I think we're experimenting with the community service officer model. I understand B.C. is recruiting officers who will be in uniform but not have powers of arrest. They will be visible, in terms of walking the public streets, etc. I don't know yet if that's a good model or not, and I think one of the things that we need to develop is the capacity to assess these when we put them in place, so that we can say it worked or it didn't work. To me, that has potential, but I don't actually know whether it's going to be an effective model in Canada.
If I could, I'll just say something about the last point. I think we sometimes focus way too much on crime. The issue of public safety is something that crime stats don't measure very well. I was thinking about the initiative that we're involved in, in downtown Halifax, which is about bars, assaults, and disorder in the public downtown. It's a huge issue. There are very few crime stats generated by this, but it's a policing problem. There are very few crime-related issues with anti-terrorism, but it is a new and demanding area for police. Public order policing.... None of these things actually have any actual crimes attached to them.
So I think we need to go beyond crime data and say that police actually have a variety of other areas of demand, which we can also develop metrics for. But I think sometimes crime is way too narrow a focus.