I do.
Thank you. I appreciate the invitation to appear before your committee, sir.
I would like to talk for a couple of minutes about what we are trying to accomplish in Abbotsford on the topic of police efficiencies. Just to give you a sense of what kind of department it is, so that my comments will make sense as I go forward, Abbotsford's is a municipal department of about 210 police officers, 300 employees in all. We police a city of 140,000 people in the Fraser Valley. It's a very large geographical area, an agricultural area.
In the last five years, from a community safety perspective, we have seen some great improvements. To give you a sense of it, in 2008 and 2009 we were the murder capital of Canada. We had had a surprising rise of gang violence in the Fraser Valley. In 2009 there were 11 murders, two of them involving very young people, and eight of those murders were gang- and organized-crime-related.
We've done a lot of things in those five years. In 2011 we had no murders; we're at two this year, one gang-related. Our crime rate since 2008 is down by 40%. We now have the lowest crime rate in the Fraser Valley, including all the jurisdictions around us.
But we cost more than the jurisdictions around us. We are funded well enough to have police officers enough to be proactive, and that has been a very key part of our success. For example, last year, although a small department, we executed more than 100 search warrants, going after organized crime and gang activity. But we're very aware that for a community such as ours, we're expensive. We're very aware of the cost drivers behind your committee's even meeting to discuss these kinds of issues.
Our focus in 2013 has been, besides fighting crime, on trying to figure out how we can become more efficient. In the spring of this year, we contracted with KPMG to do an efficiency study of the Abbotsford Police Department. KPMG came in and has been applying processes that they developed in the United Kingdom to have a look at what could be done to make us more efficient.
If you don't mind, what I'm going to do for five more minutes is simply describe what they found and what we think we're going to do about it. What I'm describing is a work very much in progress. We intend to implement a major part of their study next year and probably will contract with them to help us do so, but we are putting in place the foundation blocks to make it happen.
Here are their key findings about what was not as good as it could be in the Abbotsford Police Department, if we want it to be really efficient.
One is that Abbotsford typically sends a police officer to a call to resolve it, even though that's no longer the most effective and efficient way to respond to many calls. The image I want to put before you is that of the 1950s: if you got sick, you phoned the doctor, and he actually came to your house with his little leather medical bag and checked you out. He made a house call.
That's what police officers are doing for virtually every call, and it's an outdated and overly expensive way to respond to many calls for service.
They also found that we had a “clear the screen” mentality. What I mean by that is that the comm centre drives the deployment of resources. If somebody phoned and we created a call, then the driving force was to clear that screen and just get rid of calls. That's what was actually driving things. Instead of an intelligence-driven organization, we had become driven by a call load-clearing mentality.
Corresponding with that, they are saying we are not as intelligence-led as we like to believe we were. We are an organization with three crime analysts. We think we pay attention to what crime analysts are saying: we look at the maps every day; we do all that kind of work. They're saying, you're actually not that driven by crime intelligence; you are not being as agile as you could be, even though you're a small department. That's interesting information for us to receive, when we had a perception of ourselves as being very much intelligence-led.
In another finding that was hard to listen to but important to listen to, they said, you have some patrol officers who are working very hard, but you have a significant number of patrol officers who are not working that hard, and your performance management is not actually dealing with it. In other words, the difference between your top-performing police officers and your not-as-high-performing police officers is far too big. You need to bring up your poorer performers; you need to get more work from them in order to be efficient.
It's not a very sophisticated, complex statement, really, but almost a surprising one for us. We didn't realize the size of the gap between top performers and poor performers.
The last and main point they made is that our policies around how we will handle each kind of crime are not that clear. There is confusion, when a crime occurs, about whether it should be followed up by a detective or what unit it should go to for further work. We're mucking about, when it should be much clearer which crime we stop investigating and which one we go forward on.
So they proposed what they call a new policing model for us to implement. Here are five corresponding key points about that.
One is that we need to have the right resources for the right job. What they mean is that we should handle priority three and priority four calls in a new way. Every call that comes in to our call centre that we decide we will respond to, as opposed to telling people that we aren't going to be responding, is categorized as a one, two, three, or four priority call.
We're all used to this concept. Priority one is an emergency: somebody is breaking into my house. Priority four is: there's an abandoned bicycle on my front lawn; what do I do with it? So the calls run the full gamut, from things that are critical to things that are quite routine. I'm going to talk more about what we do about priority three and four calls in just a moment.
Among the other things they said were that we obviously needed clearer policies on workflow, which I understand, and that we needed to increase our supervision, with better performance management. I'm not going to spend much time on that, but I'll quickly mention that we have introduced a patrol activity report that measures the workload of constables. I'm now meeting every month with the staff sergeants who run all of patrol. We are teaching performance management skills and bringing in coaches for them to increase their level of performance management. So off to one side, we are working on the issue they identified.
They said we should focus on a better quality of customer service, whereby we get back to people on a better basis, and that we need to be intel-led on a daily basis.
Here is what we propose to do. I will only talk for another couple of minutes, but quickly, here is what we are going to implement next year—the significant chunk.
We are introducing a new section to the Abbotsford Police Department. We will call it the operations control branch. Like our other branches or sections, it will be headed by an inspector. They will have the comm centre as part of their branch, but the primary thing they are going to do that is different from an efficiencies perspective is take the 37% of our calls—just over one-third of our calls—that are priority threes and fours and handle them in a new and different way.
We are no longer going to send a police car routinely to those calls. They may attend that call, by appointment, after they have taken all the information they can by phone; or we may simply take the call over the phone; or we may have the complainant, if we need to, attend the police station themselves for an appointment with a police officer. Everything will be done by appointment, rather than have somebody wait for an available police officer to show up, maybe for a number of hours.
Those calls will be handled by a new team, as part of that new branch. That team may have police officers in it—it will have some police officers—but some might be tier two community safety officers and some might simply be civilians. For a department our size, it's estimated that we'll need between 10 and 16 people working in this unit that handles one-third of the calls.
This team will also have the capacity, we are told, to do follow-up on routine crimes. A crime such as a theft with a suspect won't get assigned to a detective and would be assigned to this unit to do the follow-up. Apparently, that's about three to four calls for us a day, and they will have the capacity to do the follow-up on those kinds of calls.
The work this new branch takes off the patrol branch is designed to allow us to become more proactive again, and to increase our ability for patrol officers to respond more quickly to the priority ones and twos, but also to have more time to reduce crime in our community. We've said we want to get to one-half the crime we had in 2008, and to do that we still have about 10% more to go.
KPMG believes that if we implement this, we will have police officers tied up reacting to calls with about one-third of their time, leaving them two-thirds of their time available to be involved in proactive solutions. This branch will also have the crime analysis unit, where we'll take all our crime analysts and have them in one place.
This branch will be responsible for directing our resources on a daily basis, for using the proactive resources we have available in patrol in other parts of our police department, from our bike squad, to our drug squad, and to our crime reduction unit, which goes after property criminals. They will be able to direct all of those resources by using intelligence on a daily basis and trying to make our organization driven more by one central brain and more nimble.
It's yet to be seen—
