SECU Committee Meeting

    Good morning, everyone.

    This is meeting number 81 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Tuesday, April 23, 2013.

    I'll remind our committee that towards the end of the close of the meeting today we will go in camera to consider some committee business. In the meantime, we're continuing our study of the economics of policing in Canada. On our first panel today we have with us Chief Rick Hanson of the Calgary Police Service. Welcome to the committee this morning, Chief Hanson.

    Thanks for having me.

    We also have, appearing by video conference from Toronto, Deputy Chief Peter Sloly from the Toronto Police Service, who is in charge of divisional policing command. Deputy Chief Michael Federico was to attend, but he is unable to speak with us this morning. He has also notified us that he will send us a written presentation.

    We want to thank both the Calgary chief and the Toronto deputy chief for appearing this morning and helping us in our study of the costs of policing in Canada. Our committee recognizes the good work of these two police forces and the efforts of the men and women on the front lines who serve and protect these large Canadian cities.

    I would invite each of you to make some brief opening statements before we proceed into questions. Chief Hanson has provided us with a chart. Unfortunately, it's only in one language, so we are unable to circulate it. We will see if we can get that translated so you will get a copy later on, but he may be making reference to it in his presentation.

    Welcome, Chief Hanson. We will begin with you.

    Thank you very much. I apologize for not having that translated. I was just notified late last week about attending here, and I was working on a presentation right up until the last moment on the plane last night.

    I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak about the economics of policing. With 38 years in policing, I can safely say there has been tremendous change that has occurred in policing.

    Frequently there is one measurement criterion used to relate crime rates, and that is specifically around homicide rates. Because homicide rates have dropped over the last 25 or 30 years, there's a belief that crime rates are down. I'd like to start by saying homicide rates are impacted more by the quality of health care today than by certain members of the population not endeavouring to continue on with that. I think it's safe to say that far more homicides would occur if it wasn't for the extremely high quality of trauma care in the hospitals today.

    Secondly, it's important to note that the police over the years have put in a great deal more effort in regard to things like homicide prevention via domestic conflict units. In Calgary, for instance—and you will see this throughout my presentation today and in answering questions—we use an integrated approach to policing that partners other social agencies with the police in an endeavour to reduce victimization and deal with the issues in a more effective wraparound way that not only reduces the risks to citizens in the community but also prevents further victimization. To that effect, the HomeFront model, which includes the crown, the police, women's shelters, social workers, and a domestic violence court, has reduced homicides involving domestic situations in most years by up to 70% compared to previous years.

    One thing also of note, which has remained consistent over the last 30 years, is that the rate of attacks against people has remained constant. An event that would have been a homicide years ago is a wounding with intent or a serious assault. The workload that is associated with these types of crimes has greatly increased again, primarily due to the advent of the charter, charter rulings, things like the Stinchcombe decision around disclosure.

    To that end, I don't want to spend too much time on the investigations part, which takes an immense amount of resources. I did a bring a CD. Unfortunately it wasn't translated so I couldn't hand it out, but I will endeavour to get that translated because it goes into an actual homicide and then relates the amount of effort and the resources required to take a homicide—and this is a real homicide we did—from the event to its successful prosecution in court.

    I think you're more interested in, at least I hope you're more interested in, the reality around policing today as it relates to our greater understanding of the science around bad guys, around criminals. Eighty per cent of those people in prisons suffer from anti-social personality disorder. Now that doesn't really mean anything to most people. They are bad guys who go to prison. The only time it means something to people is when you look at the science indicating the vast majority of those who suffer from anti-social personality disorder, and as I say, it's 80% of the population in the prisons. They make up 2% of the general population. They are reluctant to diagnose it in kids, but the same behaviours manifest themselves in conduct disorders.

    In other words, here's what I'm saying and the research supports this: if you can't get to kids before they leave elementary school, it's too late. I would ask that all of us here sit back for a few moments and think of your own time in school or your kids or—you're all too young to have grandkids. Thank you, there are two of us, then.

    All of us can look back and look at our time in school, and teachers tell us the same point all the time. They will tell us that they can tell in grade 1 or grade 2 who we're going to be arresting before the kids leave high school, and nobody does anything about it. Those are conduct disorder issues.

     We've recognized that many of these unresolved behavioural issues with young kids, and sometimes mental illness issues, if left unresolved, evolve to a point where these young kids will grow into adults, victimize others, and wind up in the justice system. Combined with that is a huge increase in the number of people nowadays with mental illness issues who self-medicate. They wind up homeless on the street and fall into the justice system because they're committing crimes to support their drug addiction or their alcoholism.

    What are we doing about this in Calgary? Our whole approach is based on early intervention, education, and a prevention model that has evolved.

    We recognize what the psychiatrists and psychologists tell us, that early intervention starts in kindergarten. We had two psychiatrists address our members two weeks ago so we could see the science that applies to our approach to policing. For instance, we've started what we call our start smart stay safe program. It's all about partnerships. Both school boards, Mount Royal University, and the Calgary Police Service got together to build curriculum-based education that's age appropriate, and we've spelled out the kindergarten to grade six, K to 6, component.

    The idea is that the old approach to lecturing kids about crime was too focused on the compartmentalized outcomes of what they do. In other words, the police would go in and lecture on drugs and then they'd have a separate lecture on gangs and a separate lecture on bullying. The reality is that when you get to kids you have to give them the education they need in a way that speaks to what they understand—in other words, associating with other kids, how they get along, and how to deal with situations that arise when there is inappropriate behaviour.

    We've started that. We've piloted it in elementary schools in the northeast part of our city and we've gone city-wide now. We have 12 officers in the elementary schools delivering curriculum-based education to every elementary school grade in the city. This is about prevention.

    When we rolled this out, the teachers told us if we were going to do it for the kids, we had to do it for the parents. So Mount Royal University also developed the parallel piece that goes to the families. It's a family and youth education piece. It gives them the type of knowledge and the information that kids need to counteract what they're exposed to today, the toxic waste that's called social media and television. The Internet is good in some ways, but kids get exposed to awful things and there is nothing to counteract that. Too often too many parents don't want to talk to their kids about things like drugs because they don't want to give them the idea.

    We can get into some research that just came out of the U.K. that talks about kid-on-kid sexual assaults that have been brought on by what kids see on the Internet. When we dealt with that with the teachers they said somebody has to deal with these kids we can identify in elementary school. They knew they were going to go to jail. Nobody did anything about it, so we started what we call our multi agency school support teams. These are police officers paired with social workers, in cars. The partnership is with both school boards.

    We've also partnered with Alberta Health Services, so those five agencies partnered. We have 12 teams of two and here's how this works. I'll give you a quick story because I think stories provide more context than just talking about what these teams do.

    We know that bullying is a big issue in school. We know that the so-called criminogenic factors that contribute to kids evolving into a life of crime are easily predictable and easily seen. The kids are academically unsuccessful. Generally they tend toward bullying. They have no friends, and they usually come from a background where there is disrespect for any kind of authority, whether it's teachers, the police, or whoever.

    We started this program and here are the types of situations they deal with. Day one, we get called to a school because a kid is going into grade 6. He's 11 years old and in the last two years has missed one complete year of school. In other words, he's skipping every second day. He started grade 6 in the same way, so they called us into the school and said they didn't know what to do with this kid. He's one of those we know is going to get himself into serious trouble because after they leave elementary school into the cesspool we call junior high, and then high school, it's just too tough.

    The police officer-social worker pair showed up at the school and got the facts. At 11 o'clock in the morning, they showed up at the kid's house. They rang the doorbell. He answered the door. They said, “What are you doing here?” “Well, I didn't want to go to school today.” “Where's your mom?” It turns out his mom was still in bed. It was 11 o'clock in the morning.

    It turns out, to give the Reader's Digest version, that mom was suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness: chronic depression. She was physically unable to care for those kids. There was no dad; he had gone. There had been an abusive relationship. There was an eight-year-old boy also involved, who worshipped his 11-year-old brother, so you're fighting for two kids here.

    Now, this is a kid going into grade 6, academically unsuccessful, with no friends, known as a bully in the school. As one of our chief superintendents in one of the school boards said at the time, when we talked about this particular file, “It's no wonder that kid wasn't doing well in school”. Here's a kid who felt that he had to look after the family, that he was the man of the house, and the frustrations were palpable.

    They got the mother in to see a doctor, got her medicated for the mental illness, got her back functioning at a certain level, and hooked her into a parent support program provided by the United Way. The MASS team got the 11-year-old into tutoring and into sports, because one of the greatest indicators of whether you're going to be successful—and we can get into this—is that if you have a conduct disorder, you have to be successful at something. If it turns out to be sports, that may be the one thing that gets you over the hump, or it could be a significant adult in your life.

    This is a true story, and I wanted to tell this story because this kid, because of that intervention, finished that year on the honour roll. Now let's look at the eight-year-old, his little brother, who worshiped his older brother, who was the man of the house. He paralleled the improvement.

    Now juxtapose that against this kid going into junior high school the following year with the same profile. Academically he's no good in school. Somebody comes up to him—one of the older kids—and gives him 20 bucks to deliver a package to such and such an address. You've just created a drug trafficker, you've just introduced him to crime, and you've just introduced him to the earliest stages of gang life. You figure out the cost.

    I could go on and on with stories like this. We've expanded the program from the original four teams that piloted it to 12 teams of two. Alberta Health Services has now assigned health clinicians, because mental illness is so prevalent for these teams, so that we can maximize the effect.

    The reality is that an early intervention, with a conduct disorder issue in the early stages, requires less investment than allowing the development of that conduct disorder to produce an anti-social personality disorder involving the young person in the justice system. Those are the people who either wind up going to jail, wind up going to prison, or continue to victimize.

    We have other programs that we've linked to this, including our cadet program.

    Shall I wrap it up?

    Yes, please. We've gone about 14 minutes now.

    I'm sorry about that.

    I won't get into the issues around mental illness, then, and the fact that we know that too many—the numbers are up to 78% of those in the justice system—who are in prisons and jails are suffering from an undiagnosed mental illness and are there because they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. We have programs now, which again involve police officers working with mental health workers in a system designed around getting those people out of the justice system and into the help programs, because the reality is that these are people with health issues. They are not criminals.

    I'll wrap up with that, because I'm sure you will have questions.

    Thank you very much, Chief Hanson.

    If we have our connection with Toronto, we would now welcome the comments from Deputy Chief Peter Sloly.

     Are you with us, sir?

    Yes. Good morning to the panel, and thank you for including me today.

    We don't have a video connection yet. The problem is at the other end. I'll ask our technician here to turn the volume up a little more.

    All right, Deputy Chief Sloly, we can't see you but we can hear you, so the floor is yours.

    Thank you.

    I'm responsible for all of our divisional policing operations, which includes our 18 police divisions that serve all of the city of Toronto, 4,200 members who work for me, and a $450 million budget. Virtually two-thirds of all of our members and one-half of all of the operating budget for the Toronto Police Service revolve around my operations.

    I am a big believer in community mobilization. In fact, I brought community mobilization into the Toronto Police Service. We didn't invent it, but there are lots of great agencies, including Calgary, that are outstanding examples of how to apply community mobilization.

    My recommendation for this committee is that if you want to see the best agency in all of Canada, it is Waterloo Regional Police Service, under Chief Matt Torigian. It was Waterloo that gave me the idea of bringing it into Toronto. I think they deserve reference in this conversation around the concept and the model.

    I will give you a very brief context around why I think it's important. John Fielding, back in the 18th century in the United Kingdom, just before the founding of the new model of policing under Sir Robert Peel, coined the phrase “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure”. It's a very simple statement. If you put a little bit into prevention, you don't have to do a lot of stuff downstream around the cure.

    Sir Robert Peel talked about the police being the people and the people being the police. I think that's the most overused portion of Peel's nine principles. In fact, the one that drives me is that the absence of police activity is actually the measure of police effectiveness. The less we have to do, the better we actually are. People don't want to have to call the police to respond quickly and effectively to a crime. They don't want to have to call the police in the first instance.

    Under our Police Services Act here in Ontario, which governs all of our police service delivery, the number one policing mandate for all police agencies in Ontario—and it's very similar across Canada—is to deliver community policing in partnership with our community. The functional areas of police service delivery start with crime prevention. They then go on to order management. They then go on to emergency response. They then go on to law enforcement. They then go on to assisting victims and witnesses and the prosecution of crimes. But they start with crime prevention.

    Logically, the more you prevent, the less you have to do downstream. It's in that context that I'll move on to discussing community mobilization. My research on the topic found that the field of public health services was the one that first embraced this at an institutional level. The public health field in Canada, particularly one in which we have universal health coverage, places a great stress on governments to provide health services to their citizens.

    Health Canada recognized very early on that you can't build enough hospitals and you can't hire enough doctors and nurses in order to treat everybody who wants to walk into a doctor's office or an emergency ward. We have to have a healthier community and healthier individuals in the community. Let's start to move health services out of the bricks and mortar and the human capital we've invested in and back into the community's hands. Let's teach people to be healthier. Let's encourage healthier practices in the community. Let's reduce illness at the upstream level, as opposed to treating it all downstream where it's too expensive and not sustainable to fund and resource.

    The same concept can be applied to policing. The more crime we prevent upstream—the healthier we make individuals and their choices about life, the healthier we'll make communities so they're more resilient to criminal activity and other elements of disorder—the less likely they're going to need police services or need to call on police services, particularly the most expensive parts which are, in fact, rapid response to emergency calls and law enforcement, meaning the enforcement of criminal statutes, provincial statutes, and municipal bylaws.

    The Toronto police has a long history of being involved in prevention, but I would suggest that, even as good as we are, we do not have the balance right in the mix of our focus on prevention and our reactive style of policing.

    I could talk about the community mobilization model as though it were a new model in policing. I don't believe it is a new model. I don't believe it's a model that we need to adopt. I think the police legal framework that I referenced, the Police Services Act, with its common sense approaches to keeping communities healthy and safe, dictates just good policing practices, which include engaging and working formally with community partners, and more regularly and more consistently using community assets in the service of public safety and in the provision of police service delivery.

     We've had a couple of examples here in Toronto that I was asked to comment on, specifically our Toronto anti-violence intervention strategy, which uses community mobilization at the heart of our service delivery model to reduce the effects of guns, gangs, drugs, and violent crime on our inner-city communities. As well, our mobile crisis intervention team is a model based on using police and public health practitioners to respond to people in crisis, emotional or psychological crisis.

    Both of these models are fully developed, with over a half decade of program delivery and program evaluation. They're extensively used in almost every aspect of our violent crime investigations, our violent crime operations, as well as our service to the mental health community, including response to heightened levels of emotional disturbance and mental illness in individuals on our streets.

    There was a report submitted to the committee by Deputy Chief Federico on the mobile crisis intervention teams. We have over 19,000 calls for service each year. Over the course of our implementation of this, we've had 3.6 million contacts. We've apprehended over 8,600 persons. We've reduced the incidence of severe injury. We've prevented a lot of high-cost involvement with the police by this partnership, where we have a police officer and a mental health provider working in the same scout car, responding to the same calls for service.

    It's been an effective way of mobilizing community assets, working directly and in intimate contact with our policing operations—completely sewed into our operations—for some of the most high-risk situations that officers face. It's something that we're continuing to expand to more areas of our city. We're having more and more uptake in the public health sector and the mental health survivors community in regard to this particular program.

    A report has been submitted. There are lots more details. I'd be happy to answer questions, if there are any from the committee.

    The Toronto anti-violence intervention strategy is a model that's gone province-wide. It's now been implemented as the provincial anti-violence intervention strategy, with police leaders across the province using our basic model. There are three basic components to our model: intelligence-led policing, risk focus enforcement, and community mobilization. For intelligence-led, we put the right people in the right place at the right time.

    With risk focus enforcement, we're not looking to arrest everybody and charge everybody with everything we can. We're looking at the highest-level offenders, the 1% to 2% in every community who cause 80% to 90% of violent crime and very contentious public safety issues. We focus on them. We target them. We incarcerate them. We put them before the courts.

    The two previous elements are not sufficient on their own. We can clear the swamp of alligators, but if you don't change the conditions of the swamp, the next generation of alligators will move in. You have to mobilize the community to make them, on their own, more resilient and more capable of sustaining the public safety results that come from enforcement. It's with the support of police, but primarily on their own initiative. If you can't mobilize a community to use their own resources, their own passion, their own people, there are not enough police forces you can hire to keep that swamp clear of alligators.

    It's a very simple concept. It's not easy to implement, but we've found year-over-year crime reductions right across the board. In particular, violent crime reductions have been sustained for seven straight years. We're confident that we can continue to sustain and drive down that crime bubble even further.

    I'm not sure how much time I have left, so I'll start to wrap up my comments. Certainly I'll be available for any questions that anybody has.

    All of these things still require a different change in the way that we structure our police services. I'm not saying we need a new model. We just need to structure our police services around the legal framework that we have.

    I've done enough research on this topic that I can dare say Toronto isn't where I'd like us to be. Look at the total number of resources in the Toronto Police Service dedicated specifically to the area of crime prevention and community mobilization. When I say “resources”, that's people, the human beings we hire and pay; that's our priorities; that's the time we spend on those areas; and that's the financial resources, the line-by-line operating budget items that are associated with prevention and mobilization.

    Only about 5% of our resources are dedicated to that, and yet it is the number one police service delivery requirement under the Police Services Act. I can safely say that every single other police agency in Canada, North America, and western Europe is structured in the same way. We talk a good game about prevention and mobilization, but we don't make it a priority. Your real priorities are where you put your people, your time, and your money. We're simply not structured in a way to make a prevention model, a prevention-focused model, a reality.

     The second thing I'll say is about the culture of policing. There are two things that every cop hates: the way things are, and change. We need to change from a reactive enforcement model to a prevention, pro-active model, and change is going to be difficult to do. Whether it's for a chief of police in Calgary, a deputy chief here in Toronto, or a constable on a small town street anywhere in Canada, this is not easy to do. It's going to take a real commitment.

    I believe the heart of the matter is the cost of policing. Let me make a comment on the mandate of the committee. I'm reading here from a document that was provided to me as a support document:

    By simply using that term “enforcement” to describe police services, you've already increased the cost of what you're doing. We are not in the enforcement business. We are in the police-service-providing business. We are in the public safety business. We're in the prevention business. Nobody wants to be a victim. People want us to prevent crimes from happening in the first instance, and respond effectively, efficiently, and economically when we have to. I think you need to focus on the prevention more than on the enforcement going forward. It's a tough sell inside policing. It's going to be a tough sell in government. I think the community will be more receptive to it, quite frankly.

    Those are my comments. I'm happy to answer any questions that may come my way.

    Thank you very much, Deputy Chief Sloly.

    We'll move into our first round of questioning. We'll go to the government side, to our parliamentary secretary, Ms. Bergen.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and my thanks to both our witnesses, Chief Hanson and Deputy Chief Sloly, for being here with us.

    Deputy Chief Sloly, as you wrapped up your comments, you said what I was hoping to say, that the focus of our committee meetings is the economics of policing. We're looking at ways to do things more efficiently, more effectively, and not only to save money. I think we all know in this time of fiscal restraint that this is important to all of us, but we're also looking for ways to do things so that we get the results that we need.

    What I'm hearing from both Chief Hanson and you, Deputy Chief Sloly, is about this whole notion that police officers are social workers, counsellors, medical officers, and educators. It almost sounds as if you are saying that has become what you do. You talked about the whole notion of prevention and that being a major part of what you should be doing, whether it's actually a budget priority or not. But it sounds like this whole notion of community policing and agencies being involved, and even, Chief Hanson, the stories that you told us....

    Are you telling us that this really is the role that police should be playing and that this is the most efficient way to do policing? Or are you taking on jobs that other agencies should be doing?

    Deputy Chief Sloly, I'll start with you.

    I believe that what has been broadly described as the social work aspect of policing is an important and vital part, but it should not be the predominant role that police officers play. We have been forced to take on more and more of this role, because structurally, the way we line up with other service providers—public health and public education are two quick examples—we are not in really good formal partnerships.

    Our mobile crisis intervention team is a better example of how we could be, functionally, working together better. The police could do more of what they're really good at, which is policing, and public health could do more of what they're good at, which is public health interventions. That's a better example of how we could and should be doing business, but we can and should be doing that in terms of guns and gangs operations. We can and should be doing that in terms of cyberbullying. We can and should be doing that in terms of preventing radicalization and extremists within our communities across Canada.

    So I think there is a role for us in social service provision, but we can do it better if we do it in better coordination with those other social service providers.

    I think that's what we all need to hear so that it's clear. It's not actually your job as police officers and police service providers. It's partnering with other people and surrounding yourself with a team that can do this.

    Chief Hanson, do you have any other comment? I have a whole list of questions. Did you want to comment on that?

    Yes, I'd like to say that there are certain jobs, certain functions, that we bring to the table as part of that partnership that no one else can do. That's why it's vital. Teachers would love to be able to intervene early with some of these kids, but they can't. They don't leave the school. If you don't get into the home, you don't deal with the real problem. What we bring to the table is the ability to work with other partners, literally work with them together in the same cars, going into the homes, finding out what the real issues are, and bringing in the appropriate resources. It is important to have the police as part of that team.

    Chief Hanson, I'm not sure if you're aware that our committee is going to be coming to Calgary. We haven't quite set the time down yet, but we hope to be there in the next month or so to look at what you're doing and to get more information. I'm wondering if you can tell me whether you've had a chance to do research on how this has improved efficiencies in the police department and how long you've been operating under this community model.

    We've implemented these teams in the last five years; most of them in the last four years. Some of these have had some early evaluations on them. We're currently partnering with Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary, because the best measurement is a longitudinal study that compares this approach to other approaches that don't use this model. We're still in the middle of the evaluation stage using that academic approach.

    So would your motivation for doing this be that it is an efficiency in terms of real budgets, or is it more that you want to see if you're actually reducing crime over the long term, which would mean obviously saving money in the long term? What's your sense right now, in terms of efficiencies and using your resources more wisely?

    The ultimate goal is that if you target early enough, you'll have an outcome down the road. Right now we're still dealing with 16,000 domestics a year and a quarter of a million dispatch calls, all those things. But with these focused early intervention strategies that partner with the other agencies, we're very confident that what we'll see is a reduction similar to the reduction we've seen in domestic homicides because of the coordinated approach. Right now though, as Deputy Sloly said, we're out on the street dealing with all the issues that are out there, while we're starting this new approach that we are very confident in to reduce crime and those who get involved in crime. The payoff will be down the road.

    How much time do I have, Chair?

    You have a minute and a half.

    Okay, I'm just going to switch gears a little bit. We've talked a lot about the community approach, but I want to ask you both, as Chief of Police and Deputy Chief of Police, when you're looking at your police department and other ways to be more efficient, what are some things that you've been doing to cut costs and make sure that if there are jobs that civilians could do, you don't have police resources doing them? Can you give us a kind of laundry list of some things that each of you have been doing?

    Maybe I'll start with you, Deputy Chief Sloly.

    One of the things that we've done from an operation standpoint is adopt a pilot project to deliver a hub model similar to the one that Chief McFee did in Prince Albert. In fact, we went to Prince Albert and virtually stole, copied, begged, borrowed, and everything else, what he did there. We're piloting that in one of our tougher divisions, up in 23 Division, in Rexdale. We're starting to see the same types of benefits, financially and on an efficiency basis, that Chief McFee experienced when he was chief at Prince Albert.

    Chief Blair has already implemented—in January, 2012—a complete review of all of our administrative and operational functions within the police service to look for efficiencies and economies. We've begun to civilianize. Front-line positions that were formerly done by police officers are now becoming civilian. For instance, our booking hall officers, who were fully sworn officers, 115 in total across the 17 divisions that I have, have now become 80% civilianized using special constables out of our court services division.

    As an example, we're looking at fully leveraging information technologies. Toronto was one of the first major police services in Ontario, one of the first in Canada, to fully implement a social media strategy. We're now leveraging digital media and social media in many new ways to reduce human cost. The number of officers and the time it takes to go out and stop and talk to 1,000 people in the street.... With a $2.99 software app available through open source, we can get more rich information, more geocoded location information, a complete picture of crime networks and good-guy networks. It's all available from open source information without putting a single pair of police officers into boots and onto the street with all the risks and costs that come with that.

    I could go on. I'd be happy to submit a list of review areas that the chief has undertaken through his review of his whole service as material for you to consider, and a process for you to consider, for police chiefs across Canada.

    Thank you, Deputy. We're out of time on that question. I'm sure we'll come back to it.

    Mr. Garrison, please.

    Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both our witnesses for being here today. I found the alternative models that you're talking about very interesting. But I'd like to back up for an instant and talk about the demand drivers in policing, because these strategies are obviously a response to that ever-growing demand for police services.

    I'd like to get an idea, and I'll start maybe with Chief Hanson, of what you find in the community as the main drivers for increased police services and increased police calls.

    One is that the increase in mentally ill people on the street, unmedicated or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, creates this sense in communities that the streets aren't safe. These aren't criminals and they may not be performing criminal acts, but the social disorder issues around them are huge. Studies have shown that you don't have to be the victim of a crime not to feel safe. If there's a loud, aggressive person, who may be mentally ill, who's on the block or doing something weird, you tend not to feel safe. There are 70,000 dispatch calls a year in Calgary regarding social disorder instances just like that.

    The second thing is that people are no longer satisfied with the police going out and arresting the bad guy after they've been victimized. What they're saying is that they do not want to be victimized in the first instance. They want to see prevention occur in some way prior to their house being broken into, or their kid being bullied, or whatever. There's far greater pressure in regard to that.

    The third thing that didn't exist years ago is everything to do with the cyberworld: cyber-crime, cyberbullying, and sexting, which creates the distribution of inappropriate pictures from one young person to another young person. We've recently seen the subsequent impact of that.

    Those are just three examples of what some of the drivers are over and above the regular police calls that occur when you put drugs and alcohol on the street on a regular Thursday, Friday, or Saturday night, and things go crazy.

    Deputy Chief Sloly, I put the same question to you. Since you're in charge of the boots on the ground, I guess I would say, what do you see as the real drivers for your demand?

    The number one current drivers are guns, gangs, and drugs, and all the different underlying issues that go along with that. I'm sure you're all fully educated in that, so I won't bother going through the list.

    Second—I fully support Chief Hanson in this—is the issue of mental health, not in terms of clinical diagnosis but just the stress it places on individuals in extended periods of economic downturn and in heavy urbanized environments, which Calgary and Toronto are. That same level of stress exists in young kids in small urban areas with a lack of infrastructure and a lack of the supports that are more necessary for kids these days than ever before.

    I can't support enough what Chief Hanson has described. It's what I call the number one emerging demand factor, and that is the whole issue of cybercrime, cybersecurity, and the entire digital world, which I think right now is the number one threat facing us, both at a local concept and an international concept. Quite frankly, most police leaders, including me, haven't really got our heads or our resource allocation into that space yet.

    I would also suggest that urban density and urban diversity, particularly in the Canadian context, is a number one challenge for police chiefs like Chief Hanson and Chief Blair, and the issue of public trust and police legitimacy. People trust us less. They see us less as a legitimate source of solution for their problems, so they're turning to other methods, including looking to illegitimate methods to solve their problems, such as gang members doing the policing in the community. They're not stepping forward as witnesses, so crimes are going unsolved and criminals are going loose. They're not coming to court, or if they do get to court, witnesses are too afraid to complete their testimony to get convictions. We have a spiralling problem.

    Those are some of the major demands that we're facing here in Toronto.

    Thanks. Deputy Chief Sloly, you talked about police resistance to change. I'll probably ask the same question to Chief Hanson if I have the time. How is the reaction to your prevention model, when you talk about shifting resources to prevention? For the front line, the rank and file police, how do they respond to that proposed shift in priorities?

    Exactly as I said. They don't like the way things are and they don't like the ideas that have been proposed to them for change. I'm not sure we're much different from the fire department or the public health sector, or even government and bureaucrats who work for you. It's difficult to accept that you need to do things differently and significantly differently, not incrementally differently.

    I've been on the job for 24 years. You build your career and your reputation based on doing things the way you used to do them. In fact those things are no longer sustainable, and in some cases you need to actually learn new things. It's hard to put that into the context of the individual officer, never mind trying to get it into the context of the entire police service.

    Three years ago I started a discussion at the command table about the need for us to invest in social media and utilize social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, and tools such as social media listening for us to do a better job at public safety. The reaction from my peer group was literally laughter. They weren't being mean or disrespectful to me. They just didn't see how that could become a major impact in policing.

    In three short years there's been a major impact in policing. Just look at the tragedy that happened down in Boston and how much the Internet was affecting those two young people. Look at how much information might have been available to police and law enforcement, if three years ago, we had been fully invested in the way we're trying to invest now.

    The cybercrime issue, the mental health issue, and the prevention focus are all newer approaches to policing. It's going to be hard for leaders and front-line cops to get their heads, their hearts, and their hands fully involved in making those things a priority.

    Chief Hanson, perhaps I can ask you the same question. What's been the reaction of your front-line police to this approach of the early intervention teams?

    The first response was one of, “What are you talking about? We're here to put bad guys in jail.” You have to overcome that. But I can tell you this, we adjusted our recruit training so that our officers go to those social agencies to see first-hand what they're dealing with as it relates to mental illness and addictions, and that something can be done.

    Second, what we've done is sold them on the issue that we all got on the job early on to put bad guys in jail. The reality is that when you're putting some mentally ill person in jail because he's stealing something to support an addiction that's masking a mental illness, you're not putting a bad guy in jail. That person should be in a hospital. So we've been selling it by dealing with it this way, on the early intervention side or by channeling people in the right direction, it's going to give you more time. It will free up lots of space in the jails and we can put the really bad guys in there. That's what they want to do. They don't want to deal with these other issues.

    Over four years we've seen this dramatic change, even when our downtown officers go to some of these calls. We're opening up the Safe Communities Opportunity and Resource Centre. It's the hub model, but it's very much focused on adults, where we have 18 agencies in one location. It's the police that led this. It has health, social services...United Way, the homeless foundation, Alpha House. We bring those people in with this wraparound service. Instead of taking them upstairs to jail, we put them in there and they're taken care of by the appropriate agency.

    We've been able to sell our officers on the idea that by focusing on the social disorder issues and health issues this way, they're going to have more time to chase the bad guys, of which there are lots to go around still. That's where the greatest satisfaction is. I can tell you that as the officers become more senior, they get this better and better. They realize there are more issues than just that somebody's bad or somebody's good. It's not as simple as that. As they become more senior, they get a better understanding. We have no problem at all staffing our over 100 early intervention, crime prevention positions, which are focused on these strategies.

    Thank you, Chief.

    We'll move back to Mr. Hawn, please, for seven minutes.

    Thank you, Mr. Chair.

    Thank you both for being here. Those were two very good, useful pieces of testimony.

    Chief Hanson, I want to start with you. This goes to what we have just been talking about: cyber and social media. Obviously it's used to the disadvantage of law and order. We had something called Bill C-30, which isn't there anymore, that was trying to address using social media to the advantage of prevention, and so on.

    Without putting you too much on the spot—I'm not sure if you're familiar with Bill C-30, but I'm sure you are—do you see that as having potentially very useful, positive measures? What do we bump up against with respect to charter challenges, from your viewpoint, or to the judiciary providing a challenge to the use of that?

    Thank you for that question.

    First, lawful access has to be addressed by this country. It has to be addressed by Parliament. We're so far behind the other countries. This is about safety. This isn't about the police wanting to troll, to go fishing in somebody's e-mails. I get it that in Bill C-30, clause 16 was written abysmally. I get it. That was bad. Clause 16 is what killed Bill C-30.

    The reality is that if we don't create legislation that recognizes how technology has evolved and allows the police just to do their job.... Trust me. We have way more important things to do than to find out who's sending salacious messages to their girlfriend or wife. We don't care. But what we do need is the ability to get, for instance, ISP information without a warrant so that we can save people's lives.

     This is a true story. Somebody died in Calgary because they had an asthma attack. They used their cell phone to call 911, and they couldn't get out. Now, if it's a land line, you get what's called ANI-ALI, the automatic number indicator and automatic location indicator, but because it was a cell phone we didn't have that information. So that person died because they couldn't give their location, even though they were at home. We couldn't get subscriber information for that cell phone in time to get medical help to that person who died. That's just stupid in a technologically proficient country such as Canada.

    We get suicide threats where people say they're going to kill themselves. The efforts we have to go through to try to find out where that came from.... This is about saving lives and doing the right thing. Bill C-30 is gone. It's off the table. It's dead. There has to be a new, lawful access piece of legislation that gets clause 16 out of there and is rewritten in a different way, that gets us the authorities we need, the power we need, to go and save lives, whether it's about cyberbullying or anything else. There are certain steps we need to have before we can go to the next step with search warrants and other things, such as production orders.

    Thank you for that.

    Deputy Chief Sloly, may we have your views on that?

    I support everything Chief Hanson just said.

    When we were all in horse and buggies and didn't have superhighways, when we built those highways we built a Highway Traffic Act that supported the laws. Now we have the information highway. We don't have a legislative framework for the massive amounts of traffic and the speed and volume around which people use that highway. We need that legislation.

    My only suggestion is that when you write the next version of it, whatever you call it, you bring in privacy commissioner people who understand the privacy legislation at the earliest point and have a discussion. It relates to some degree to what Chief Hanson is doing in Calgary, and what we're doing here in Toronto, and what Dale McFee did in Prince Albert.

     The number one barrier to the success of hub service delivery models—coordinated service delivery, wraparound service delivery, whatever you want to call it—is not the willingness of police and public sector partners and not-for-profits to partner with each other and look at these cases from a prevention standpoint. It's the legislative inability to share information across those silos. Information sharing and the lack of a legal framework around which we can share information about individuals or families or communities that are displaying risk factors stop us from properly analyzing and assessing the risk and deploying the right combination of service interventions to prevent that risk from becoming a real problem.

    Information sharing broadly, not just in the concept of Bill C-30, is an area that government and police leaders and community leaders need to put their minds to.

    The ultimate solution for Dale McFee was that he didn't need to create new legislation, but he brought in the privacy commissioners and legal people who had expertise, and they realized existing legislation provided them enough latitude to conduct operations at a higher level. They were just ignorant of the law.

    Thank you for that.

    Deputy Chief Sloly, Chief Hanson talked a little about training and so on, and how you have to change that for results down the road, just like the other things we're trying to do. You talked about changing the swamp and changing the culture of policing.

    Can you talk a little about your training program. I think what we're talking about here are the expectations of recruits, the people coming to join the police service. What are they expected to do, and how do you reorient them to what you want them to do and what they should do?

    I think the best example of a recruit training program existed in the mid 1990s. The RCMP brought recruits into their “Depot”—I think it was only for one or two classes. Before they gave them a uniform, before they issued the baton, handcuffs, gun, bullets, before they gave them any Criminal Code statutes or anything else related to provincial or municipal laws, they sat them down for three weeks straight and taught them how to do problem solving, conflict mediation, and effective communication.

    Once they gave them the soft skills, the right mindset around how to approach providing public safety and police service delivery, they gave them the tools of the trade and the laws of the land.

    I'd like to see all of us revert to something more like that. There's simply not enough in our recruit class for training that deals with these issues. We're too focused on officer safety and law enforcement, and we don't have nearly enough information and training content specifically around those other areas of prevention, community mobilization, community engagement—the soft skills, and the common sense approaches we need to have more of in policing.

    You said the RCMP only did that for a couple of classes? Did I understand that correctly? Are they not still doing that?

    I'm not sure if they are still doing it. When I was doing research back in the 1990s, looking for best practices on this type of training, I was led to the RCMP Depot and saw those two examples. Whether they have continued that since then or have it in place now, I would suggest asking the RCMP. But I haven't seen that type of model of recruit training deployed in Ontario and certainly not in the Toronto history.

    Chief Hanson, you were shaking your head. Have they stopped that, and should all police forces be bringing that back?

    I think that was under Frum Himelfarb, wasn't it?

    I'm not sure, Chief, but I remember who the commissioner of the day was.

    No. It wasn't the commissioner. She was in charge of training. Yes, it was a good model, and no, they don't do it that way anymore.

    Thank you.

    We'll move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please.

    Deputy Chief Sloly, you mentioned something I didn't quite catch. You were talking about the mandate of this study and suggesting the wording should be a bit different. Did I understand correctly?

    Yes. Again it's just a quick document that was shared with me. It reads:

    Language is powerful. Law enforcement in Ontario is only one of seven responsibilities for police service delivery. By referring to ourselves as law enforcement, by referring to your committee's goal of looking at enforcement and law enforcement agencies, you're setting up a frame of reference around which you're ignoring the most important parts of policing, which are prevention and order management.

    Law enforcement is important. It's not the most important aspect of police service delivery, I would suggest. Although I would probably be argued with even by my peer group, that it has become the most important, and it's the most expensive part of police service delivery. Enforcing the laws is the riskiest and the most costly element of policing.

    Thank you for your intervention.

    I'm trying to link all of this fabulous information and these very interesting insights and stories, which are truly instructive. You've put them so concretely and described them so well. I'm trying to find out what the role of the federal government is in all of this. I was wondering if you had any thoughts, first Deputy Chief Sloly and then Chief Hanson.

    I've been exposed a little bit to this committee's work. I had a chance to go online and read the presentations by Dale McFee, our police board chair Alok Mukherjee, and Tom Stamatakis from the Canadian Police Association. By virtue of your convening these meetings, exposing yourselves to some outstanding police leaders like Chief Hanson, I think you're doing yourselves a great service. You are educating yourselves on a very complex and vitally important public service component. It is a major symbol of Canada's democracy and its image in the rest of the world.

    I think anything the federal government does to support police leaders, to support the most proactive and innovative aspects of police service delivery and public safety in Canada, is going to make us better and more efficient, and it may very well make us more cost-effective as well. I encourage you in what you're doing.

    It's been very interesting and I think it's brought some good ideas into the spotlight. The big challenge for us will be to make recommendations on how the federal government can act to improve matters.

    Chief Hanson, maybe you can answer this. I think we all feel this. What we're seeing is that cybercrime of the type you described is expanding at a great rate. It's putting a lot of pressure on police resources. As one of you said, the police forces have to become more expert at dealing with these kinds of technologies. No doubt that means hiring people who are very skilled in and knowledgeable about these technologies.

    I agree completely, but don't you think that will add some costs to policing? I don't see how it cannot add costs, personally, which is fine—we need to support these efforts. If the government wants to keep a cap on expenses, on the costs of policing, what's going to give? We can't have fewer regular police officers.

    Is there any room for maintaining costs, or are we inevitably on a path toward increasing costs?

    That's a great question. You asked one question that I'd like to answer later on if somebody else asks it. What can the federal government do? I'd like to address that one, but you asked a specific one here.

    First of all, I'd like to tell you—and I'm sure that Deputy Sloly will also support this—the relative cost of policing has not gone up. I pulled the numbers from when I started in policing in 1975, and the same percentage of the city budget goes to policing today as it did back in 1975.

    Second, the salaries are equivalent to the increase in every other indicator, including other people's salaries. Third, the police-to-population ratios in Calgary have not changed. Across Canada, the 10 major cities, we rate eight out of 10. In other words, we have fewer cops policing more people than in the seven other cities that are in front of us.

    So what we have done well over the years, and this is what is frustrating. It was frustrating that the conference in January on the economics of policing did not acknowledge two things. First, the cop-to-pop or cop-to-population ratio shows that we've adjusted to huge changes in policing over the last 35 years. Do you guys want to go for a beer afterwards and talk about what policing looked like 38 years ago? I'll tell you, it's nothing like today and nothing like what we're doing.

    We have adjusted our resources to reflect community needs, partnerships, all kinds of things that have actually reduced the cost. When the economics of policing conference was going in January, CBC actually put on its website that Canada has the least number of police officers to population of the G-8 countries. That includes Japan—and people say Japan is some kind of nirvana—as well as the U.K., the U.S., and every other G-8 country.

    The reality is that we adjust. When things like cybercrime come up, you're right, we have to adjust our resource base. As the city grows—and all cities are growing in this country—as long as we keep that cop-to-pop ratio, then we will make the adjustments, because we're partnering very effectively with community groups.

    It just seems to me that there's no room to reduce the police-to-population ratio, yet there's going to be a huge demand for technical experts to deal with cybercrime.

    I have one question that flows from a scenario you've painted.

    What happens to some kid who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a package of drugs somewhere? Somebody asks him to deliver this for 20 bucks. What happens to that kid if he's caught doing that? What are the steps? Where does that kid end up? Is there any going back?

    Very quickly, our time for both Mr. Scarpaleggia and for the first hour are just about up.

    You always have an alternative resolution through the court process. If the kid is under 18 years of age, you have different options, but the real, social issue that's associated with that is that he comes home a hero because he has money in his pocket now.

    The issue is one that's very much associated to the positive reinforcement that comes from criminal activity, as opposed to the consequences of criminal activity.

    Thank you very much to Deputy Chief Sloly. I think Chief Hanson is going to stick around for the second hour as well. We want to thank you.

    We're going to suspend momentarily.

    To Mr. Sloly, I would say we appreciated your appearing. We're looking forward to Deputy Chief Federico's presentation. Even in your consideration of what you've said in answer to questions, or your presentation, if you would like to enlarge on any of it, please feel free to contact our clerk and he will see that it gets circulated among the members.

    Thank you very much.

    Thank you.

    We're going to suspend for about 30 seconds to make sure we have the network set up with our next guests....

    All right. I'll call the meeting back to order. This is the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. We're in our second hour, where we're continuing to look at the economics of policing in Canada.

    Appearing by video conference, we have Halifax Regional Police Chief Jean-Michel Blais. Also appearing by video conference, from British Columbia, we have Chief Jim Chu, chief constable of the Vancouver Police Department.

    Our committee thanks these two police chiefs for appearing this morning and helping us in our study of the costs of policing in Canada. Our committee also wants to recognize the good work performed by both of these police forces in Vancouver and Halifax.

    We have as well from the first hour, Chief Rick Hanson from Calgary, who will stay around. Although he won't have another opening statement, he will be here to answer questions that we may have as well.

    Welcome.

    Perhaps we will move, first of all, to Chief Constable Chu, and if you have an opening statement, we would like to hear that at this time.

    Good morning. Greetings from Vancouver. The sun is just coming up in the city right now.

    Greetings on behalf of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, which I'm very proud to represent and head.

    My understanding is that this morning a number of topics are going to be discussed, but that I am to talk about mentally ill offenders and policing. In Vancouver, the calls we deal with that involve people with a mental disorder are a significant problem.

     We've been talking about this since 2008, when we released a report. The title of that report pretty much described the problem. It's called “Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver's Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources”.

     We researched the issue of how many calls we deal with involving people with a mental disorder. City-wide, up to 30% fit into that category. In certain areas of the city, they are up to half of the calls. When I say “certain areas”, that includes the downtown eastside, which is the lowest-income part of Vancouver, where we have the most drug addiction.

    To give you an example of how many mentally ill people we're dealing with, and how it has changed even in the last 10 years, we do something called a Mental Health Act apprehension. If someone is a danger to themselves or others and is suffering from an apparent mental disorder, we call that a section 28 apprehension. In 2002 we were doing about 1.5 per day. In 2012, when we looked at our stats, we were doing about seven per day. That's a fivefold increase in the number of people we're taking into care to see a doctor because they're suffering from a mental disorder and they're a danger.

    What has caused all of this?

    One thing is that we've had deinstitutionalization. While that was fine for some people, it's our belief that it went too far. There are many people who are now in the community and cannot cope on their own. For one thing, supports that were promised to support these people in the community never materialized, and some people just can't cope without being in custodial care.

    For example, when Riverview, the local health facility that cared for the mentally ill, closed and people ended up out in the streets, a lot of them went to the lowest-income parts of the region, which includes Vancouver's notorious downtown eastside.

     There, of course, the first person they meet is their friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. Now we have someone who is mentally ill and addicted to illicit drugs. Because they don't have the ability to hold a job or function, a lot of them end up as homeless people, so you have those three problems to try to deal with. Not only do the people who were deinstitutionalized gravitate to areas like the downtown eastside, but also a lot of young people do when they have problems, and they can become addicted quite easily.

    In terms of recent violence—I'll talk about that and conclude with what we're going to do about the problem of the mentally ill in Vancouver—we've been tracking 35 incidents since 2012, at the beginning. These involve death and serious injury. Most of these incidents involve males. About 90% of these situations involve males who either were released from hospital or were apprehended under section 28. I'll give you some recent examples.

     In October, a man who was severely disturbed rode our Canada Line to the last stop in downtown Vancouver, got out, and with a gun in his hand, decided to barricade himself in the lobby of a very luxurious Vancouver hotel, scaring the staff and guests. There was a 12-hour standoff with that person. He ended up being taken into custody after being shot with a rubber bullet and is now in psychiatric care.

     In December, a man who who was emotionally disturbed arrived from Edmonton. He said to the police officers who he encountered in the street, “Please take me to the hospital. I don't feel right.” They took him to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital. I guess nothing was done for him, and he was back on the streets. He then attacked three elderly women right outside the hockey rink. He just randomly walked up to them and started striking their heads against the pavement. A fourth woman was potentially a victim of a carjacking, but the police arrived and arrested him.

    In February, in a downtown apartment building, a person who was here from France and had been in the hospital system went berserk and attacked seven people in the building with a knife and a hammer, causing very severe injuries. He attacked the police officer who tried to arrest him.

    To give a couple of other quick examples, in February, again near the hockey rink downtown, a man stabbed three people, including a woman who was walking her dog. Then he laid down on the ground and started yelling and screaming. When the police officers arrived, they thought he was a victim of a stabbing because he had blood on him and was lying on the ground, but he was clearly mentally ill.

     The last incident was in a 7-Eleven just last month. In the early morning hours a woman was waiting for the cashier when buying something, and a man who had just finished serving a five-year sentence for aggravated assault and had been under psychiatric care by the correction system went berserk again and stabbed her in the head with a chip of the knife breaking off in her skull.

    Fortunately, all these victims survived, but there could have been much more tragic consequences.

    Let me conclude by just saying what we're doing about it in Vancouver. This has created lots of calls and workload for Vancouver police officers. We've been trying to address the upstream drivers by talking to our partners in the health system, saying, “You need to do more. You can't just let people who have an inability to function out on the streets”.

    We've talked to our officers and we've explained how serious this problem is, but we've also said that it's mandatory that each front-line officer undertake a crisis intervention training program. It's a week-long program. We bring in psychiatric experts. We bring in mental health professionals. Our goal is to de-escalate situations. We don't want to use force. We don't want to criminalize the mentally ill, and we're trying to resolve these incidents with dialogue and other tools we can use to de-escalate.

    For about 30 years now in Vancouver we've had a full-time unit called Car 87, which has a psychiatric nurse and a police officer. They take calls from both the police and the health system and they deal with lots of people who have issues.

    Since the beginning of 2012 we've partnered with our local health authority on what is called ACT, assertive community treatment. I mentioned before that a lot of people end up in the community without support. This program does try to give those people support. The term “assertive” is in there because sometimes somebody who is not well mentally may say, “I'm feeling better today. I'm not going to take my medication”. One of the goals of this team is to make sure that people are taking their medication because, if they're not, they will perhaps be a danger to themselves or others.

    We are going to expand the ACT program. It's been a good model and is used elsewhere in North American and in the city of Victoria as well. Also, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police are going to convene a national conference to talk about this. I've also talked to Senator Vern White, who is considering a study on this as well.

    But a lot of the calls we're dealing with in the city of Vancouver involve those with a mental disorder, and it's creating a lot of work for our front-line officers.

    That's my opening statement.

    Thank you very much, Chief Constable Chu.

    We'll move to Chief Blais. You have 10 minutes.

    Great. Thank you very much.

    Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee.

    I want to thank you for this opportunity to present a few highlights on the current state of policing in Canada, particularly in the Halifax Regional Municipality.

    I will be presenting in English but, of course, I will be happy to answer questions put to me in French .

    Thank you very much for the opportunity today. I'd like to focus my comments on four major themes, not in any particular order of importance per se but hopefully in an effort to contribute more fully to the understanding of what we are facing right now. The four themes that I wish to focus on are: the mounting complexity of policing; financial pressures; union and generational divides; and the redefinition of core responsibilities in the management of public expectations.

    The first point is the mounting complexity of policing. We've heard over many years that since 1992 crime has been diminishing. Of course there are many reasons, and I won't get into what they could possibly be. But I will comment that if crime has indeed diminished, as statistics would have us believe, it would make sense that the cost associated with policing would also diminish. Unfortunately, as we all know that hasn't occurred.

    Since 1992, as a basic takeoff of the post-Soviet bloc era expression about the “peace dividend” that we saw in the 1990s, we should have technically experienced a “crime reduction dividend”. Unfortunately, the gap between mounting costs and reduced crime has been absorbed by many things, among which are increased accountability measures and requirements for both internal and external oversight; judicial complexity, including disclosure; undelivered benefits of technology; and ever-increasing police compensation packages. I'd like to comment on these things a bit later on.

    The ever-increasing judicial complexity equates to tasks taking longer and requiring more resources than in the past. When I lecture to master's-level students on the single decision that most impacts policing, I always of course refer to the Stinchcombe decisions. Included in that group, of course, are the Askov, Collins, Feeney, and McNeil decisions. They have all had significant impacts upon the way we do investigations. As a legally trained police officer, I do not lament whatsoever the inherent wisdom of these decisions, but I recognize the added burden of each one of these decisions, which have added to what was already a challenging profession.

    For example, it take us longer today to charge somebody with impaired driving because of additional legal requirements, including, of course, disclosure. Warrants, as has been discussed earlier on here and I'm sure in other fora, are also considerably more complex and take longer to write today than in the past. It has indeed become—as we saw in the film of that name in the 1970s—a paper chase. I recognize as well that some of these cases have not only added additional burdens to the criminal side of policing, but also, in my past life as a disciplinary adjudicator, they rendered more complex the application of administrative law to policing. All this complexity increases the time spent on policing, and as we all know, time is of course money.

    With regard to financial issues, the most evident factor affecting the economics of policing is the escalating cost of salaries and benefits. We are a human resource-rich environment. The cost of policing has skyrocketed over the last number of years, almost exclusively because of compensation. In fiscal 2012, compensation comprised more than 92% of the Halifax Regional Police total operating budget. It's no longer possible to reduce budgets using innovative strategies, quite simply because there is so little room left for reductions to impact upon, that being the remaining 8% that we have.

    I'd like to share some interesting numbers with you. Sworn and civilian employees' salaries in Halifax Regional Police have increased 45.92% since the signing of our 12-year collective agreement in 2003, which ends in 2015. It's clear that we need to slow down salary increases to a more reasonable pace. In fiscal 2014, my staff sergeants, and this is without overtime, will be making more money than my first-level commissioned officers. Overtime is another major issue, amounting to another 3% of the overall operating costs in the budget.

    Court time, when we have individuals who go to court and are not required because, for various reasons, the crown has decided that they cannot proceed, is another major concern that we have. The increased costs can only be managed fiscally to a certain point, and often that management has proven to be a band-aid solution. One of the major things we've been seeing, I guess in the last two years, and we've seen it as a result of what has been happening in Great Britain, is that fundamental changes to the way policing is delivered in a municipality must be considered in order to improve policing from an economic perspective in future years.

     The union and generational divides are an issue related to financial pressures such that our unions and especially our employers are not necessarily abreast of the realities of the economics of policing. We define this, as mentioned before, as a union and generational divide or expectation gaps. It's almost as if we've become victims of our own success. As an example, our wage model has generously offered our employees roughly 15 wage increases in the last 15 years. One of these annual wage increases alone equalled 5.39%. Last year, it was 3.7%, and of course this is all cumulative. As a result, employees hired in the last 10 years or so have never been confronted with tough economic situations that others before them have experienced, such as wage rollbacks or wage freezes. We're faced with a workforce that doesn't understand the current budgetary realities, and the economic prosperity they've been afforded has fostered a culture of entitlement, which is resulting in economic instability and unsustainability. Quite simply, all municipal services are vying for budget dollars, and there are simply not enough to go around.

    We need to be thinking strategically about how to cut costs, which unions and employees fail to fully understand. This is further compounded by the fact that they believe it's a management issue and not a union or an employee issue. We have divergent views and are incredibly far apart when we meet at the table for collective bargaining. Employees need to understand the realities of the economics in policing, particularly leading up to and during negotiations. That of course is a major responsibility of ours as police leaders.

    The fourth and final point is the redefinition of core responsibilities and management of public expectations. One of the things that we've seen is that in the past, we used to be the responders of last resort. Today, for various reasons, we are the responders of first resort. We're the only 24/7 social agency around. When I lecture, whether it's before M.B.A. students, police officers, or committee members, I've asked them to define policing. It's not serving and protecting, even though that's an important part of it. We're more problem solvers. I believe that the deputy chief from Toronto had spoken about the importance of problem-solving models earlier on. We solve those problems that people themselves cannot or will not solve. As such, we are the consummate problem solvers and consummate servants of the public. This leads me to believe that from a systems-wide perspective, we should no longer be talking about the economics of policing but rather the economics of public safety.

    Within the context of the sustainability of our present public safety model, we need to redefine the core responsibilities of police so that we're no longer the responders of first choice on a 24/7 basis. Mental health fits squarely into this discussion. We have become social workers and mental health providers all in one. We believe this is partly a result of, as Chief Constable Chu had mentioned, deinstitutionalization due to the increased costs of hospitalizing those with mental health issues.

    We've seen significant increases in mental health-related calls for service, just as every other city across the country has. To give you an idea, we received 638 mental health-related calls for service in 2007. Just to give you an idea further, the overall population in Halifax that is served by the HRP is about 300,000 people. We received, as mentioned, 638 calls in 2007, and in 2012 we received 1,193. Of those calls, 223 people were taken into custody under the Nova Scotia Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Act and taken to hospital by police.

    To deal with the marked increase in this cohort of individuals, Halifax Regional Police has developed a highly trained mental health mobile crisis team compromised of police officers and mental health clinicians. Every month for the past few years, more than 1,000 calls related to mental health issues have been made by the public.

    Of those calls, more than 80% are made directly to our crisis helpline. That was in an effort to bypass police dispatch. The remainder are dispatched to the mental health mobile crisis team. They also respond to wellness checks and section 14 calls. Those are instances where an officer has the right to take a person to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. This gives uniformed officers the ability to attend other calls for service.

    We are attempting, and we've had some fairly good success, to invest in the front end with our mental health mobile crisis team as a preventive measure and as a way of averting what could become more serious calls had we not responded. Chief Chu had mentioned self-medication and the challenges that we have out there.

     I was reading a report recently that stated that in 2012 there were 357 deaths attributed to drug misuse and overdose. When I talk about drugs, I'm talking about medicinal legal drugs. This is an issue that we're dealing with more and more in Nova Scotia.

    Over and above the issue of mental health—and I'm cognizant of time here—we've also accepted a lot of non-core policing functions over the years. They have been downloaded for one reason or another from other agencies, such as animal or bylaw control. We need to agree on what is important for us to do and to eliminate the non-core functions, keeping in mind that there may be some contractual issues to contend with in the interim.

    Ultimately, I guess this raises a fundamental question of who responds if we do not respond to a particular call for service, especially when it comes to mental health. It begs the questions of what alternative responses there are that cost less than policing today. This conjures up concepts of two-tiered policing, public-private policing partnerships, civilianization, subcontracts, outsourcing, along with associated protocols that would allow us to achieve such options.

     The biggest challenge is to look at what police officers contribute to the community. First off, police officers have three particular attributes. One, they have certain authorities that you, as legislators, have provided. Two, they have specialized training, and three, they have access to specialized tools. If just one of those attributes is not required in any intervention, then considering the costs, we should and we must look at someone else fulfilling the role other than a police officer.

    Those are my comments to this point. Of course, I'm open to answering questions.

    Thank you very much.

    We'll move quickly into the first round.

    We're going to have to cut this a little short because we have some committee business. We're going to go to six-minute rounds.

    Mr. Leef, please.

    Thank you very much, gentlemen.

    There has been a lot of discussion in past testimony, and a fair bit in this one, about the upstream issues. I think we'll definitely hear some questions on that. We had lots of great input during the last round of witnesses around the upstream issues of policing.

    I want to talk about some of the downstream solutions we could have, to see if you have any particular recommendations.

    Chief Blais, you did talk a bit about the complexity of policing around the judicial requirements and technology, the sorts of things that are placing burdens on budgets.

    Is there a way that each of you have had an opportunity to measure the administrative costs of policing in respect to value for service, for lack of a better term? When I say that, I think the community would measure that in hours per shift that officers are out in the field. How much time are they actually spending in the community doing that crime prevention work, which is a primary function of their duty, versus the administrative burden that the municipality or the police organization or legislators put on them?

    As a former police officer, I spent a lot of time making sure that I was compiling statistics for Stats Canada, doing data entry. We always felt, of course, that we could have spent more time in the field.

     From your perspectives, are there recommendations you could make to improve hours per shift in the field? Are you able to measure that at this point, and what's your perspective on that ratio?

    We'll start with Chief Blais, then Chief Chu, and then Chief Hanson.

    Thank you very much.

    Actually I would have preferred if Chief Chu spoke first because I know he has been looking at some of those things.

    Nonetheless, we've been caught up with the whole notion of technology and RMS, the records management system. We use a system called Versadex, which allows us to capture information directly from terminals within police cars. The expectation would be to have the office on the road, as opposed to having our police officers going back to the office.

    Mr. Leef, you spoke in regard to—without perhaps mentioning it—performance measures and being able to determine how much time is spent on the administrative functions as opposed to the actual policing functions. I can only speak, of course, for HRP.

    We have not gone that deep into the development to determine exactly how much time is spent on particular functions, and part of the reason for that is the nature of policing. As you mentioned, there are so many other things to be done that we don't get a chance to properly measure this.

    We find that very often our police officers are becoming more and more frustrated by the sheer mass of information that is being thrown at them. We all looked at e-mail traffic as being a panacea back in the late nineties, when it became more and more mainstream. What we're seeing now is that our police officers are asking that less e-mail messages be sent out.

    Unfortunately, I don't have anything specific, but I'll leave it up to the other chiefs to add their input.

     In Vancouver we've looked at all of our patrol operations in quite extensive detail, because our most expensive resource is the officers who are out there on the streets. We've looked at a number of key performance indicators, but we've boiled them down to a couple of pretty important ones. One is response time to priority-one calls. At one point in time it was 13 minutes to a call in progress, a crime in progress, and we've managed to get that down to about nine minutes or eight minutes.

    We also aim for a 50% proactive policing time ratio, so when officers are going call to call, whether it's a routine burglary report or whether it's processing an impaired driver or arresting somebody for a violent crime, they're tied up on a call. We're trying to get them free from that tied up status to about half of their time in which they're engaged in proactive policing, which is preventative patrols, street checks of gang members, or walking into high-crime areas.

    More specifically, it's not 50% of the time in which they do whatever they want. Because we're reviewing crime hot spots in our latest data on a temporal and a geographical basis, we will instruct our officers what areas they need to focus on during that proactive policing time we're aiming for.

    Thank you, Chief.

    Chief Hanson, please.

    There are a few things here and I thank you. The legislation that you mentioned would be hugely beneficial to freeing up the time of officers, particularly lawful access. We already talked about that, but also legislation around random breath testing, or RBT. If that could be brought on I will tell you that the amount of time spent on impaired driving would be cut by probably 70% with RBT, and it would drop court time. Court time is a huge cost of policing.

    Secondly, on the technology side, we have what we call our intelligence-led software. It's Palantir, a company out of the U.S. that built this new software project for Homeland Security. It does an amazing job of not only accessing instantaneously your vast pools of data but analyzing the data. It's going to save not only resources on analysts' time, but it will also allow our officers to do a better job on investigations.

    I want to talk a bit about body cams. We have in-car cameras, but body cams on the pilot project. We have saved time, not only with professional standards investigations because the videos are right there but also in pre-charge, pre-court appearance resolution, because when you can show the defence lawyer what this idiot was actually doing instead of what he said he was doing, it frequently results in, “I'm not going to court”.

    Of course, there are the crime management strategies that have been implemented district-wide in Calgary. These are about analyzing the data and focusing your resources for maximum effect.

    Thank you. Your time is up.

    And yes, it's 30% proactive time for our officers that we shoot for. That measurement is 30% in Calgary.

    Thank you.

    We'll move to Mr. Rafferty, please, for six minutes.

    Thank you very much. Thank you to all three of you for being here. Thank you, Chief Hanson, for staying.

    I have a number of questions, but let me start off with one that I'd like each of you to answer, and it probably won't take very long. I was wondering how much your police services have saved with the elimination of the long-gun registry.

    Would you like me to start?

    Chief Hanson, sure.

    As far as a policing issue we have seen no financial benefit one way or the other to the police side of that. The reality is that it was the unregistered guns that were committing the vast majority of crimes in Calgary, the vast majority of crimes.

    As far as our guns and gangs, our anti-gang strategy, we're still devoting big resources into the suppression of those things. The actual time saved by the elimination is an administration function. Probably the cost savings were elsewhere other than in policing in Calgary.

    Chief Blais, please.

    Zero per cent. We found that the majority of our guns are locally resourced and sourced, and are weapons that have been stolen from legitimate gun owners. With the elimination of the long-gun registry it has hampered some of our work.

    Chief Constable Chu.

    I know of no cost savings.

    One of the things that was brought up in the last session that I'd like to follow is the responsibility of the federal government with the economics of policing, or the economics of public safety, as Chief Blais puts it.

    I know, Chief Hanson, you had some things to say on that, but let me throw this out. Would it be useful to have a federal, maybe a central repository, a clearinghouse, if you will, of best practices, not only in Canada but in North America, Europe, and from around the world that police services in Canada could draw from? It may even extend to running courses and all sorts of other things. Would that be one way to go in terms of federal government involvement?

    Okay.

    I'd like each of you to answer that please.

    Yes, go ahead.

    The police services through the CACP, major city chiefs, which is the top 40 biggest police agencies in the U.S. and Canada, is communicating all the time about best practices. If there was a development of some repository of best practices that could be easily accessed, there could be.

    But we look at the U.K. From Calgary, we actually send our officers—at least an officer, sometimes two senior officers a year—over to Bramshill to be trained at Bramshill. We look at the best practices out of the U.K.

    Each of you could also, if you want, comment not just specifically on this in particular but also in general about the federal role in the economics of the policing.

    I'd like to make this point. If there is something that would come out about what the federal government could do, it is this. You've heard from every chief or deputy chief I think who has spoken to you about the vast number of people who are in our prisons and jails who have health issues. They're mentally ill, undiagnosed. They ought not to be there.

    So many times now parents are coming up to us and saying, if you could just get my kid off drugs, I could talk some sense into him. Jim Chu did a really great job talking about that cycle. The reality is that, as has been mentioned, frequently there's family support but they still can't get their kid back because the drugs have taken such a hold. There's a good chance that this young male adult generally—that's the profile—because they're self-medicating they're going to prison. They're going to jail. What happens there is that there's no service. Don't pretend that there's treatment in our prisons and jails that adequately deals with the issue.

    So here's what we're saying. You're sending these people to prisons and jails in huge numbers. I'd like to see the feds partner with the province and fund one jail. Let's start in Alberta. It would be a safe jail, secure detox facility. We've already got the support of the crown, the judges, social services, the police. Here's the criteria. If this person has family support, and the crimes are such that they're going to go to jail anyhow, if they meet a certain set of criteria, send them to a safe jail, which is a secure detox facility.

    As soon as they walk in the door, you detox them. You cannot diagnose a mental illness until you've detoxed. So use that time in jail to detox, assess the mental illness, medicate, give therapy, introduce them to the post-release treatment provider who is going to be.... There are all kinds of those that are housing-first models. Break the cycle, get them off the street from committing crimes and get them back into treatment. Drugs are so powerful.

    I have to say that I talked on a national CBC radio show and I got this comment, e-mails from right across Canada, from families that basically said—and I won't read it because there's not enough time—I thought you were talking about me in that case. These were young men who come from good families primarily—and young women too but mostly men—where they've made one mistake. They wind up taking drugs like crystal meth or crack and sometimes it's laced into one joint and they're addicted, just like that. They're kicked out of the home and they start committing crimes to support their addiction.

    Use jail as the opportunity to detox, diagnose, treat, and then release, instead of throwing them into jail where they get abused. The smart ones get conscripted into gangs and off they go.

    Thank you for that.

    Are there comments from the other two?

    About 30 seconds for the two because we're running low on time.

    With regard to the national repository, we have the Canadian Police College. That should be used perhaps a bit more, even though it is used considerably. There's a lot of exchange going on with regard to information not only intra-nationally but internationally as well.

    In Vancouver, we have close relations with our academic partners. I have several officers who are doing Ph.D.s in criminology. In terms of what the federal government can do—legislation, lawful access. I'd like to talk about that more if there's a chance.

    Thank you.

    We'll move to Mr. Norlock please for four minutes and Ms. Bergen for two.

    Ms. Bergen, you can go first.

    I just need two minutes.

    I just need to get something cleared up for my own understanding on the cost of the long gun registry to law enforcement. When I talked to them, it was more rural police services. They did find that there was a cost when the long gun registry existed because they would get a list from the CFO as to whose licences had expired and then they were able to go and check to see who had firearms that were not registered. They would then confiscate those firearms because these individuals were breaking the law because these firearms were not registered. It would take them, they told me, at least one hour per firearm to not only register it again, but then dispose of it and deal with the paperwork. They now don't have to do that.

     I know that in Toronto there were a number of reports where the Toronto Police Service spent probably about 1,500 man hours going door to door and confiscating firearms, not from criminals but from people who didn't have their paperwork in order. So I'd like to ask each one of you about this. I think you want to clarify this. Either you weren't doing it, which I don't think is the case, or in essence there are savings because now you don't have to go and take firearms from people who don't have their paperwork completed. Then it's costing you and your officers more time and resources to deal with these unregistered firearms.

    Is that correct or is that only in rural areas?

    Rick, Mr. Hanson.

    As I said, I come from a jurisdiction where we focused more on the criminal use of firearms.

    If we could use the firearms registry legislation in that context, then we would. But we were one of those jurisdictions that didn't hunt down the duck hunters who had failed to register.

    Okay. Thank you.

    Chief Blais?

    I have the same comments. We're predominantly urban as opposed to rural.

    And Chief Chu?

    It wasn't a big issue in Vancouver.

    So it was just Toronto, and then in rural areas.

    Thank you.

    Thank you.

    Mr. Norlock.

    Thank you very much.

    I was very interested in Chief Hanson's hub model and the Toronto Police Service having a mental health worker or a social worker working with the police officers. But in the policing world that I come from, the second largest deployed police force in Canada, in policing a town of 800 people or completely rural areas, that's just not possible.

    Could this hub model be tweaked a little to be able to respond to the smaller areas, to rural Canada as opposed to urban Canada, where you have all this expertise right in the city that's easy to access, where it's easy to put bodies in cars and bring people physically there, and where you're not dealing with hundreds, in some cases thousands, of kilometres from the nearest centre?

    I can tell you that there's probably a greater need for this in the rural communities. I think you'll probably find that, percentage-wise, there are more people who have anti-social personality disorders and can't live in the cities who gravitate out to the rural areas. Their illness starts to get worse and they become a danger. So I would suggest that you'd have to look....

    You could create a regional model. It would require staffing it a little differently, but for officers' safety and the communities' safety, I think it's the next step that has to happen in rural areas where people are living by themselves and isolated because they can't coexist with other people.

    If we look at some of the history, we don't have to look any further than Alberta. We had one just last year where one of those people killed a peace officer who was going to basically take care of his dogs. This is a guy who everybody knew was crazy and nobody did anything about it—that old “nobody does anything about it”.

    The reality is that this model can be applied in a deployed area, it just takes a different approach.

    Thank you.

    Do any of the other witnesses have a comment there?

    I think information sharing is really important, especially for young people. In Vancouver that is a priority for us, with school liaison officers who deal with the education, with the social service, and also with health professionals in terms of a wraparound approach to preventing young people from getting into that life of crime.

    Thank you.

    Go ahead, Chief Blais.

    Thank you very much, Mr. Norlock.

    Unfortunately, I don't have the article with me here, but in The Globe and Mail in 2011, there was an article talking about the life of a young man who had gone from an abusive home through various stages of prevention care. He ended killing somebody at the age of 17.

    The overall cost was estimated to be about $1.5 million to be able to deal with this individual up to the age of 21. Imagine if, at the front end, perhaps $100,000 had been spent on that individual and on dealing with some of the root causes of his criminality. We perhaps would have been able to avoid that $1.5 million outlay for that young individual.

    As the other chiefs have mentioned, this is a question of investment. Whether it's in a rural or an urban area, it's investment that would have to be done, and in a concerted fashion.

    You have 10 seconds left.

    Okay.

    I guess the question is whose budget we take the $100,000 from to put it towards this other—

    Yes, and that's the question we'll have to discuss over the long period of time here.

    We'll move to Mr. Scarpaleggia, please.

    Thank you, Chair.

    Chief Hanson, you proposed the notion of safe jails, where drug treatment could be offered. You said that, in your opinion, there isn't a sufficient level of treatment in regular jails.

    Perhaps you could just expand on that. Was that for drug addiction or for mental health issues in general?

    It's both, whether it's a provincial jail or a federal penitentiary. Any time you're in an environment where you have an hour a week that you can put your prisoner in to deal with an issue, and then back into the general population he goes, it's not going to work. You have to devote the facility to being.... It can still be run as a jail. They are still serving sentences. But it's been proven not to work in the major penitentiaries and the big jails.

    This notion of safe jails would be something between a prison for bad guys, if you want to put it that way, and a hospital. It would be somewhere in between the two. You would not be able to leave, you would be under a criminal conviction, but essentially you'd be in a care environment.

    It would be a secure detox facility.

    Yes.

    Constable Chu, you were talking about incidents in Vancouver where mentally ill individuals had committed crimes. If they had committed crimes, would these individuals be classified as not criminally responsible? Is that the kind of mental illness we're talking about?

    Some of them might be. The standard for “not guilty by reason of a mental disorder” is quite high. A lot of them are in psychiatric remand right now being assessed for the suitability of the sentence, to see if they understand the nature of a trial.

    In some cases it was people who should be taking medication, but they're not. Then you alluded to the fact that the community health services, or somebody, I don't know if it's the police, should be more proactive in ensuring that people who need medication are in fact taking it.

    Could you elaborate on that?

    If somebody's in the community and they're suffering from a medical issue such as diabetes, they know they need to take their medication to be better and to live. But somebody who's mentally ill in the community, perhaps taking medication for his mental illness, may one day think he's feeling fine and doesn't need to take the medication. Next thing you know, he devolves into something that tends to be considered dangerous behaviour. That's obviously what's happened. But then once they're back on the medication, they understand what's been happening.

    Sure, they're back on the medication. These are people who are going freely about. They're not in an institutionalized setting.

    You seemed to suggest that there is something that could be done through community policing or the police working with health professionals to remind or somehow encourage people to take their medications. That's what I was hoping you could elaborate on.

    There's a concept called assertive community treatment teams. Right now there's a police officer that's part of a group of people, including mental health professionals. They'll have a caseload. One team of perhaps 12 professionals will deal with 100 people on their caseloads and actively monitor these individuals to make sure they're functioning, taking their medication, and not developing problems that require them to be taken into care. The concept there, really, is based on the assertive model of community care.

    Chief Hanson, you mentioned that the rate of attack—someone attacking another individual, either killing them or hurting them or intending to hurt them—has remained constant over time. Yet, the proportion of this group, what you called the “bad guys”, has dropped, and it's been made up by an increase in assaults by those who are mentally ill in some way.

    Did I understand you correctly? Was that what you said?

    If you look at rates of attack against persons, the rates today per 100,000 are the same as they were 25 to 30 years ago.

    But within that group of people committing attacks, the portion of those who don't have a mental health issue, who perhaps have some kind of anti-social issue but not a mental health issue, has dropped.

     Is that what you are saying?

    I can't say that because we didn't really track that 25 or 30 years ago.

    Oh, I see. Okay.

    But what we can say is that the number of mentally ill people—now they've diagnosed those who are in prisons and jails as having anti-social personality disorder—makes up about 80% of the population.

    Yes, I see. It's really a diagnosis issue.

    Your time is up.

    I'm done, okay.

    Thank you.

    Thank you to all.

    I found today's testimony and questions very enlightening, honestly.

    I'm sorry, Mr. Chair, I have to disagree on your ruling on that because on the orders of the day it's written that at 10:40 we would go into committee business. We still have five minutes.

    I've cut everyone back here. It's going to take a little longer on our committee business because we have to do a break to go in camera. It's going to take longer than five minutes to deal with committee business, so we've had to adjust.

    That's why I've cut everyone back so that Mr. Scarpaleggia would get his full time. Otherwise Mr. Scarpaleggia would probably have been out of time.

    We're going to be doing some travelling, and I know we have some more questions. I'd like to sit down with a cup of coffee with all three of you because I don't know that I agree with everything, and I haven't had a chance to question you myself.

    But to Mr. Blais, I wonder if you would send us a little information. You talked about the four points, for example, increased judicial requirements and compensation. Union-generational divides was the one I didn't get a lot on. I'm not sure exactly what you meant. We don't have time to deal with it now, but if there is any way you could send us a little more on what you meant on that, certainly as the chair I would appreciate it.

    Certainly, there is no problem. I have my notes, actually, which are a bit more complete than what I said. I'll have them sent to you.

    Thank you very much.

    To all three, I thank you.

    We are going to suspend.

    Committee, don't leave. I would ask those who aren't part of an in camera meeting to leave as quickly as possible, and we'll come back in 30 seconds.

    [Proceedings continue in camera]