, as to how to address and redress that? These are common concerns that are developing in different jurisdictions.