Thank you very much. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today.
By way of beginning my comments—and I look forward to the discussion that will take place afterwards—I'll try to walk you through a description of where we see all of this coming together. Professor Murphy touched on a lot of the points that I think are very important when we look at where policing is headed in Canada.
This morning I hope to share with you some of our on-the-ground experiences on some of the work we've done and the initiatives we've undertaken to determine the best approach to delivering public safety and security for our community. At the same time, I hope to connect this to the overall direction of policing in Canada. In Waterloo we are beginning to develop what we would refer to as an economic model of policing.
We've talked about the economics of policing, and we've spoken at length about expenditures and revenues and trying to drive down costs and doing things more efficiently. We often get too far ahead of ourselves at times. We don't ask ourselves why. How does this all fit together?
I would take it back to one of the reasons why I got into policing in the first place. The purpose of policing is to protect the weak from the strong. Gangs are strong. So is addiction to a substance. The strong can prey on the disenfranchised or the marginalized in our communities. What can we do as a community and in policing to protect the weak from the strong? We often come in contact with the weak. Those are the people we serve, who we need to pay attention to.
So when we're looking at the economics of policing and when we think about our clients, the people we come in contact with the most—people living with mental illness, the homeless, the disenfranchised, the marginalized people in our communities, the students—none of them pay property taxes. That is the base from which we get our budgets. So it's very important not to silence our clients and not to look just at the cost of policing.
We can get ahead of ourselves by looking at other models. We can look at some of the one-off efficiencies, try to grab the low-hanging fruit, but that won't serve the sustainability of policing in the future. When we look at this committee, we see the great work that can be done at the national level in providing leadership for the overall direction and the sustainability of policing in Canada. If there's one area that I might disagree with Professor Murphy on, it's public policing. There's no such thing as public or private policing; it's policing. There's private security; there isn't public policing.
One of the initiatives we're probably proudest of in Waterloo would be our domestic violence project. It's a wraparound approach. We've taken our domestic violence investigators and collocated them with 14 other community partners outside the traditional police service building. We have them housed with sexual assault treatment centres, women's crisis shelters, crown attorneys, counselling services. We anticipated and realized a 20% increase in calls for service on domestic incidents alone in the initial stages of this initiative.
We also noticed...and the impetus for us to do this was that about three and a half murders a year were related to domestic violence. We began this project in January 2006 after extensive research. We went all over the world and took the best practices from many different areas: San Diego, Calgary, the U.K., Ottawa. We pulled them all together and created the family violence project. We are now averaging less than one homicide per year related to domestic violence—a significant reduction. We look at it as homicide prevention.
To do this, we had to look at data. We had to look at the evidence in front of us before we could make a decision on what we needed for our community. Right now, we're starting to see the beginnings of a national initiative to have more research, more evidence, more data in front of us. We look at outcome evaluations of some of the projects and initiatives that were undertaken, and as a result of that, we're starting to inform our business decisions in policing.
Some of that evidence-based decision-making comes in the form of weekly or monthly reports that we, as police leaders, receive. We use these to analyze the work that's being done. Currently in Waterloo, we're developing an impaired driving dashboard. We're working with a software company to put technology in the hands of our front-line officers. When they log on to their mobile workstation, the map of their zone comes up and through a pick list they can actually see where all of the hotspots are, where most of the collisions have occurred because of impaired driving. We can then deploy properly.
We also have another software program we are putting all of our data into. It's a queuing model, and as a result of it we now deploy based on where we're needed, so that we have the right number of people in the right place at the right time.
All of this is to ensure optimum efficiency, but none of it comes together unless we have all of the evaluation pieces, the investment in some of the tools, and an analysis of the work being done. This is what it takes to determine the value of policing. What we're trying to do is demonstrate a return on investment for our community. It's the last piece that I want to touch on now, the community.
At the core of all of this, be it a new model for policing, a new governance model, different oversight, mileposts, measurements, community or provincial or national direction—all of this speaks to creating the lighthouse, a beacon for us to move towards. We want to look at this ecosystem of work, which is a very comprehensive business. We take the research, apply it to some of the tools, and build capacity within our organizations. We develop leaders. We make sure that we can demonstrate a return on investment. We do this by assessing what we have. We need strong plans to build the data sets that inform the decisions we make on investments. This ongoing process really is an ecosystem. It ensures the sustainability of this profession, and it ensures that we are addressing public safety concerns in our community.
I have the good fortune of sitting on a number of committees. One of these is the Police Executive Research Forum of the Canadian Association Chiefs of Police. You've heard from Deputy Minister Dale McFee, and I'm fortunate enough to be sitting on his expert advisory council in Saskatchewan. In Ontario, we have a Future of Policing Advisory Committee, and as the immediate past president of the Ontario Association of Chiefs of Police, I sit on that committee. I also co-chair the National Police Services Advisory Committee and the Police Information and Statistics, POLIS, committee with the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics. It's the last one that's really important. We have to start challenging some of the stats and ask ourselves if we are capturing these statistics in the proper way.
We hear a lot of discussion and debate about whether crime is up or down. What we've endeavoured to do at the POLIS committee is to index crime. What we know is that the complexity and severity of crime is increasing in some communities across Canada. It's very important for us to drill down and see if we need to capture more statistics on the crimes that are occurring.
I'd be happy to answer some of your questions afterwards. I hope I've enabled you to have some sort of picture of what we're trying to develop in Waterloo with respect to the economics of policing.