Public Safety Committee on Feb. 14th, 2013

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

In the principal recommendation I have, I go back to my passion for local policing. These terrorists work in local neighbourhoods. When the London tube bombers bombed London some years ago, we know now that their behaviour changed in their local communities.

What we need to have is the trust and the confidence of local minority communities so that when people's behaviour does change, when there are extremists operating amongst them, they have confidence in local policing to pass that intelligence to local law enforcement agencies.

Then any counterterrorism effort has to be built upon the foundation of local policing. It cannot be something that comes in, and if you like, hits and runs. Because when terrorism arrests are made, local officers need to continue to work within those communities at a time of increased tension and volatility to continue to build those relationships of trust. That's what I think will defeat local terrorism.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, I had a particular interest in that issue because I was in London of the time of the London bombings and I felt that was a kind of tipping point in terms of both the understanding of and approach to terrorism.

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

I think your assessment of a tipping point is absolutely right.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

I think my time might be limited. If I may, let me ask you how complaints with respect to police officials are handled and whether you have any appreciation of the nature of the complaints, the frequency in that regard.

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

Yes. I also have a responsibility nationally for leading on this area for the Association of Chief Police Officers in the U.K. I can tell you that the profile of complaints is handled predominantly within local police forces because overwhelmingly they are about things like rudeness, incivility, lateness, those sorts of service issues.

When matters are more serious, and these thankfully are fewer and farther between, we have an Independent Police Complaints Commission to which these more serious matters are referred, such as death following police contact or an allegation of corruption, those sorts of things. The Independent Police Complaints Commission can do one of two things: they can independently investigate that, and they would do this for very serious matters, or they could manage an investigation and oversee a police force investigating that locally.

Overwhelmingly, complaints need to be dealt with by local supervisors because very often it is just an officer getting something wrong that needs to be put right with a simple “sorry” and service recovery.

[Irwin Cotler, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Would you say there's a general satisfaction with the way matters relating to police complaints are handled and resolved?

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

I think there's a general satisfaction but I think there are obviously people who if they were sitting here would say they're dissatisfied with it because they have some mistrust in policing.

The integrity of U.K. policing is something that the home secretary is very focused on at the moment and matters around the transparency of U.K. policing, of gifts, hospitality, relationships with the press, etc., are all under a lot of scrutiny at the moment. There is a big push, which I support, for enhanced transparency on the part of policing and I'm very up for that challenge.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Chief Cunningham. We'll now move to Madam Doré Lefebvre.

You have five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for taking part in our committee meeting, Chief Cunningham. I very much appreciate it.

I would like to briefly go back to what my colleague, Mr. Garrison, mentioned about mental health at the end of his questions. There were some comparisons with the problems our police forces see in our country in this regard. You seem to have the same kind of challenges. Do you work with various stakeholders in the community?

I am also curious to know how police officers in the United Kingdom manage this type of situation.

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

Absolutely. This is a significant challenge to us. At the moment we are not working enough with key partners. We need to engage the health sector far, far more than we have in relation to resolving these issues with some of the most vulnerable people we come across.

There are some pockets of good examples. In my own force, we have community psychiatric nurses who work within our custody areas. When a person comes into custody with clear mental health issues, they can have an immediate referral to a mental health professional. We also are looking for those psychiatric nurses to provide telephone support to officers who are at an incident and dealing with somebody who clearly has mental health issues. That may be somebody who is contemplating suicide or who is in serious distress.

I would like to move to how we think about actually deploying mental health professionals alongside police officers to incidents that would benefit from their expertise. Far too often our communities now are relying on police officers to do things they are simply not trained to do.

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

I understand.

You mentioned that you are currently going through a period of budget cuts and that you will be unable to renew your police forces for a number of years. Is it a huge challenge to deal with this difficult situation, and at the same time, find the staff required to provide mental health services? How do you find the resources, and where do you find them?

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

Absolutely, resourcing is a major challenge.

There is a saying that you shouldn't waste a good crisis. The crisis we are in at the moment is helping us to have very difficult conversations with the health professionals—who are also having financial squeeze—to step up to the plate and do what they are paid and trained to do.

This has to happen, not just at my level but at the most senior levels of government. The Department of Health and the Home Office have to get around the table and work this one out. We are lobbying government very strongly to have those discussions much more effectively.

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

I see.

Chief Cunningham, there is something else I would like to know.

In our country, there are young people who join street gangs and organized crime. We have programs to deal with this.

How do you work with young people? Do you raise awareness? How do you try to get them out of these circles?

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

It's a really important point. We do have officers who work with young people. We look to identify early those people who may be at risk of becoming involved in criminality.

There is more to do on this, but there are two significant pieces of work that I'd like to mention. One is work around problem families. We find that a problem family is a family who might call upon education services, police services, health professionals, and social services at different stages of their difficulty. What we need to do is have a much more comprehensive joined-up approach across agencies for dealing with that family. I think the evidence is that within that family there will be an increased vulnerability to becoming a criminal or being the victim of a crime or having mental health issues, as we've described, all within that family.

Some work was done recently by a colleague in another police force, and for one particular family, in terms of the police service calls for assistance, it would have been cheaper to have posted a police officer with that family permanently than to deploy as often as the force did once that work was undertaken. We need to identify these families. We need to work with them in a much more different way.

The second thing I'm very proud of is an approach to offender management. We work very closely on a project called integrated offender management, where the police officers work with probation officers, charities, health care professionals, and the like, to work with our most prolific criminals. They don't have any choice to be in our offender management program, they only have a choice as to whether they want to cooperate or not. If they don't cooperate, we will target them with enforcement activity. If they do cooperate, we will assist them with drug intervention programs, counselling, looking to help them get training, and diverting them away from criminality. Some of the early evidence is that it is a fantastically productive way of reducing criminality.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We're certainly learning some very interesting concepts in the new way of policing, if I could say “the new way”.

Mr. Norlock, please, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

And through you to the witness, thank you for being with us today.

I'd like to go back to the beginning.

You mentioned, when you were talking about some of the things you were doing to become more effective and efficient, building capacity instead of reliance. Could you explain that, please?

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

That was in relation to private sector engagement, and consultancy in particular. Too often, I think, consultants would have a conversation with you that leaves you reliant upon them for delivery of too much. I think the conversation has to be different. It has to be about investing with a consultancy company, as we did here. Part of the deal is that they build capacity within the force to take on the work that they initiated. That was the point I was making.

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

Thank you very much.

Going back, I have a little bit of experience in policing. Some of the things that you have done—when I'm talking about “things”, I'm talking about looking at single-patrol vehicles. In Canada, because of our expanse, we have mobile offices called patrol vehicles, and an officer rarely, in some cases, gets out of it other than to see people. One of the things in the past, especially with a deployed police force in a more rural setting, was officer safety. We tended to team up officers. Some of the efficiencies that you've been able to extract of necessity...I'm just wondering what is the labour relationship model in most police forces? Do you have bargaining units? Do they have the right to strike? How did you work with them to have buy-in to some of the things that you've been doing with regard to efficiencies?

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

It's an excellent question. This was a real challenge.

First of all, police officers in the U.K. do not have a right to strike. It is something that they give up when they join the police force. They have a police federation—it's not a union—that represents front-line rank-and-file officers. Each police force has its own police federation representatives.

I found the most effective way was to get them very close to the change program, especially the official representatives of the police federation. They were sitting on boards. They were sitting in projects, doing governance, and working with us to see what worked.

I also tried on the basis of “no surprises”. I have attempted, not always successfully, to be as open as I possibly can around the challenges that we're facing and the changes that we're making. I have discovered that not many officers needed to be persuaded of the financial challenge. In other words, once that had been set nationally, the cops understood that we had to change dramatically. In that sense, we got their buy-in. I'm not saying all the changes were popular—and some of them had to be enforced—but I think overwhelmingly we had a huge amount of support from officers who could see what we were trying to do.

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

Were you able to measure morale before and currently—in other words, before you had to take these actions and then after?

The second part of the question is whether in the cost reductions there were any impositions of salary cuts or freezes or changes to the benefit package, etc.

[Chief Michael Cunningham]

Three things have happened that have attacked officer morale. Nearly all of them are national interventions.

One is that there has been a complete review of police officer terms and conditions. This was a government-led program of work. It was undertaken independently by a guy called Tom Winsor, and the Winsor report, which is published, set out a whole new framework for police officer reward, recognition, and remuneration. That has been challenged by police officers, but it has been implemented. The government has forced that through.

Secondly—and this has really upset officers—there has been a change to their pension arrangements. Police officers now make a far higher contribution to pensions. They're not able to retire when they thought they were going to be able to retire, and when they retire they will not get the pension, in some cases, that they thought they were going to get. Those things have changed, and, again, they have not been popular.

Thirdly, the reduction in numbers has also affected morale.

The overall impact of that is that many of the morale issues, which I'll return to in a second, are directed not necessarily at me as chief but towards government. In relation to that, we benchmarked morale through a staff survey and that is something we're going to repeat. Anecdotally, I would say that morale has taken a hit, but also overwhelmingly officers recognize the need for change and are doing a fantastic job in very challenging circumstances.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll move to Mr. Rafferty, please.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, Chief Cunningham, to our committee this morning.

I want to talk about the public for a second here. Canadians' impressions of British police services I think are very high. I get mine through watching Coronation Street—

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

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

—and the police service there is very efficient and very polite. You say that the public impression of a police force, even though this big change has been going three years now, remains high.

I want to ask you a question about the move to a single commissioner. Are you concerned about the lack of public input now into policing in Staffordshire? What's your impression across the country?