Public Safety Committee on April 23rd, 2013

[Chief Rick Hanson]

One is that the increase in mentally ill people on the street, unmedicated or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, creates this sense in communities that the streets aren't safe. These aren't criminals and they may not be performing criminal acts, but the social disorder issues around them are huge. Studies have shown that you don't have to be the victim of a crime not to feel safe. If there's a loud, aggressive person, who may be mentally ill, who's on the block or doing something weird, you tend not to feel safe. There are 70,000 dispatch calls a year in Calgary regarding social disorder instances just like that.

The second thing is that people are no longer satisfied with the police going out and arresting the bad guy after they've been victimized. What they're saying is that they do not want to be victimized in the first instance. They want to see prevention occur in some way prior to their house being broken into, or their kid being bullied, or whatever. There's far greater pressure in regard to that.

The third thing that didn't exist years ago is everything to do with the cyberworld: cyber-crime, cyberbullying, and sexting, which creates the distribution of inappropriate pictures from one young person to another young person. We've recently seen the subsequent impact of that.

Those are just three examples of what some of the drivers are over and above the regular police calls that occur when you put drugs and alcohol on the street on a regular Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, and things go crazy.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Deputy Chief Sloly, I put the same question to you. Since you're in charge of the boots on the ground, I guess I would say, what do you see as the real drivers for your demand?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

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.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Thanks. Deputy Chief Sloly, you talked about police resistance to change. I'll probably ask the same question to Chief Hanson if I have the time. How is the reaction to your prevention model, when you talk about shifting resources to prevention? For the front line, the rank and file police, how do they respond to that proposed shift in priorities?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

Exactly as I said. They don't like the way things are and they don't like the ideas that have been proposed to them for change. I'm not sure we're much different from the fire department or the public health sector, or even government and bureaucrats who work for you. It's difficult to accept that you need to do things differently and significantly differently, not incrementally differently.

I've been on the job for 24 years. You build your career and your reputation based on doing things the way you used to do them. In fact those things are no longer sustainable, and in some cases you need to actually learn new things. It's hard to put that into the context of the individual officer, never mind trying to get it into the context of the entire police service.

Three years ago I started a discussion at the command table about the need for us to invest in social media and utilize social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, and tools such as social media listening for us to do a better job at public safety. The reaction from my peer group was literally laughter. They weren't being mean or disrespectful to me. They just didn't see how that could become a major impact in policing.

In three short years there's been a major impact in policing. Just look at the tragedy that happened down in Boston and how much the Internet was affecting those two young people. Look at how much information might have been available to police and law enforcement, if three years ago, we had been fully invested in the way we're trying to invest now.

The cybercrime issue, the mental health issue, and the prevention focus are all newer approaches to policing. It's going to be hard for leaders and front-line cops to get their heads, their hearts, and their hands fully involved in making those things a priority.

[Randall Garrison, NDP, Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, BC]

Chief Hanson, perhaps I can ask you the same question. What's been the reaction of your front-line police to this approach of the early intervention teams?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

The first response was one of, “What are you talking about? We're here to put bad guys in jail.” You have to overcome that. But I can tell you this, we adjusted our recruit training so that our officers go to those social agencies to see first-hand what they're dealing with as it relates to mental illness and addictions, and that something can be done.

Second, what we've done is sold them on the issue that we all got on the job early on to put bad guys in jail. The reality is that when you're putting some mentally ill person in jail because he's stealing something to support an addiction that's masking a mental illness, you're not putting a bad guy in jail. That person should be in a hospital. So we've been selling it by dealing with it this way, on the early intervention side or by channeling people in the right direction, it's going to give you more time. It will free up lots of space in the jails and we can put the really bad guys in there. That's what they want to do. They don't want to deal with these other issues.

Over four years we've seen this dramatic change, even when our downtown officers go to some of these calls. We're opening up the Safe Communities Opportunity and Resource Centre. It's the hub model, but it's very much focused on adults, where we have 18 agencies in one location. It's the police that led this. It has health, social services...United Way, the homeless foundation, Alpha House. We bring those people in with this wraparound service. Instead of taking them upstairs to jail, we put them in there and they're taken care of by the appropriate agency.

We've been able to sell our officers on the idea that by focusing on the social disorder issues and health issues this way, they're going to have more time to chase the bad guys, of which there are lots to go around still. That's where the greatest satisfaction is. I can tell you that as the officers become more senior, they get this better and better. They realize there are more issues than just that somebody's bad or somebody's good. It's not as simple as that. As they become more senior, they get a better understanding. We have no problem at all staffing our over 100 early intervention, crime prevention positions, which are focused on these strategies.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Chief.

We'll move back to Mr. Hawn, please, for seven minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for being here. Those were two very good, useful pieces of testimony.

Chief Hanson, I want to start with you. This goes to what we have just been talking about: cyber and social media. Obviously it's used to the disadvantage of law and order. We had something called Bill C-30, which isn't there anymore, that was trying to address using social media to the advantage of prevention, and so on.

Without putting you too much on the spot—I'm not sure if you're familiar with Bill C-30, but I'm sure you are—do you see that as having potentially very useful, positive measures? What do we bump up against with respect to charter challenges, from your viewpoint, or to the judiciary providing a challenge to the use of that?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

Thank you for that question.

First, lawful access has to be addressed by this country. It has to be addressed by Parliament. We're so far behind the other countries. This is about safety. This isn't about the police wanting to troll, to go fishing in somebody's e-mails. I get it that in Bill C-30, clause 16 was written abysmally. I get it. That was bad. Clause 16 is what killed Bill C-30.

The reality is that if we don't create legislation that recognizes how technology has evolved and allows the police just to do their job.... Trust me. We have way more important things to do than to find out who's sending salacious messages to their girlfriend or wife. We don't care. But what we do need is the ability to get, for instance, ISP information without a warrant so that we can save people's lives.

This is a true story. Somebody died in Calgary because they had an asthma attack. They used their cell phone to call 911, and they couldn't get out. Now, if it's a land line, you get what's called ANI-ALI, the automatic number indicator and automatic location indicator, but because it was a cell phone we didn't have that information. So that person died because they couldn't give their location, even though they were at home. We couldn't get subscriber information for that cell phone in time to get medical help to that person who died. That's just stupid in a technologically proficient country such as Canada.

We get suicide threats where people say they're going to kill themselves. The efforts we have to go through to try to find out where that came from.... This is about saving lives and doing the right thing. Bill C-30 is gone. It's off the table. It's dead. There has to be a new, lawful access piece of legislation that gets clause 16 out of there and is rewritten in a different way, that gets us the authorities we need, the power we need, to go and save lives, whether it's about cyberbullying or anything else. There are certain steps we need to have before we can go to the next step with search warrants and other things, such as production orders.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you for that.

Deputy Chief Sloly, may we have your views on that?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

I support everything Chief Hanson just said.

When we were all in horse and buggies and didn't have superhighways, when we built those highways we built a Highway Traffic Act that supported the laws. Now we have the information highway. We don't have a legislative framework for the massive amounts of traffic and the speed and volume around which people use that highway. We need that legislation.

My only suggestion is that when you write the next version of it, whatever you call it, you bring in privacy commissioner people who understand the privacy legislation at the earliest point and have a discussion. It relates to some degree to what Chief Hanson is doing in Calgary, and what we're doing here in Toronto, and what Dale McFee did in Prince Albert.

The number one barrier to the success of hub service delivery models—coordinated service delivery, wraparound service delivery, whatever you want to call it—is not the willingness of police and public sector partners and not-for-profits to partner with each other and look at these cases from a prevention standpoint. It's the legislative inability to share information across those silos. Information sharing and the lack of a legal framework around which we can share information about individuals or families or communities that are displaying risk factors stop us from properly analyzing and assessing the risk and deploying the right combination of service interventions to prevent that risk from becoming a real problem.

Information sharing broadly, not just in the concept of Bill C-30, is an area that government and police leaders and community leaders need to put their minds to.

The ultimate solution for Dale McFee was that he didn't need to create new legislation, but he brought in the privacy commissioners and legal people who had expertise, and they realized existing legislation provided them enough latitude to conduct operations at a higher level. They were just ignorant of the law.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you for that.

Deputy Chief Sloly, Chief Hanson talked a little about training and so on, and how you have to change that for results down the road, just like the other things we're trying to do. You talked about changing the swamp and changing the culture of policing.

Can you talk a little about your training program. I think what we're talking about here are the expectations of recruits, the people coming to join the police service. What are they expected to do, and how do you reorient them to what you want them to do and what they should do?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

I think the best example of a recruit training program existed in the mid 1990s. The RCMP brought recruits into their “Depot”—I think it was only for one or two classes. Before they gave them a uniform, before they issued the baton, handcuffs, gun, bullets, before they gave them any Criminal Code statutes or anything else related to provincial or municipal laws, they sat them down for three weeks straight and taught them how to do problem solving, conflict mediation, and effective communication.

Once they gave them the soft skills, the right mindset around how to approach providing public safety and police service delivery, they gave them the tools of the trade and the laws of the land.

I'd like to see all of us revert to something more like that. There's simply not enough in our recruit class for training that deals with these issues. We're too focused on officer safety and law enforcement, and we don't have nearly enough information and training content specifically around those other areas of prevention, community mobilization, community engagement—the soft skills, and the common sense approaches we need to have more of in policing.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You said the RCMP only did that for a couple of classes? Did I understand that correctly? Are they not still doing that?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

I'm not sure if they are still doing it. When I was doing research back in the 1990s, looking for best practices on this type of training, I was led to the RCMP Depot and saw those two examples. Whether they have continued that since then or have it in place now, I would suggest asking the RCMP. But I haven't seen that type of model of recruit training deployed in Ontario and certainly not in the Toronto history.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Chief Hanson, you were shaking your head. Have they stopped that, and should all police forces be bringing that back?

[Chief Rick Hanson]

I think that was under Frum Himelfarb, wasn't it?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

I'm not sure, Chief, but I remember who the commissioner of the day was.

[Chief Rick Hanson]

No. It wasn't the commissioner. She was in charge of training. Yes, it was a good model, and no, they don't do it that way anymore.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you.

We'll move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Deputy Chief Sloly, you mentioned something I didn't quite catch. You were talking about the mandate of this study and suggesting the wording should be a bit different. Did I understand correctly?

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

Yes. Again it's just a quick document that was shared with me. It reads:

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 and effectiveness of law enforcement.

Language is powerful. Law enforcement in Ontario is only one of seven responsibilities for police service delivery. By referring to ourselves as law enforcement, by referring to your committee's goal of looking at enforcement and law enforcement agencies, you're setting up a frame of reference around which you're ignoring the most important parts of policing, which are prevention and order management.

Law enforcement is important. It's not the most important aspect of police service delivery, I would suggest. Although I would probably be argued with even by my peer group, that it has become the most important, and it's the most expensive part of police service delivery. Enforcing the laws is the riskiest and the most costly element of policing.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you for your intervention.

I'm trying to link all of this fabulous information and these very interesting insights and stories, which are truly instructive. You've put them so concretely and described them so well. I'm trying to find out what the role of the federal government is in all of this. I was wondering if you had any thoughts, first Deputy Chief Sloly and then Chief Hanson.

[D/Chief Peter Sloly]

I've been exposed a little bit to this committee's work. I had a chance to go online and read the presentations by Dale McFee, our police board chair Alok Mukherjee, and Tom Stamatakis from the Canadian Police Association. By virtue of your convening these meetings, exposing yourselves to some outstanding police leaders like Chief Hanson, I think you're doing yourselves a great service. You are educating yourselves on a very complex and vitally important public service component. It is a major symbol of Canada's democracy and its image in the rest of the world.

I think anything the federal government does to support police leaders, to support the most proactive and innovative aspects of police service delivery and public safety in Canada, is going to make us better and more efficient, and it may very well make us more cost-effective as well. I encourage you in what you're doing.