Thank you.
I will try to speak in French, and sometimes in English.
Thank you for receiving me.
With respect to current violence and firearms crimes in Quebec, my colleague Benoît Dubé can tell you about the repression aspect. He has extensive expertise in that area. Units have been established, including the one in Longueuil through which my team cooperates with Mr. Dubé.
Today I'm going to talk about police work. I've been a police officer for 30 years, 5 of them as chief of police. The work we do in the municipalities is prevention work.
Way before the crime happens, we work with the community. While children are very young, we work on prevention with them, in the community, along with police officers.
We've noticed that, the more we work with young people, the better we are at preventing problems with key partners. Members of the entire community intervene, not just its police officers.
It takes a village to control a community. It's impossible for the police department to anticipate all the violence that's happening in the community.
I read about your program “Rethink, Refocus, Reintegrate”, which has been financed by the government. I also read about MST, the multisystemic therapy program, and about LRP, the leadership and resiliency program, that you put into force and that are being financed by your government. I think these are great programs, especially with the great indicators to see if they're efficient or not, but there are always some “buts”.
What the police of Longueuil are trying to do is work in the same way. We grow contacts. This is a new approach that we're doing. It's also a new social approach for the police department: to be able to be with the community outside the 911 calls, to be integrated into the community and to be able to anticipate all the violence that is happening.
I can tell you that even in our communities—with a population of around half a million and with a thousand officers—even in some of the very rich areas of Longueuil, there is crime and the young kids have guns inside the schools, inside the lockers. It's incredible how much this is changing the mentality of the young people. They want to protect themselves. It's the first time we've seen such a movement over to violence.
If we're not in the classroom with the kids from a young age, we're only going to be reacting, and the Longueuil police don't want to work that way. We want to suppress this, but we want to work in a proactive way.
I'll stop there. We can discuss this later.