Public Safety Committee on April 25th, 2013

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good morning, everyone. This is meeting 82 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. It is Thursday, April 25, 2013.

Today we're going to continue our study of the economics of policing in Canada. On our first panel today is Mr. Geoff Gruson, executive director of the Police Sector Council. We also have the chief of the Edmonton Police Service, Chief Rod Knecht. Welcome.

Our committee thanks both of these witnesses for appearing before our committee today to help us with our study on the costs of policing in Canada.

I invite Chief Knecht to make a few opening statements, followed by Mr. Gruson, and then we will go into a round or two of questioning.

Can you hear me in Edmonton?

[Chief Rod Knecht, Chief of Police, Edmonton Police Service]

Yes, I can. Thank you.

I have about a 10-minute prepared commentary. Is that too long?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

No, that's just perfect. Thank you.

[Chief Rod Knecht]

Okay. Very good. I'll start then.

Good morning. Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak to the committee today on a topic of critical importance to the profession of policing and the communities we serve, including all levels of government.

The proactive work of this committee is vital to the future sustainability and public confidence in policing and the broader criminal justice system. I congratulate the committee for taking responsibility for fulsomely examining this issue.

Police services across Canada are experiencing unprecedented challenges. Demands for service and public expectations continue to increase while budgets remain static or are decreasing in some jurisdictions. The recognized position is that the current situation is no longer sustainable. No single organization can stretch and adapt continually to meet all of the demands and expectations that are placed upon it when those demands grow unabated.

As we look for workable and affordable solutions, we are reminded that public safety is a fundamental expectation by citizens and a critical function of government at every level. The police are an essential service with a broadly reaching mandate. My personal policing career has spanned 37 years, in five provinces, two territories, and 16 communities across Canada. Over the previous 17 years, I've occupied senior leadership roles within two policing organizations, including a term as senior deputy commissioner for the RCMP in Ottawa, and my current role as Chief of Police for the City of Edmonton.

The simple reality is that policing costs are going up, and many are rightfully challenging the value of these expenditures. The policing profession is at a critical juncture that requires the need to reform our practices within the broader environment and better communicate value for investment of precious and limited tax dollars.

What is driving up police expenditures and costs? Police service growth has consistently reflected a growth in the greater population. Citizens want their streets and neighbourhoods safe to walk and live within. The governments are expected to deliver on safety and security through an investment in policing. That growth has a cost. Policing is very expensive, and like most commodities, you get what you pay for. However, per unit labour costs for sworn and civilian or non-sworn police employees are higher than they have ever been before, reflective of the broader public service. Of note is that since 1999, police compensation has significantly outpaced inflation, and the cost of pensions and benefits have been a major contributor to those costs.

In Edmonton, 80% of our operating budget is dedicated to employee costs, leaving only 20% for discretionary spending on police service delivery. These percentages mirror what I experienced when I was with the RCMP. Rising wage increases are a natural result of the greater mobility among younger Canadians, demand for specific skills, and tighter competition in the labour market.

In Alberta, we have a highly competitive market that challenges our ability to attract new employees and retain experienced employees. This is not exclusive to policing. However, to meet demands, we are currently recruiting aggressively in Ontario and the eastern provinces, due to the competition for new hires in Alberta. It continues to be a challenge to maintain highly qualified employees who are constantly cajoled into higher-paying jobs in oil and gas.

Those costs pale when compared to the costs that are now being incurred when police become engaged in ever-increasing social issues related to the homeless, mental health, and addictions. Our health and social services infrastructure is continually challenged to adapt to the same human resource and fiscal pressures of our changing environment, particularly as it relates to the most vulnerable in our communities.

As a result, police spend an ever-increasing amount of time and resources dealing with complex social issues as opposed to more traditional public safety issues. In point of fact, interaction with the mentally ill, homeless, and addicted has been our greatest area of increased deployment of policing resources over the past five years. I can say with confidence that we, the police, have become the social agency of first resort for many of our vulnerable citizens.

Last year alone, Edmonton police dealt with 35,000 calls relating to mental health, addictions, and the homeless. Each call took an average of 104 minutes. If you do the math, that's seven and a half years. Most often we are dealing with the same people over and over. We have documented over 150 contacts with a single individual during the course of the year. Our colleagues in hospital emergency wards, ambulance, and shelters are dealing with these same people, in some cases more often than us.

Policing has become increasingly complex. In my early years as a police officer it took 55 minutes to process a drunk driver; today it takes four hours. Obtaining a search warrant was a single page when I was in a drugs section in 1986; today a search warrant application is consistently hundreds of pages long.

Policy changes for levels of government, changes in legislation, and increased liability are often out of the direct control of the police. However, they create new and growing pressures on police officers and police budgets. Our citizens and our stakeholders have increasing expectations of their police, requiring higher benchmarking in equipment, training, accountability, and technology.

The Internet, social media, and new technologies have had a profound impact on policing in a very short period of time. We are seeing an emergence of new crimes that cross geographic, cultural, and organizational jurisdictions. Child pornography, cybercrime, human trafficking, financial frauds, and national security investigations are but a few of the serious crimes being facilitated through the Internet in this new community within our current community.

Ten years ago it was the police who had the most up-to-date technologies at their disposal; today it is the organized criminal element who have the resources and access to cutting-edge technology without legal, budgetary, or regulatory restriction, often leaving police in the position of playing catch-up or simply being neutralized. Most, if not all, major Canadian municipalities are also dealing with the realities of shadow and transient populations. For example, Alberta has in excess of 100,000 persons who report income from that province but file tax returns elsewhere.

The knowledge level for leadership in policing is also morphing from the requisite administrative and operational skills of an experienced senior police officer to that of an educated chief executive officer with significant corporate acumen. Policing has evolved into a modern business form, so senior executives need to know the intimacies of modern policing and the intricacies of running a business. This fundamental shift reinforces the challenges I mentioned earlier in terms of recruitment and retention.

Last, police organizations within the broader government structure are often competing with other departments and agencies for operating funds within a zero-sum game. One department or organization wins at the cost of others. This promotes competition and inefficiencies, while stymying cooperation, integration, innovation, and broader-based strategies for collective long-term success.

The accepted wisdom is that crime is down. This statement is accurate within some categories and in some jurisdictions. However, there are few front-line police officers who will agree that crime is down. In Edmonton, calls for service are up significantly. Certain categories of crime are way up, specifically sexual assaults, domestic violence, and vehicle thefts, and there is a burgeoning trend to not report certain crimes, as the belief is that police do not have the ability to respond.

The points I have made outline the complex drivers and pressures that the present and future policing environment faces. However, all is not lost. Out of adversity is born real opportunity, and I believe there is plenty of opportunity to address current challenges. The good news is that policing has historically proven to be adaptive and flexible, albeit sometimes slow and resistant, and often personality driven. Our traditional model of policing has evolved over time and in response to a changing environment, from being problem-focused and reactive to being more strategically active and proactive by utilizing the principles of community policing, intelligence-led policing, integrated policing, and, most recently, predictive policing.

The future requires us to employ intelligence-led management and systems-wide integration; that is, integration across ministries and across agencies, both public and private. As stewards of the public purse, it is the responsibility of today's police leaders to continuously and judiciously look for efficiencies in the delivery of public safety.

Current fiscal realities require continuous reprioritization around crime trends and community priorities while exploiting emerging technologies and human resource exigencies, supported by strong communication and relationship-building skills. It is essential that police leaders are constantly managing the demand for services more effectively, efficiently, and economically. A major component of this is the absolute necessity to manage expectations by communicating reprioritization to stakeholders, funders, and communities. This requires senior police leader competencies to be broadened to encompass skills that support business acumen, while still having a holistic understanding of policing as a distinct craft.

Related to this point is the need for police to do a better job of measuring and articulating the value of a dollar invested in policing. One of the challenges is trying to measure the intangible. How do we quantify a life saved, the elimination of an emergency room visit, or a second chance as a future contributor to society as a result of a drug bust? How do we assess the reduction of a life-long health care cost as a result of arresting a drunk driver?

We need to undertake a detailed review of our current policing model and determine the true impact on the cost-benefit ledger of policing. In my world, we have often experienced increased and uncontrollable demands for service, absent of requisite resources. This is particularly poignant as it relates to the mentally ill, homeless, and addicted.

Notionally, there are considerable savings to be realized through police diffusing social tension, preventing conflict, and reducing victimization and revictimization. There are clearly downstream benefits for families and communities, as well as increased economic development. We need to explore methods and metrics to effectively quantify this.

As I indicated earlier, responding to our most vulnerable impacts between 30% and 40% of policing budgets. It also has an impact on health, social service, criminal justice, and correction services' budgets, as the same people are being cycled through the broader system. While the fiscal outcomes are huge, the real tragedy is the suffering of our most vulnerable. In Edmonton, we have recognized that a limited number of the same citizens are consuming an inordinate number of police, ambulance, health care, and social service resources. We are doing something about it.

We have brought together a select group of impacted key stakeholders that include public health care, medical services, shelters, community members, and levels of government, in order to work together, to work smarter and to case-manage our most vulnerable to a better place. This is system-wide integration of service delivery. Our focus is currently on the top 50 consumers of police resources and how our list compares to our colleagues in other agencies.

We are taking steps to examine where these people are falling out of the system and becoming frequent flyers. We are changing a system that has been in place for dozens of years through partnerships, collaboration, innovation, and the recognition that there has to be a better way.

By leveraging resources, we are able to realize efficiencies and economies of scale and better service delivery. From a strictly policing perspective, we are able to reinvest that scarce 30% of our resources into targeting those who prey on the most vulnerable and other prolific offenders.

The end game is safer communities, more effective deployment of policing resources, and reduced costs to our criminal justice partners. There is no zero-sum game. There are simply benefits to the vulnerable and benefits to the system.

This takes me to the main point I want to make this morning. There is a better way, and not just within policing; a better way needs to encompass the entire criminal justice system and the broader system of health care, social services, communities, and relevant stakeholders. Police are most often the first responders and gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, but the system is not ours. To look at the cost of policing without giving equal attention to the efficiencies and costs of these other components gives only a partial picture. The solution lies in challenging the system beyond the economics of policing. A new model is required, one that clarifies roles and responsibilities of the entire criminal justice and social justice systems and one that articulates a clear vision. Increasing the cost of policing is one system of a larger problem, not the problem itself.

Police have become the social agency of first choice by more and more Canadians, and the costs of that are real, tangible, and excessive. In small communities across Canada, particularly in isolated, northern, and first nations communities, the problem is far more acute. Police are most often the only social agency of choice.

In closing, police services are not going to become more affordable based on more effective delivery of current services; this is simply biting around the edge of the cookie.

There are three questions we should be asking ourselves about policing into the future, and upon answering them, we should be re-engineering our processes toward a broader systems-based approach accordingly. Those questions are: What are we doing that we should be doing? What are we doing that we should not be doing? And what are we not doing that we need to do?

A response to these questions by governments, communities, and policing will allow us to create a higher degree of flexibility, manage expectations, be appropriately funded, and continue to deliver a level of public safety that is the envy of the world.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Chief.

We'll move quickly to Mr. Gruson, please, for 10 minutes.

[Geoff Gruson, Executive Director, Police Sector Council]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to pick up on a few points that Rod touched on, and in fact reinforce them in my presentation.

My thanks for the invitation. More importantly, I thank all of you for the effort you're putting into looking at a new model of policing and the evolution of that model here in Canada. Clearly, the economics are driving a serious re-examination of the work and costs of policing, and a potential re-engineering of the model toward more efficiencies and effectiveness.

If I may, I'd like to add a personal comment and take a couple of minutes to talk to you about what the Police Sector Council was and did. I use the past tense, unfortunately, because the federal program that funded our work was terminated with the recent round of deficit reduction initiatives. Following that, I'd offer a recommendation on moving forward, based on the work and research of the Police Sector Council.

My opening thought—a personal point of view on this one—is based on many years in the public sector, six years with the RCMP as assistant commissioner, and eight years with the Police Sector Council as executive director. The current model of policing in Canada has been evolving for about 140 years, based on the British model of Robert Peel. It's a quasi-military structure operating for the safety and security of Canadians and communities.

The model has been evolving slowly in response to many dynamic factors in the environment, but in recent years a number of critical factors have increased the pace of that evolution: the economic recessions of the 1980s, the 1990s, and certainly the one we're in now; technology that has brought information intelligence to the cars and the mobile devices of police officers; the growth of private sector industry, private security, especially post-9/11; the change in our communities, the face of our communities, the age, the diversity, the urbanization; and even the politics of governments at the federal-provincial-municipal levels. These have all had a significant impact on how policing is done and under what framework.

My personal comment on this is that the economic factor now trumps all of those other environmental factors—society, technology, politics, demographics—and really, based on the economics alone, the current model of policing is not sustainable. In reality, the economics of policing is a derivative of all the others, but it certainly is moving things forward.

The Police Sector Council—what we were and what we did—was a small, national, not-for-profit organization fully funded until March 31 of this year by HRSDC under the sector council program. Like all other sector councils, the Police Sector Council focused on the strategic long-term sustainability of the sector, did research, and undertook initiatives to ensure that the policing sector continued to be efficient, effective, and responsive to policing and public needs.

In the past eight years, under the guidance of a board of directors, which included key stakeholders in policing—ADMs from the federal and provincial governments, the presidents of the CACP, the chiefs' association, the Association of Police Boards, the Canadian Police Association, the union folks, the FCM, Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the heads of academies, learning institutions, and reps from private security organizations—the council has focused on a number of issues really related to national solutions to strategic workforce management challenges.

One example of our recent research and facilitated/collaborative undertaking has been the phased introduction of key elements to embrace more professionalism. That's common language, tools, and processes specifically through competency-based HR management of the critical HR functions: recruiting, education, training, leadership development, succession planning, and performance management. I'm going to speak a bit more about this in a second.

What we really do as a sector council is bring leaders and practitioners in policing together to break down the jurisdictional silos, to address common issues, and to collaborate on nationally applicable solutions. In other words, we facilitate a common pursuit of management efficiencies and effectiveness. That's been our eight-year exercise.

Our belief is fairly simple. In Canada, we have 201 police forces in 11 jurisdictions, compared with over 16,000 police services in over 100 jurisdictions in the United States. We should be significantly more capable of bringing together a common national policing management framework and leveraging the investment of taxpayers into enhanced policing and security.

When you think about it, we don't expect different kinds of policing from coast to coast to coast. Whether it's handcuffing skills, counterterrorism training, or HR management, we should do it once and use it many times. Such a national approach will result in more efficiency and effectiveness. Of course, the council's tag phrase was “connecting forces - securing futures”. More importantly, we just focus on skills up and costs down. The work we were doing in this area in fact led to the minister's summit on the economics of policing.

I'll give you a quick note just to reinforce a couple of Rod's points on the economics of policing, the costs, and the workload. In any one police service across this country, there is limited room for cost savings and efficiencies. Eighty per cent of the 96,000 employees work in 8% of the police agencies. Those are the top 16 police forces across the country.

Police budgets have increased at a rate of about 7% a year in the last 10 years and are an ever-increasing portion of municipal and provincial budgets. On average, about 85% to 90% of the police services budget is employee costs: the salaries and the benefits dictated by collective agreements.

Salaries have increased by 40% over the last 10 years, compared to an average of about 11% in any other sector of the economy for the same period. That's mostly due to leapfrogging collective agreements and arbitration awards. With a recent award in Windsor, for example, it looks like a first class constable will be making $93,000.

With the other 10% of the budget, the 10% or 15% of the services budget, there are costs for procurement and maintenance of infrastructure, technology, equipment, vehicles, and training, and other costs associated with managing the workforce. These are mandatory costs for the optimal delivery of policing.

Canadians currently spend about $12.6 billion on policing. Even if we were able to freeze contracts and reduce costs, we'll be at $17 billion by 2015 due to current collective agreements and locked-in contracts.

As you heard from Deputy Minister Dale McFee when he spoke to you earlier—and I think he will be here later today—policing has even less control of the workforce, and certainly Chief Knecht talked about that this morning. Every law enforcement regulation passed, every recommendation from commissioners, and every deficit-fighting reduction in other community service departments increases the work and creates complexity and complications in policing. We're the first responders and we're the last resort.

One recent study conducted by the University of the Fraser Valley in B.C. showed that the work of police officers has changed significantly over the last 10 years, post charter and subsequent to any legislative and regulatory changes in the 1980s and 1990s, with breaking and entering at 58% more processing time, driving under the influence at 250% more processing time, and a relatively simple domestic assault at 950% more processing time.

I offer this information to suggest that it's not very useful to place the burden of solutions to the economics of policing on individual command executives or their individual police services. They have very few discretionary options when it comes to their own budgets. They have very little control over 95% to 96% of the costs and can only really exercise discretion when it comes to triaging crimes or their responses to social issues or social misconduct, which for some services make up almost 75% of their calls for service.

When our sector council asked chiefs what are the implications of the economics of policing, they responded that they feel they are under a lot of pressure. The reality is that an inflexible tax base plus fiscal constraint equals capacity erosion, and we've estimated that to be at about 12% in the last five years. Also, chiefs continue to have to manage under the highest expectations of public oversight, media scrutiny, and the highest bar of public accountability.

The discussion of the economics of policing really has to be raised up and elevated to another level. That's the responsibility of governments and governance: to set a workable national framework under which chiefs can then manage their workforces. We don't do that now.

I'm going to give you one example, just one, of our sector council work: an opportunity to derive real efficiency and effectiveness in workforce management. In the past five years, the sector council expended almost $5 million of taxpayers' money to develop a set of national occupational standards, researching and leveraging the best practices in three continents and consulting and validating findings with 900 subject matter experts across the country—the police people and supervisors doing and managing the work—and consolidating contributions from 70 police organizations and 90 members of steering committees or working committees. This is something that has been done for policing and by policing.

We now have in place fully defined, competency-based behavioural and technical standards for over 160 roles in policing in three broad work streams: general duty, which is constables through chiefs of police; general, specialized, and investigative support; and leadership and management from supervisory right up to executive command. All of these roles have been fully defined in terms of competency-based technical or behavioural standards.

Why is this important for our discussion about efficiencies and effectiveness? The logic goes as follows. If the work of policing is consistent across Canada and we can define that work and the competencies required to do that work successfully, then the roles and occupations can be standardized through national and provincial occupational standards. If we have standards, then like any other sector, such as doctors, electricians, etc., we can have standard processes and mechanisms to manage that work in a consistent and more effective manner.

Right now we don't have that. By that I mean national workforce management standards, including curriculum training standards, certification accrediting trainers and training institutions, and certification and qualifications for each role. Think of policing as a national company. We want all police officers to be qualified for their jobs and promoted only on the attainment of new and higher qualifications.

Progress is being made. Today's narrative has much improved, but it goes something like this: we promote by rank and base criteria, not by skills and competence; we compensate by rank, not by skills and competencies; and we recruit and train by rank, the same way we have for 50 years, not by skills and competencies. This leads to overqualified and overpaid workers doing roles that they probably shouldn't be doing. I think Dale McFee used the analogy of a turbo mechanic being forced to do oil changes. This often leads to a mediocre and demotivated workforce.

The result of the sector council-led approach on the competency-based work is the economies of scale that drive efficiencies. Build it once, use it many times. Then refocus the cost savings on operational effectiveness on the important areas of policing, such as organized crime and cybercrime.

Successive RCMP commissioners have stood before this committee and talked about the fact that they only have the resources to actually investigate 20% to 25% of the known organized crime in this country, let alone deal with issues of cybercriminality. To emphasize this point, through the work of the sector council facilitating the collaboration of many stakeholders, we now have a competency-based workforce management framework. It's made for policing and by policing. It's been embraced by managers and unions. It has clarity, objectivity, learner orientation, and employee focus, and it's a simplified HR management tool and process.

Implementation of this framework needs focus and leadership. As you've heard before, delegated responsible policing goes from feds to provinces, from provinces to municipalities, and creates a policing culture that works against a nationally led direction and transformational change. We've been slowly working with pilot police services, specific provincial ADMs, and keen individuals across the country in the police service boards and associations to start the change process.

The recommendation to the committee is very simple. It's going to take time; it's going to take some leadership, but five years from now, if focused and concentrated effort can be made, there should be a national qualification framework in place and implemented, while the window of opportunity, our Canadian economic opportunity, still exists.

Let me leave you with five points, a sort of vision, if you like, of Canadian policing. We recommend a national qualification framework based on national workforce management architecture; role-based, not rank-based, occupational standards; professional training and certification through rationalized, cost-effective delivery structures; rigorous leadership standards so that we have fully qualified leaders in deputy and chief roles; and a national college of policing, administering the training and education to national standards, much like they have in the U.K.

This vision requires a not-for-profit organization at arm's length, with full stakeholder involvement, to implement and administer. It requires a national competency-based framework for managing human capital, including certification and accreditation with collaborative endorsement from the provinces and from Public Safety Canada.

This not-for-profit organization would continue to work on the sector council, which, over the past eight years, has been building collaborative networks, improving the capacity of all stakeholders to work together in a sectoral environment, identifying common approaches to optimize resources devoted to the management of personnel on a national, sector-wide, competency-based certification and accreditation of police officers and civilians. In other words, continue this professionalization of policing in Canada.

As you can all appreciate, any new evidence-based innovation to change how we do business today requires political leadership and policy-makers to champion and advance these efforts and to engage in the necessary partners who can truly make a difference. That's not the case today. The challenge, really, is how we develop a digital-age response to an analog-age system and structure.

Thank you for letting me make this statement. I'd be happy to take any questions you have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

You were a little long on the statement, so we're going to cut to six-minute rounds, if we can.

We'll begin with Mr. Hawn, please.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to both of the witnesses for being here.

Chief Knecht, I want to start with you, but I'll ask for Mr. Gruson's comments on this, too. You raised the issue of Internet crimes, and certainly that's been a focus here with some recent events. You also mentioned intelligence-led policing, which leads me to ask you about legislation in the past, which was dropped for a variety of reasons, with respect to lawful access to the Internet, to IP addresses, and so on, with supervision, obviously, with some checks and balances, to allow police forces to gather intelligence on things that are going on, on the Internet that are in fact crimes or are indicative of crimes, whether it's terrorism, cyberbullying, or whatever it may be. What's your view on the necessity of having some kind of lawful access legislation to aid police in that area?

[Chief Rod Knecht]

I think it speaks to the economics of policing. We spend a lot of time preparing to get access to the Internet, to buildings, to locations, etc. Hours are spent behind the scenes working up to that particular event. Lawful access is essential for us to do our job.

I think there has to be oversight, checks and balances, similar to getting a search warrant, when we go before a justice or a judge and explain the rationale behind getting lawful access. I don't think any of us want carte blanche access by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there has to be a more streamlined ability to gain lawful access and IP addresses, etc.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Mr. Gruson, may I have your views on that?

[Geoff Gruson]

I fully agree. I would add one point of comparison to push it a little further. We did a survey of 190 countries through Interpol last year and asked them what they were doing about cybercrime.

Every one of those countries was separately and uniquely setting up cyber-centres, cyber-processing, cyber-structures, cyber-facilities, all of which leads to this issue of a lack of intelligence, a lack of integration, and a lack of capacity in policing to deal with the issues that are coming at us in the future. Certainly this is one of those areas we have to deal with.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

Chief Knecht, back to you again. You talked about some challenges with the judicial system, the court system, and so on. I know that police officers spend a lot of time in court. Some of it is wasted because the defendants don't show up and the police sit there for two or three hours and nothing happens.

Have you looked at or thought about any sort of technological solutions or assistance to that, i.e., appearing by teleconference when the police officer could be in the station or wherever and doing other duties? If and when the defendant shows up or the time comes up in court, they could appear by teleconference. Might that be feasible?

[Chief Rod Knecht]

Yes, absolutely, that is one option.

I addressed this with the justice department the day before yesterday. Through their own efficiencies they are able to free up court time first thing in the morning, when they are able to deal with court cases that are coming before them.

Unfortunately, from a policing perspective, our people will still have to show up someplace, whether it's at a video location or at a courthouse. If they don't get their notice, they automatically get compensated for eight hours. So they may show up, and if they're told they're not required for court today, they still get compensated for eight hours.

We have to build something into the system that allows us to notify our people in advance that they don't have to show up. It's a huge burden.

In the Edmonton Police Service alone we're probably looking at $3 million in overtime annually when our folks show up for court cases and are never required to testify.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay. Sticking with you, Chief Knecht, you obviously have a lifetime of experience with the national police force and now with a major municipal police force. Can you compare and contrast the challenges with respect to the economics and getting the job done with a limited budget between a national police force and a municipal force, and differences in solutions, if necessary?

[Chief Rod Knecht]

Sure. In some ways the costs are greater and in some ways they're less. I look at my time with the RCMP. Many of the challenges were policing in isolated communities and our folks needing the same equipment, the same training, etc.

I know to keep a member in Iqaluit fully trained, often they have to fly out for their training. There are costs attached to that. The fact that you have to have so many police officers...there are safety issues for our police officers that require us to staff at higher levels in those smaller communities, although the workload may not be there to justify that. Those are great challenges.

The nice thing about the national police service is that we have the resources you can deploy into a particular situation; whether it's an emergency response team, specialized equipment, a helicopter, a plane, or whatever else, you have that accessibility. Again, it's often far away and at an increased cost.

In municipal policing we're very lucky, to the extent that we have immediate accessibility to backup and related equipment.

There are advantages to centralization and decentralization. We have to do a better job of finding what that balance is. We are integrating better in police services, much better than we did ten years ago, five years ago. I still think there's a lot of opportunity to integrate more, to leverage it among ourselves.

I know here in Edmonton we're working a lot more closely with the RCMP because our jurisdiction is surrounded by theirs. We're looking at the potential of sharing a helicopter, a tactical team, an emergency response team. We can collaborate on that, and we can save the taxpayers money by investing municipal, provincial, and federal resources into one pot for the benefit of all citizens.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hawn, and Chief Knecht.

We'll move to Mr. Garrison, please.

You have six minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to both the witnesses for being here today.

I want to start with a question to Chief Knecht.

You started by talking about salary costs. I believe you said those costs pale when considering the demand that's generated from complex social issues. I'd like you to say a bit more about that, because there has been some emphasis on salaries. What you appear to be saying to me is that this is a fact, but the demand factors are even greater in the policing costs. Is that true?

[Chief Rod Knecht]

That is correct.

Salary is the focus. There's no doubt about that because it makes up 80% of our budget. When it comes to our police response and our duties, I recall when I first became the chief of Edmonton the way it came to my attention is that our folks were picking up people who were essentially either homeless or intoxicated. There was no place to take them because shelters or locations were not open after 4 p.m. It was an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday business. They had no place to take these folks at 11 o'clock at night or 3 o'clock in the morning. They were driving around with them in the back seat of the police car because there was no place to take them; they had no family members available, etc. The impact of that was extraordinary.

The other thing we dealt with were homeless persons who were injured, for example, or were mentally ill. On any particular Saturday night we would have three police cars parked at the emergency ward at the hospital, with six police officers sitting there waiting six hours for the individual they had picked up or arrested to get medical treatment. Those folks are not out on the street doing police work, keeping the predators off the street. They're basically babysitting, because they have to take care of these people; the system is backed up and is not prepared to deal with these people. We become basically either taxi drivers or social workers, which is not our primary responsibility.

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

You said you're working with other social services agencies. Can you talk more about this specifically? Is it a pilot project, or is there an area of the city for this? How have you tried working on the case management system?

[Chief Rod Knecht]

You could call it a pilot project, but it's broader than that. We're bringing people to the table, such as non-traditional groups who we're interacting with on a broader basis. We're seeing that we're all dealing with the same people. If you talk to the ambulance drivers and the emergency service people at the hospitals and the shelters, it's all the very same people. We can all refer to them by name; our front-line police officers can refer to these people. We all know who they are, and they're cycled through the system time and time again.

For example, we arrest the same person two and three times per night. We take them to the hospital, they're treated and released from the hospital, and they show up again. That's not a way to treat our most vulnerable people in society. There's a better way to do that, and we found a better way to do that. We know there are gaps in the system. We're working with provincial, federal, and municipal governments as well as with our partners in social agencies to find where those gaps are. We're trying to identify those gaps, figure out a way to plug the gaps, and work collaboratively to get these people to a better place.

The benefit to policing is, quite frankly, that we save considerable man hours by not doing the sorts of things we were doing before—for example, sitting around and waiting for somebody to deal with the problem, or responding to the same call over and over again. Huge efficiencies can be found there. It's a short-term investment and it will have long-term gains. All our partners are seeing this, and they're excited about it. It's not only a better way to treat our most vulnerable, but we're going to save huge amounts of money because of the integration and cooperation, the working together.

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

Thank you.

I want to turn to Mr. Gruson.

Thank you for being here.

I have to say the inevitable: sometimes in budget-cutting exercises it's penny-wise and pound foolish. I'll just let it go at that.

In the work of your sector council, what you presented today—and I don't want to criticize it by calling it narrow—I think is a narrow look at the management ways of efficiency and saving money.

Did the council look at these kinds of demand questions we're hearing about, the demand for policing?

[Geoff Gruson]

Yes, of course, we did. I was just trying to focus on one area we had done some research on to show there are some real efficiencies around management as well.

If I can just pick up on the point before I answer the question, in the U.K. they have a system where the police call up a less costly, more mobile wagon to come and pick up the folks Rod is talking about, and they do the administration and the processing before they get put back on the road for Rod to deal with them again. So there are some other opportunities for having lower-paid individuals doing the work and not having the $93,000-a-year officer spending six, seven, and eight hours in the processing.

To come back to your point about the demand, absolutely, we've looked at the demand side of this one fairly significantly over the last eight years. The problem is it just gets more complicated and more complex.

If I can suggest a recommendation, we actually need to have a model that understands multi-tier policing, that we have the fully qualified, fully functional people doing the work they should be doing and leaving some of the work that Chief Knecht talked about to some folks who are also fully qualified and have the competencies but are at a much lower pay scale. The demand's not going to change. The complexity of the work is not going to change.

I'll give you a very brief example. As soon as the commission on the taser incident in Vancouver airport finished, the training on tasers changed for police all across the country. The commission finished its work, passed this recommendation, and taser training changed. There was no assessment of the amount of effort that training would take, of the cost of the training, or of the potential cost of the requalification on that training.

Currently we requalify in 22 technical skills every year in police services across the country, skills they should have that don't perish or decay that much from year to year.

So, yes, when we look at the demand, there are all sorts of areas we have to look at a little more carefully.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

We'll move to Mr. Gill, please.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank our witnesses for being with us today.

My question is for Chief Knecht. Chief, you mentioned in your remarks some of the offences that go unreported because the public just believes the police don't have the resources to investigate them. I'm wondering if you can shed some light on what some of those offences might be that the public doesn't necessarily call the police on.