Public Safety committee  We are at one police officer for 628 citizens right now. That is somewhat in the middle in British Columbia. If you were in a Mountie jurisdiction in British Columbia, you would have perhaps a slightly higher ratio. If you were in Vancouver, it would be one officer to 500, for ex

Public Safety committee  Yes, it's always been an issue for police that people use 911 when they shouldn't and sometimes use a non-emergency line when they should be using 911. It's on our website. We communicate it a lot through social media. We talk with the community around this, with the odd story

Public Safety committee  One of the things to understand about accountability for police officers who are out on the street on patrol is that they have tremendous autonomy. They are out on the road by themselves with nobody watching. In a sense, the community is watching, but they are out there working o

Public Safety committee  Thank you for your work. Thank you very much.

Public Safety committee  No. The hospital is a very robust, large hospital in Abbotsford. They have psychiatric nurses and doctors 24/7. But this is the same problem that other police jurisdictions face. When you get to the hospital with a person you've apprehended, that is not a crisis for the hospital.

Public Safety committee  The fact that you have a police officer meeting informally with people is probably the single best resolution to that problem. What's odd is that the computer systems that exist across Canada for police sometimes have more mental health information on some people than the health

Public Safety committee  Abbotsford is 140 square miles, unfortunately—sorry, but I don't do kilometres—so it's a large community, and our response times are in the area of 11 minutes, unfortunately. I would wish them to be in the area of seven minutes, but part of that simply is dealing with a large geo

Public Safety committee  No, not in the area of mental health. We are working with people who are part of the health unit in our city, so we are working with people outside of our police department in this area. Our mental health officer's job is to work with a committee of people who discuss the difficu

Public Safety committee  The people we expect to do this work will be a mixed team. There will be some police officers and some communications operators. We hire people off the street, as you say, who have gone through specific testing with us, and we teach them how to answer 911. We also teach them how

Public Safety committee  Our gangs are not like street gangs, in the sense that they don't stand on the corner. Because Abbotsford for a period of time allowed a lot of marijuana grow operations to occur—all through the valley there were many grow operations for marijuana—the young gangs made a tremendou

Public Safety committee  Anecdotally, I believe the answer is yes.

Public Safety committee  Part of it is going to require an education for the public. In this plan that has yet to be done, the belief is that this citizen in the past would have waited for somebody. In P.E.I. they'd be waiting for the officer to come and respond to this call about the stolen doors. In th

Public Safety committee  Abbotsford is trying to respond to this issue. I don't think we're as far down this road as some other agencies in B.C. are. We have a mental health officer, a police officer who works full-time on trying to resolve these issues. Her job, for example, is to take a story like the

Public Safety committee  The answer is yes. It has been successful with the chronic users of police resources who have mental health issues. I think it is quite successful. Other police agencies in B.C. are using assertive community teams, the “ACT teams”, as they call them, in working with the community

Public Safety committee  So far.... I was actually asking that question yesterday to try to figure out when I was going to get myself in trouble—