The number one current drivers are guns, gangs, and drugs, and all the different underlying issues that go along with that. I'm sure you're all fully educated in that, so I won't bother going through the list.
Second—I fully support Chief Hanson in this—is the issue of mental health, not in terms of clinical diagnosis but just the stress it places on individuals in extended periods of economic downturn and in heavy urbanized environments, which Calgary and Toronto are. That same level of stress exists in young kids in small urban areas with a lack of infrastructure and a lack of the supports that are more necessary for kids these days than ever before.
I can't support enough what Chief Hanson has described. It's what I call the number one emerging demand factor, and that is the whole issue of cybercrime, cybersecurity, and the entire digital world, which I think right now is the number one threat facing us, both at a local concept and an international concept. Quite frankly, most police leaders, including me, haven't really got our heads or our resource allocation into that space yet.
I would also suggest that urban density and urban diversity, particularly in the Canadian context, is a number one challenge for police chiefs like Chief Hanson and Chief Blair, and the issue of public trust and police legitimacy. People trust us less. They see us less as a legitimate source of solution for their problems, so they're turning to other methods, including looking to illegitimate methods to solve their problems, such as gang members doing the policing in the community. They're not stepping forward as witnesses, so crimes are going unsolved and criminals are going loose. They're not coming to court, or if they do get to court, witnesses are too afraid to complete their testimony to get convictions. We have a spiralling problem.
Those are some of the major demands that we're facing here in Toronto.