Since it's a fairly complex question, I would like to answer in English, if you don't mind, to avoid any ambiguity.
There's ample opportunity within our police services for a division of labour among the functions that police services perform, particularly with regard to the use of special constables. We currently have police officers doing everything from running background checks on people—and of course we're running a lot more background checks—to doing medical training and education and training at Depot and at our police academies, even on matters of criminal law, on things where arguably those officers are hardly the people who are the best qualified to instruct our officers.
I think there's ample opportunity in things like court services, community policing, and public affairs to specialize those functions with either civilian positions or special constables. I point in particular to the British approach, where even traffic police and traffic flows have been outsourced.
I want to differentiate here between outsourcing and privatization versus the civilianization of certain functions. There are pilot projects in the United States that have been highly successful in interventions that are not high-risk interventions. We now send civilian members of the force to do the investigation after burglaries. These members will even bring the insurance adjuster along so you can do all the paperwork there in one go. One of the challenges when we have police officers is that they inherently get called away for other types of functions that they then need to perform.
The one function where I would be reticent to have it performed by civilians or to have it outsourced is actual traffic stops, because these are the actual areas where we lose.... The greatest number of deaths of police officers is as a result of traffic stops, because it's a hazardous work environment, on the one hand, and it's also dangerous in the sense that if you're pulling over someone who might have a record or whatnot, you might put yourself at risk. This is one area where we need the accountability and the high level of training.
But you are absolutely correct. I think we need to think much more judiciously about what functions we can actually have performed by members who may indeed be sworn members, even perhaps including mental health or child protection workers, who might also be sworn members but who don't intervene in a crisis situation with a gun at their side, because ultimately that is unlikely to de-escalate particular circumstances.
So indeed, in the division of labour and the specialization of functions, we have a one-size-fits-all system. It's the iceberg problem, where if we don't think about what tasks we can actually have other elements within organizations perform, we're going to see an ever-smaller tip of that iceberg actually out there and being able to perform the core policing functions.