Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Michael McCormack. I'm the president of the Toronto Police Association. Here in Toronto I represent one of the most diverse communities in all of Canada. I also represent over 8,000 members.
First of all, I want to thank the standing committee for giving me this opportunity to speak to some of our association's concerns regarding amendments to Bill C-2.
I'd like to start off by stating that our association does not support the current configuration of supervised safe injection sites. I'm not here to argue the medical evidence, whether or not they reduce the number of deaths from overdoses or prevent the spread of infectious disease. I'm here to speak about our public safety concerns from a policing perspective.
The goal in policing is to improve the quality of life in the community by reducing crime and disorder and the fear of crime and disorder, and enhancing public safety, which is something that we do in the policing community. We believe supervised injection sites contribute to social and economic deterioration and further victimization where they are located. They do little to achieve our goal in policing, which is public safety.
I've worked—again, this is from a policing perspective—in 51 Division in downtown Toronto, which is a unique division. It has the second-highest density of government housing in North America; almost 90% of all the halfway houses and stationary homes in Toronto are located within the boundaries of 51 Division. I've worked there for almost 15 years, in major crime, street crime, dealing with all types and different levels of crime. What we found was that in a division like this, 90% of the crimes we dealt with were either drug or alcohol related. This is a big concern to us in the policing community.
When we talked about where we go, when we looked at all the anecdotal and other evidence around safe injection sites, and when we reviewed the evaluations of these sites, we were very critical of their methodology and the findings. We found that the public safety issues have been downplayed or not considered, or even poorly measured in a lot of this research.
For example, one study used only three crime types for benchmarks: drug trafficking, assault, and robbery and vehicle theft. Notably absent were the other crimes that from practical experience we found were missing in the indicators linked to drug use, such as break and enter, shoplifting, theft from auto, fraud, prostitution, panhandling, selling of stolen property—not to mention the countless provincial offences.
What we find too is that it's really hard to measure these offences, because given the way.... We just looked at the report on unreported crime that the federal government puts out every year. We find that people who are using drugs—we consider them victims of drug abuse or addiction—are very reluctant to come forward and report when they are, in fact, the victims of crime, whether of theft, sexual assaults, or involvement in prostitution. That's something that really concerns us.
But overall, when I look at policing somewhere in Toronto, with such diverse and widespread communities in different pockets throughout this city, when we're dealing with people who are looking to use intravenous drugs—it's not only heroin, it's also MDMA and other types of chemicals that they inject—they call it jonesing, or needing a fix, for a reason. We have all these communities throughout Toronto, as I described, and we have different pockets where you have a concentration of drug users. It's not one area where all your intravenous drug users will be congregating or hanging out. We found in working in the projects that the drug users will go get their fix, and we will find needles and syringes in schoolyards, elevators, corridors, and stairwells. The drug addicts get their drugs, they need their fix, and they go to the nearest location where they can have a little bit of privacy. They'll inject and then move on from there.
The whole premise of having a centralized injection site really baffles us in the policing community, because you're taking a heck of a leap of faith to think that a person who's addicted to drugs is going to, for instance, go to wherever the drug dealer is, buy their drugs, get their syringes, jump on the subway or take a taxicab or ride their bike to go to a safe injection site, and then inject—and go through that process four or five times a day, which is what we find with intravenous drug users. It's not a once-a-day event and then they move on and their day is normal. They inject up to four to six times a day.
So the logistics escape us. There needs to be some dialogue around how this would actually work. How do people see that as being effective? We're very puzzled about how that would be applied to somewhere like the city of Toronto.
As I said earlier, most of the drug addicts that I've ever dealt with as a practical matter were forced into criminality to support their habit. Where are they going to get $100 to $200 a day, which is what it requires to support this addiction? They do it by supporting their habit with theft from autos, break and enters, and other types of crimes. With that addiction they're victims, but they're victimizing the community as well.
Again, when we're talking about safe injection sites or supervised injection services, you go where the market is. Drug dealers are, for lack of a better word, business people, and they're going to go where the market is. So if you have a safe injection site—this is some of the experience we've found from the Vancouver experience as well—drug dealers will go where the market is. They'll go where people are going to use.
If they're going to traffick, they'll congregate in the areas where they can sell to the users. When we have a safe injection site, we have people who are going to be using. The drug dealers are going to go there, which is further going to facilitate and increase the amount of crime and that type of activity in those neighbourhoods. So we're very concerned about the drug dealers going there and about further victimization of the addicts.
When I worked in 51 Division, I could look out the back gate of 51 Division and see a methadone clinic. That's quite a different premise: people are getting treatment, the product is on site, and it's managed. This is a very different concept. So we're very concerned about the practical basis for this and how this would work.
The other concern we have from a policing perspective is that we are the ones expected to police those areas and increase enforcement and our presence. When we looked at it, we found in Vancouver that there was a dip in crime around the supervised injection site, but there were, I think, an additional 83 police officers who were put into that area to police. We found in Toronto that whenever we increase policing into a community, there is a significant dip. Police presence does have an impact on crime. For us, the police, we're going to be left mopping it up and it's going to be a demand on police resources. Police need to be consulted and have more dialogue and evidence on how this is going to impact our already taxed police resources.
We have some real concerns about the practical basis of this. Again, I'm not talking from the health perspective. That's not what I'm here to do. I'm talking from a public safety basis. From the Vancouver experience, when the 81 police officers were surveyed, in I think 2008, the individual officers who worked in that area said that their perception and feeling was that there was no actual decrease in the indicators of that type of illegal activity, whether it was public injection of drugs—they were still cleaning up syringes and needles from all over that community—or the congregation of people in that area, including prostitution, and street-level crimes. We're obviously very concerned about that, and that's something the policing community is going to be left to deal with. So we need to have more dialogue and see more evidence-based discussions, as Matt referred to, around what the outcome is going to be and how this is going to work with these communities.
I'll conclude my remarks by saying that we feel there needs to be more independent research to provide a more balanced and inclusive review of the impacts of these injection services on public safety. We need to improve the body of research in this area with objective studies, evaluations, and measurables that all stakeholders can agree on. We feel that the measurables would include crime rates, disorder indicators, property values, other economic indicators, social indicators, and data gathered through the community, law enforcement, and multi-sector consultation.
We also need to explore other strategies, including education and prevention strategies, and judicial enforcement strategies—