Thank you.
I'm responsible for all of our divisional policing operations, which includes our 18 police divisions that serve all of the city of Toronto, 4,200 members who work for me, and a $450 million budget. Virtually two-thirds of all of our members and one-half of all of the operating budget for the Toronto Police Service revolve around my operations.
I am a big believer in community mobilization. In fact, I brought community mobilization into the Toronto Police Service. We didn't invent it, but there are lots of great agencies, including Calgary, that are outstanding examples of how to apply community mobilization.
My recommendation for this committee is that if you want to see the best agency in all of Canada, it is Waterloo Regional Police Service, under Chief Matt Torigian. It was Waterloo that gave me the idea of bringing it into Toronto. I think they deserve reference in this conversation around the concept and the model.
I will give you a very brief context around why I think it's important. John Fielding, back in the 18th century in the United Kingdom, just before the founding of the new model of policing under Sir Robert Peel, coined the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure”. It's a very simple statement. If you put a little bit into prevention, you don't have to do a lot of stuff downstream around the cure.
Sir Robert Peel talked about the police being the people and the people being the police. I think that's the most overused portion of Peel's nine principles. In fact, the one that drives me is that the absence of police activity is actually the measure of police effectiveness. The less we have to do, the better we actually are. People don't want to have to call the police to respond quickly and effectively to a crime. They don't want to have to call the police in the first instance.
Under our Police Services Act here in Ontario, which governs all of our police service delivery, the number one policing mandate for all police agencies in Ontario—and it's very similar across Canada—is to deliver community policing in partnership with our community. The functional areas of police service delivery start with crime prevention. They then go on to order management. They then go on to emergency response. They then go on to law enforcement. They then go on to assisting victims and witnesses and the prosecution of crimes. But they start with crime prevention.
Logically, the more you prevent, the less you have to do downstream. It's in that context that I'll move on to discussing community mobilization. My research on the topic found that the field of public health services was the one that first embraced this at an institutional level. The public health field in Canada, particularly one in which we have universal health coverage, places a great stress on governments to provide health services to their citizens.
Health Canada recognized very early on that you can't build enough hospitals and you can't hire enough doctors and nurses in order to treat everybody who wants to walk into a doctor's office or an emergency ward. We have to have a healthier community and healthier individuals in the community. Let's start to move health services out of the bricks and mortar and the human capital we've invested in and back into the community's hands. Let's teach people to be healthier. Let's encourage healthier practices in the community. Let's reduce illness at the upstream level, as opposed to treating it all downstream where it's too expensive and not sustainable to fund and resource.
The same concept can be applied to policing. The more crime we prevent upstream—the healthier we make individuals and their choices about life, the healthier we'll make communities so they're more resilient to criminal activity and other elements of disorder—the less likely they're going to need police services or need to call on police services, particularly the most expensive parts which are, in fact, rapid response to emergency calls and law enforcement, meaning the enforcement of criminal statutes, provincial statutes, and municipal bylaws.
The Toronto police has a long history of being involved in prevention, but I would suggest that, even as good as we are, we do not have the balance right in the mix of our focus on prevention and our reactive style of policing.
I could talk about the community mobilization model as though it were a new model in policing. I don't believe it is a new model. I don't believe it's a model that we need to adopt. I think the police legal framework that I referenced, the Police Services Act, with its common sense approaches to keeping communities healthy and safe, dictates just good policing practices, which include engaging and working formally with community partners, and more regularly and more consistently using community assets in the service of public safety and in the provision of police service delivery.
We've had a couple of examples here in Toronto that I was asked to comment on, specifically our Toronto anti-violence intervention strategy, which uses community mobilization at the heart of our service delivery model to reduce the effects of guns, gangs, drugs, and violent crime on our inner-city communities. As well, our mobile crisis intervention team is a model based on using police and public health practitioners to respond to people in crisis, emotional or psychological crisis.
Both of these models are fully developed, with over a half decade of program delivery and program evaluation. They're extensively used in almost every aspect of our violent crime investigations, our violent crime operations, as well as our service to the mental health community, including response to heightened levels of emotional disturbance and mental illness in individuals on our streets.
There was a report submitted to the committee by Deputy Chief Federico on the mobile crisis intervention teams. We have over 19,000 calls for service each year. Over the course of our implementation of this, we've had 3.6 million contacts. We've apprehended over 8,600 persons. We've reduced the incidence of severe injury. We've prevented a lot of high-cost involvement with the police by this partnership, where we have a police officer and a mental health provider working in the same scout car, responding to the same calls for service.
It's been an effective way of mobilizing community assets, working directly and in intimate contact with our policing operations—completely sewed into our operations—for some of the most high-risk situations that officers face. It's something that we're continuing to expand to more areas of our city. We're having more and more uptake in the public health sector and the mental health survivors community in regard to this particular program.
A report has been submitted. There are lots more details. I'd be happy to answer questions, if there are any from the committee.
The Toronto anti-violence intervention strategy is a model that's gone province-wide. It's now been implemented as the provincial anti-violence intervention strategy, with police leaders across the province using our basic model. There are three basic components to our model: intelligence-led policing, risk focus enforcement, and community mobilization. For intelligence-led, we put the right people in the right place at the right time.
With risk focus enforcement, we're not looking to arrest everybody and charge everybody with everything we can. We're looking at the highest-level offenders, the 1% to 2% in every community who cause 80% to 90% of violent crime and very contentious public safety issues. We focus on them. We target them. We incarcerate them. We put them before the courts.
The two previous elements are not sufficient on their own. We can clear the swamp of alligators, but if you don't change the conditions of the swamp, the next generation of alligators will move in. You have to mobilize the community to make them, on their own, more resilient and more capable of sustaining the public safety results that come from enforcement. It's with the support of police, but primarily on their own initiative. If you can't mobilize a community to use their own resources, their own passion, their own people, there are not enough police forces you can hire to keep that swamp clear of alligators.
It's a very simple concept. It's not easy to implement, but we've found year-over-year crime reductions right across the board. In particular, violent crime reductions have been sustained for seven straight years. We're confident that we can continue to sustain and drive down that crime bubble even further.
I'm not sure how much time I have left, so I'll start to wrap up my comments. Certainly I'll be available for any questions that anybody has.
All of these things still require a different change in the way that we structure our police services. I'm not saying we need a new model. We just need to structure our police services around the legal framework that we have.
I've done enough research on this topic that I can dare say Toronto isn't where I'd like us to be. Look at the total number of resources in the Toronto Police Service dedicated specifically to the area of crime prevention and community mobilization. When I say “resources”, that's people, the human beings we hire and pay; that's our priorities; that's the time we spend on those areas; and that's the financial resources, the line-by-line operating budget items that are associated with prevention and mobilization.
Only about 5% of our resources are dedicated to that, and yet it is the number one police service delivery requirement under the Police Services Act. I can safely say that every single other police agency in Canada, North America, and western Europe is structured in the same way. We talk a good game about prevention and mobilization, but we don't make it a priority. Your real priorities are where you put your people, your time, and your money. We're simply not structured in a way to make a prevention model, a prevention-focused model, a reality.
The second thing I'll say is about the culture of policing. There are two things that every cop hates: the way things are, and change. We need to change from a reactive enforcement model to a prevention, pro-active model, and change is going to be difficult to do. Whether it's for a chief of police in Calgary, a deputy chief here in Toronto, or a constable on a small town street anywhere in Canada, this is not easy to do. It's going to take a real commitment.
I believe the heart of the matter is the cost of policing. Let me make a comment on the mandate of the committee. I'm reading here from a document that was provided to me as a support document:
That the Committee conduct a study into all aspects of the economics of policing, by speaking to federal, aboriginal, provincial, territorial and municipal, police forces in all areas of enforcement, with a focus on improving the efficiency....
By simply using that term “enforcement” to describe police services, you've already increased the cost of what you're doing. We are not in the enforcement business. We are in the police-service-providing business. We are in the public safety business. We're in the prevention business. Nobody wants to be a victim. People want us to prevent crimes from happening in the first instance, and respond effectively, efficiently, and economically when we have to. I think you need to focus on the prevention more than on the enforcement going forward. It's a tough sell inside policing. It's going to be a tough sell in government. I think the community will be more receptive to it, quite frankly.
Those are my comments. I'm happy to answer any questions that may come my way.