Justice committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for accommodating my schedule today. It's a pleasure to speak to you today regarding Bill C-14. As you are aware, in many Canadian cities the concern about violence and youth crime has been rising in the last number of years. H

Justice committee  Thank you very much. The short answer is yes. At Halifax Regional Police right now we're actually going through an upgrade of our system that will allow us to do such things as e-mail and texting, those types of things. I understand, for instance, some emerging technology will a

Justice committee  To my understanding, in some cases, no. But when I was at a meeting in Vancouver about a month ago, we were led to believe that some new technology that's just being developed will allow us to do some of these things that we couldn't do in the past.

Justice committee  Can I speak for Halifax?

Justice committee  The majority of what I see is in the urban core. But in the last couple of years we've found, particularly with drive-by shootings and criminals meeting criminals at different locations, it doesn't really matter where they are. We've seen shootings happen in our suburban areas. O

Justice committee  What I'm saying is that I'm seeing a change in the intensity of violent crime. If you look at the statistics, let's say for youth offenders, they may say that youth crime has gone down over the past 10 years. But the increased violence, the higher violence, has actually increased

Justice committee  I think in Atlantic Canada we've been a little bit reluctant to go ahead with organized crime charges, and when we have gone ahead with them--I'm thinking of one particular case we had several years ago--the actual organized crime charges were dealt off for guilty pleas and other

Justice committee  Recent experience is that, no, it hasn't been, and I think the crown, again, is being cautious. We're getting the normal terms to do this, and then we go back with a renewal.

Justice committee  We could probably give you some more current information that would be difficult to give right now.

Justice committee  I don't think I could add much more to that. I'm not an expert in this field. The little bit I do know is that we have to be concerned about safety--the extension cords, the batteries. The toys that the superintendent talked about may be made out of things like lead that could ma

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the panel. My name is Frank Beazley, and I'm chief of the Halifax Regional Police. The Halifax regional municipality is a region of approximately 385,000 people, who represent about 42% of the population of Nova Scoti

Justice committee  Okay. In relation to disclosure, I think it's a good idea. I've heard about this before. I've attended meetings at which it's been discussed. A judge would be appointed to deal with all the technical issues and all the arguments and whether proper disclosure has been made. If the

Justice committee  In the Halifax regional municipality, for over 20 years we did have a chapter of the Hells Angels. I believe it finally closed down around 2000 or 2001. After numerous investigations over a period of years, the chapter folded. There are still remnants of motorcycle gang activity.

Justice committee  This one will take a little more time. I hope you don't mind. The Halifax regional municipality, unfortunately, has a number of distinct areas throughout its community that would be considered communities at risk. We have a number of public housing initiatives--I believe seven--