Great. Thank you very much.
Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.
I want to thank you for this opportunity to present a few highlights on the current state of policing in Canada, particularly in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
I will be presenting in English but, of course, I will be happy to answer questions put to me in French .
Thank you very much for the opportunity today. I'd like to focus my comments on four major themes, not in any particular order of importance per se but hopefully in an effort to contribute more fully to the understanding of what we are facing right now. The four themes that I wish to focus on are: the mounting complexity of policing; financial pressures; union and generational divides; and the redefinition of core responsibilities in the management of public expectations.
The first point is the mounting complexity of policing. We've heard over many years that since 1992 crime has been diminishing. Of course there are many reasons, and I won't get into what they could possibly be. But I will comment that if crime has indeed diminished, as statistics would have us believe, it would make sense that the cost associated with policing would also diminish. Unfortunately, as we all know that hasn't occurred.
Since 1992, as a basic takeoff of the post-Soviet bloc era expression about the “peace dividend” that we saw in the 1990s, we should have technically experienced a “crime reduction dividend”. Unfortunately, the gap between mounting costs and reduced crime has been absorbed by many things, among which are increased accountability measures and requirements for both internal and external oversight; judicial complexity, including disclosure; undelivered benefits of technology; and ever-increasing police compensation packages. I'd like to comment on these things a bit later on.
The ever-increasing judicial complexity equates to tasks taking longer and requiring more resources than in the past. When I lecture to master's-level students on the single decision that most impacts policing, I always of course refer to the Stinchcombe decisions. Included in that group, of course, are the Askov, Collins, Feeney, and McNeil decisions. They have all had significant impacts upon the way we do investigations. As a legally trained police officer, I do not lament whatsoever the inherent wisdom of these decisions, but I recognize the added burden of each one of these decisions, which have added to what was already a challenging profession.
For example, it take us longer today to charge somebody with impaired driving because of additional legal requirements, including, of course, disclosure. Warrants, as has been discussed earlier on here and I'm sure in other fora, are also considerably more complex and take longer to write today than in the past. It has indeed become—as we saw in the film of that name in the 1970s—a paper chase. I recognize as well that some of these cases have not only added additional burdens to the criminal side of policing, but also, in my past life as a disciplinary adjudicator, they rendered more complex the application of administrative law to policing. All this complexity increases the time spent on policing, and as we all know, time is of course money.
With regard to financial issues, the most evident factor affecting the economics of policing is the escalating cost of salaries and benefits. We are a human resource-rich environment. The cost of policing has skyrocketed over the last number of years, almost exclusively because of compensation. In fiscal 2012, compensation comprised more than 92% of the Halifax Regional Police total operating budget. It's no longer possible to reduce budgets using innovative strategies, quite simply because there is so little room left for reductions to impact upon, that being the remaining 8% that we have.
I'd like to share some interesting numbers with you. Sworn and civilian employees' salaries in Halifax Regional Police have increased 45.92% since the signing of our 12-year collective agreement in 2003, which ends in 2015. It's clear that we need to slow down salary increases to a more reasonable pace. In fiscal 2014, my staff sergeants, and this is without overtime, will be making more money than my first-level commissioned officers. Overtime is another major issue, amounting to another 3% of the overall operating costs in the budget.
Court time, when we have individuals who go to court and are not required because, for various reasons, the crown has decided that they cannot proceed, is another major concern that we have. The increased costs can only be managed fiscally to a certain point, and often that management has proven to be a band-aid solution. One of the major things we've been seeing, I guess in the last two years, and we've seen it as a result of what has been happening in Great Britain, is that fundamental changes to the way policing is delivered in a municipality must be considered in order to improve policing from an economic perspective in future years.
The union and generational divides are an issue related to financial pressures such that our unions and especially our employers are not necessarily abreast of the realities of the economics of policing. We define this, as mentioned before, as a union and generational divide or expectation gaps. It's almost as if we've become victims of our own success. As an example, our wage model has generously offered our employees roughly 15 wage increases in the last 15 years. One of these annual wage increases alone equalled 5.39%. Last year, it was 3.7%, and of course this is all cumulative. As a result, employees hired in the last 10 years or so have never been confronted with tough economic situations that others before them have experienced, such as wage rollbacks or wage freezes. We're faced with a workforce that doesn't understand the current budgetary realities, and the economic prosperity they've been afforded has fostered a culture of entitlement, which is resulting in economic instability and unsustainability. Quite simply, all municipal services are vying for budget dollars, and there are simply not enough to go around.
We need to be thinking strategically about how to cut costs, which unions and employees fail to fully understand. This is further compounded by the fact that they believe it's a management issue and not a union or an employee issue. We have divergent views and are incredibly far apart when we meet at the table for collective bargaining. Employees need to understand the realities of the economics in policing, particularly leading up to and during negotiations. That of course is a major responsibility of ours as police leaders.
The fourth and final point is the redefinition of core responsibilities and management of public expectations. One of the things that we've seen is that in the past, we used to be the responders of last resort. Today, for various reasons, we are the responders of first resort. We're the only 24/7 social agency around. When I lecture, whether it's before M.B.A. students, police officers, or committee members, I've asked them to define policing. It's not serving and protecting, even though that's an important part of it. We're more problem solvers. I believe that the deputy chief from Toronto had spoken about the importance of problem-solving models earlier on. We solve those problems that people themselves cannot or will not solve. As such, we are the consummate problem solvers and consummate servants of the public. This leads me to believe that from a systems-wide perspective, we should no longer be talking about the economics of policing but rather the economics of public safety.
Within the context of the sustainability of our present public safety model, we need to redefine the core responsibilities of police so that we're no longer the responders of first choice on a 24/7 basis. Mental health fits squarely into this discussion. We have become social workers and mental health providers all in one. We believe this is partly a result of, as Chief Constable Chu had mentioned, deinstitutionalization due to the increased costs of hospitalizing those with mental health issues.
We've seen significant increases in mental health-related calls for service, just as every other city across the country has. To give you an idea, we received 638 mental health-related calls for service in 2007. Just to give you an idea further, the overall population in Halifax that is served by the HRP is about 300,000 people. We received, as mentioned, 638 calls in 2007, and in 2012 we received 1,193. Of those calls, 223 people were taken into custody under the Nova Scotia Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act and taken to hospital by police.
To deal with the marked increase in this cohort of individuals, Halifax Regional Police has developed a highly trained mental health mobile crisis team compromised of police officers and mental health clinicians. Every month for the past few years, more than 1,000 calls related to mental health issues have been made by the public.
Of those calls, more than 80% are made directly to our crisis helpline. That was in an effort to bypass police dispatch. The remainder are dispatched to the mental health mobile crisis team. They also respond to wellness checks and section 14 calls. Those are instances where an officer has the right to take a person to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. This gives uniformed officers the ability to attend other calls for service.
We are attempting, and we've had some fairly good success, to invest in the front end with our mental health mobile crisis team as a preventive measure and as a way of averting what could become more serious calls had we not responded. Chief Chu had mentioned self-medication and the challenges that we have out there.
I was reading a report recently that stated that in 2012 there were 357 deaths attributed to drug misuse and overdose. When I talk about drugs, I'm talking about medicinal legal drugs. This is an issue that we're dealing with more and more in Nova Scotia.
Over and above the issue of mental health—and I'm cognizant of time here—we've also accepted a lot of non-core policing functions over the years. They have been downloaded for one reason or another from other agencies, such as animal or bylaw control. We need to agree on what is important for us to do and to eliminate the non-core functions, keeping in mind that there may be some contractual issues to contend with in the interim.
Ultimately, I guess this raises a fundamental question of who responds if we do not respond to a particular call for service, especially when it comes to mental health. It begs the questions of what alternative responses there are that cost less than policing today. This conjures up concepts of two-tiered policing, public-private policing partnerships, civilianization, subcontracts, outsourcing, along with associated protocols that would allow us to achieve such options.
The biggest challenge is to look at what police officers contribute to the community. First off, police officers have three particular attributes. One, they have certain authorities that you, as legislators, have provided. Two, they have specialized training, and three, they have access to specialized tools. If just one of those attributes is not required in any intervention, then considering the costs, we should and we must look at someone else fulfilling the role other than a police officer.
Those are my comments to this point. Of course, I'm open to answering questions.