:
Okay. Very good. I'll start then.
Good morning. Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak to the committee today on a topic of critical importance to the profession of policing and the communities we serve, including all levels of government.
The proactive work of this committee is vital to the future sustainability and public confidence in policing and the broader criminal justice system. I congratulate the committee for taking responsibility for fulsomely examining this issue.
Police services across Canada are experiencing unprecedented challenges. Demands for service and public expectations continue to increase while budgets remain static or are decreasing in some jurisdictions. The recognized position is that the current situation is no longer sustainable. No single organization can stretch and adapt continually to meet all of the demands and expectations that are placed upon it when those demands grow unabated.
As we look for workable and affordable solutions, we are reminded that public safety is a fundamental expectation by citizens and a critical function of government at every level. The police are an essential service with a broadly reaching mandate. My personal policing career has spanned 37 years, in five provinces, two territories, and 16 communities across Canada. Over the previous 17 years, I've occupied senior leadership roles within two policing organizations, including a term as senior deputy commissioner for the RCMP in Ottawa, and my current role as Chief of Police for the City of Edmonton.
The simple reality is that policing costs are going up, and many are rightfully challenging the value of these expenditures. The policing profession is at a critical juncture that requires the need to reform our practices within the broader environment and better communicate value for investment of precious and limited tax dollars.
What is driving up police expenditures and costs? Police service growth has consistently reflected a growth in the greater population. Citizens want their streets and neighbourhoods safe to walk and live within. The governments are expected to deliver on safety and security through an investment in policing. That growth has a cost. Policing is very expensive, and like most commodities, you get what you pay for. However, per unit labour costs for sworn and civilian or non-sworn police employees are higher than they have ever been before, reflective of the broader public service. Of note is that since 1999, police compensation has significantly outpaced inflation, and the cost of pensions and benefits have been a major contributor to those costs.
In Edmonton, 80% of our operating budget is dedicated to employee costs, leaving only 20% for discretionary spending on police service delivery. These percentages mirror what I experienced when I was with the RCMP. Rising wage increases are a natural result of the greater mobility among younger Canadians, demand for specific skills, and tighter competition in the labour market.
In Alberta, we have a highly competitive market that challenges our ability to attract new employees and retain experienced employees. This is not exclusive to policing. However, to meet demands, we are currently recruiting aggressively in Ontario and the eastern provinces, due to the competition for new hires in Alberta. It continues to be a challenge to maintain highly qualified employees who are constantly cajoled into higher-paying jobs in oil and gas.
Those costs pale when compared to the costs that are now being incurred when police become engaged in ever-increasing social issues related to the homeless, mental health, and addictions. Our health and social services infrastructure is continually challenged to adapt to the same human resource and fiscal pressures of our changing environment, particularly as it relates to the most vulnerable in our communities.
As a result, police spend an ever-increasing amount of time and resources dealing with complex social issues as opposed to more traditional public safety issues. In point of fact, interaction with the mentally ill, homeless, and addicted has been our greatest area of increased deployment of policing resources over the past five years. I can say with confidence that we, the police, have become the social agency of first resort for many of our vulnerable citizens.
Last year alone, Edmonton police dealt with 35,000 calls relating to mental health, addictions, and the homeless. Each call took an average of 104 minutes. If you do the math, that's seven and a half years. Most often we are dealing with the same people over and over. We have documented over 150 contacts with a single individual during the course of the year. Our colleagues in hospital emergency wards, ambulance, and shelters are dealing with these same people, in some cases more often than us.
Policing has become increasingly complex. In my early years as a police officer it took 55 minutes to process a drunk driver; today it takes four hours. Obtaining a search warrant was a single page when I was in a drugs section in 1986; today a search warrant application is consistently hundreds of pages long.
Policy changes for levels of government, changes in legislation, and increased liability are often out of the direct control of the police. However, they create new and growing pressures on police officers and police budgets. Our citizens and our stakeholders have increasing expectations of their police, requiring higher benchmarking in equipment, training, accountability, and technology.
The Internet, social media, and new technologies have had a profound impact on policing in a very short period of time. We are seeing an emergence of new crimes that cross geographic, cultural, and organizational jurisdictions. Child pornography, cybercrime, human trafficking, financial frauds, and national security investigations are but a few of the serious crimes being facilitated through the Internet in this new community within our current community.
Ten years ago it was the police who had the most up-to-date technologies at their disposal; today it is the organized criminal element who have the resources and access to cutting-edge technology without legal, budgetary, or regulatory restriction, often leaving police in the position of playing catch-up or simply being neutralized. Most, if not all, major Canadian municipalities are also dealing with the realities of shadow and transient populations. For example, Alberta has in excess of 100,000 persons who report income from that province but file tax returns elsewhere.
The knowledge level for leadership in policing is also morphing from the requisite administrative and operational skills of an experienced senior police officer to that of an educated chief executive officer with significant corporate acumen. Policing has evolved into a modern business form, so senior executives need to know the intimacies of modern policing and the intricacies of running a business. This fundamental shift reinforces the challenges I mentioned earlier in terms of recruitment and retention.
Last, police organizations within the broader government structure are often competing with other departments and agencies for operating funds within a zero-sum game. One department or organization wins at the cost of others. This promotes competition and inefficiencies, while stymying cooperation, integration, innovation, and broader-based strategies for collective long-term success.
The accepted wisdom is that crime is down. This statement is accurate within some categories and in some jurisdictions. However, there are few front-line police officers who will agree that crime is down. In Edmonton, calls for service are up significantly. Certain categories of crime are way up, specifically sexual assaults, domestic violence, and vehicle thefts, and there is a burgeoning trend to not report certain crimes, as the belief is that police do not have the ability to respond.
The points I have made outline the complex drivers and pressures that the present and future policing environment faces. However, all is not lost. Out of adversity is born real opportunity, and I believe there is plenty of opportunity to address current challenges. The good news is that policing has historically proven to be adaptive and flexible, albeit sometimes slow and resistant, and often personality driven. Our traditional model of policing has evolved over time and in response to a changing environment, from being problem-focused and reactive to being more strategically active and proactive by utilizing the principles of community policing, intelligence-led policing, integrated policing, and, most recently, predictive policing.
The future requires us to employ intelligence-led management and systems-wide integration; that is, integration across ministries and across agencies, both public and private. As stewards of the public purse, it is the responsibility of today's police leaders to continuously and judiciously look for efficiencies in the delivery of public safety.
Current fiscal realities require continuous reprioritization around crime trends and community priorities while exploiting emerging technologies and human resource exigencies, supported by strong communication and relationship-building skills. It is essential that police leaders are constantly managing the demand for services more effectively, efficiently, and economically. A major component of this is the absolute necessity to manage expectations by communicating reprioritization to stakeholders, funders, and communities. This requires senior police leader competencies to be broadened to encompass skills that support business acumen, while still having a holistic understanding of policing as a distinct craft.
Related to this point is the need for police to do a better job of measuring and articulating the value of a dollar invested in policing. One of the challenges is trying to measure the intangible. How do we quantify a life saved, the elimination of an emergency room visit, or a second chance as a future contributor to society as a result of a drug bust? How do we assess the reduction of a life-long health care cost as a result of arresting a drunk driver?
We need to undertake a detailed review of our current policing model and determine the true impact on the cost-benefit ledger of policing. In my world, we have often experienced increased and uncontrollable demands for service, absent of requisite resources. This is particularly poignant as it relates to the mentally ill, homeless, and addicted.
Notionally, there are considerable savings to be realized through police diffusing social tension, preventing conflict, and reducing victimization and revictimization. There are clearly downstream benefits for families and communities, as well as increased economic development. We need to explore methods and metrics to effectively quantify this.
As I indicated earlier, responding to our most vulnerable impacts between 30% and 40% of policing budgets. It also has an impact on health, social service, criminal justice, and correction services' budgets, as the same people are being cycled through the broader system. While the fiscal outcomes are huge, the real tragedy is the suffering of our most vulnerable. In Edmonton, we have recognized that a limited number of the same citizens are consuming an inordinate number of police, ambulance, health care, and social service resources. We are doing something about it.
We have brought together a select group of impacted key stakeholders that include public health care, medical services, shelters, community members, and levels of government, in order to work together, to work smarter and to case-manage our most vulnerable to a better place. This is system-wide integration of service delivery. Our focus is currently on the top 50 consumers of police resources and how our list compares to our colleagues in other agencies.
We are taking steps to examine where these people are falling out of the system and becoming frequent flyers. We are changing a system that has been in place for dozens of years through partnerships, collaboration, innovation, and the recognition that there has to be a better way.
By leveraging resources, we are able to realize efficiencies and economies of scale and better service delivery. From a strictly policing perspective, we are able to reinvest that scarce 30% of our resources into targeting those who prey on the most vulnerable and other prolific offenders.
The end game is safer communities, more effective deployment of policing resources, and reduced costs to our criminal justice partners. There is no zero-sum game. There are simply benefits to the vulnerable and benefits to the system.
This takes me to the main point I want to make this morning. There is a better way, and not just within policing; a better way needs to encompass the entire criminal justice system and the broader system of health care, social services, communities, and relevant stakeholders. Police are most often the first responders and gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, but the system is not ours. To look at the cost of policing without giving equal attention to the efficiencies and costs of these other components gives only a partial picture. The solution lies in challenging the system beyond the economics of policing. A new model is required, one that clarifies roles and responsibilities of the entire criminal justice and social justice systems and one that articulates a clear vision. Increasing the cost of policing is one system of a larger problem, not the problem itself.
Police have become the social agency of first choice by more and more Canadians, and the costs of that are real, tangible, and excessive. In small communities across Canada, particularly in isolated, northern, and first nations communities, the problem is far more acute. Police are most often the only social agency of choice.
In closing, police services are not going to become more affordable based on more effective delivery of current services; this is simply biting around the edge of the cookie.
There are three questions we should be asking ourselves about policing into the future, and upon answering them, we should be re-engineering our processes toward a broader systems-based approach accordingly. Those questions are: What are we doing that we should be doing? What are we doing that we should not be doing? And what are we not doing that we need to do?
A response to these questions by governments, communities, and policing will allow us to create a higher degree of flexibility, manage expectations, be appropriately funded, and continue to deliver a level of public safety that is the envy of the world.
Thank you.
I'm going to pick up on a few points that Rod touched on, and in fact reinforce them in my presentation.
My thanks for the invitation. More importantly, I thank all of you for the effort you're putting into looking at a new model of policing and the evolution of that model here in Canada. Clearly, the economics are driving a serious re-examination of the work and costs of policing, and a potential re-engineering of the model toward more efficiencies and effectiveness.
If I may, I'd like to add a personal comment and take a couple of minutes to talk to you about what the Police Sector Council was and did. I use the past tense, unfortunately, because the federal program that funded our work was terminated with the recent round of deficit reduction initiatives. Following that, I'd offer a recommendation on moving forward, based on the work and research of the Police Sector Council.
My opening thought—a personal point of view on this one—is based on many years in the public sector, six years with the RCMP as assistant commissioner, and eight years with the Police Sector Council as executive director. The current model of policing in Canada has been evolving for about 140 years, based on the British model of Robert Peel. It's a quasi-military structure operating for the safety and security of Canadians and communities.
The model has been evolving slowly in response to many dynamic factors in the environment, but in recent years a number of critical factors have increased the pace of that evolution: the economic recessions of the 1980s, the 1990s, and certainly the one we're in now; technology that has brought information intelligence to the cars and the mobile devices of police officers; the growth of private sector industry, private security, especially post-9/11; the change in our communities, the face of our communities, the age, the diversity, the urbanization; and even the politics of governments at the federal-provincial-municipal levels. These have all had a significant impact on how policing is done and under what framework.
My personal comment on this is that the economic factor now trumps all of those other environmental factors—society, technology, politics, demographics—and really, based on the economics alone, the current model of policing is not sustainable. In reality, the economics of policing is a derivative of all the others, but it certainly is moving things forward.
The Police Sector Council—what we were and what we did—was a small, national, not-for-profit organization fully funded until March 31 of this year by HRSDC under the sector council program. Like all other sector councils, the Police Sector Council focused on the strategic long-term sustainability of the sector, did research, and undertook initiatives to ensure that the policing sector continued to be efficient, effective, and responsive to policing and public needs.
In the past eight years, under the guidance of a board of directors, which included key stakeholders in policing—ADMs from the federal and provincial governments, the presidents of the CACP, the chiefs' association, the Association of Police Boards, the Canadian Police Association, the union folks, the FCM, Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the heads of academies, learning institutions, and reps from private security organizations—the council has focused on a number of issues really related to national solutions to strategic workforce management challenges.
One example of our recent research and facilitated/collaborative undertaking has been the phased introduction of key elements to embrace more professionalism. That's common language, tools, and processes specifically through competency-based HR management of the critical HR functions: recruiting, education, training, leadership development, succession planning, and performance management. I'm going to speak a bit more about this in a second.
What we really do as a sector council is bring leaders and practitioners in policing together to break down the jurisdictional silos, to address common issues, and to collaborate on nationally applicable solutions. In other words, we facilitate a common pursuit of management efficiencies and effectiveness. That's been our eight-year exercise.
Our belief is fairly simple. In Canada, we have 201 police forces in 11 jurisdictions, compared with over 16,000 police services in over 100 jurisdictions in the United States. We should be significantly more capable of bringing together a common national policing management framework and leveraging the investment of taxpayers into enhanced policing and security.
When you think about it, we don't expect different kinds of policing from coast to coast to coast. Whether it's handcuffing skills, counterterrorism training, or HR management, we should do it once and use it many times. Such a national approach will result in more efficiency and effectiveness. Of course, the council's tag phrase was “connecting forces - securing futures”. More importantly, we just focus on skills up and costs down. The work we were doing in this area in fact led to the minister's summit on the economics of policing.
I'll give you a quick note just to reinforce a couple of Rod's points on the economics of policing, the costs, and the workload. In any one police service across this country, there is limited room for cost savings and efficiencies. Eighty per cent of the 96,000 employees work in 8% of the police agencies. Those are the top 16 police forces across the country.
Police budgets have increased at a rate of about 7% a year in the last 10 years and are an ever-increasing portion of municipal and provincial budgets. On average, about 85% to 90% of the police services budget is employee costs: the salaries and the benefits dictated by collective agreements.
Salaries have increased by 40% over the last 10 years, compared to an average of about 11% in any other sector of the economy for the same period. That's mostly due to leapfrogging collective agreements and arbitration awards. With a recent award in Windsor, for example, it looks like a first class constable will be making $93,000.
With the other 10% of the budget, the 10% or 15% of the services budget, there are costs for procurement and maintenance of infrastructure, technology, equipment, vehicles, and training, and other costs associated with managing the workforce. These are mandatory costs for the optimal delivery of policing.
Canadians currently spend about $12.6 billion on policing. Even if we were able to freeze contracts and reduce costs, we'll be at $17 billion by 2015 due to current collective agreements and locked-in contracts.
As you heard from Deputy Minister Dale McFee when he spoke to you earlier—and I think he will be here later today—policing has even less control of the workforce, and certainly Chief Knecht talked about that this morning. Every law enforcement regulation passed, every recommendation from commissioners, and every deficit-fighting reduction in other community service departments increases the work and creates complexity and complications in policing. We're the first responders and we're the last resort.
One recent study conducted by the University of the Fraser Valley in B.C. showed that the work of police officers has changed significantly over the last 10 years, post charter and subsequent to any legislative and regulatory changes in the 1980s and 1990s, with breaking and entering at 58% more processing time, driving under the influence at 250% more processing time, and a relatively simple domestic assault at 950% more processing time.
I offer this information to suggest that it's not very useful to place the burden of solutions to the economics of policing on individual command executives or their individual police services. They have very few discretionary options when it comes to their own budgets. They have very little control over 95% to 96% of the costs and can only really exercise discretion when it comes to triaging crimes or their responses to social issues or social misconduct, which for some services make up almost 75% of their calls for service.
When our sector council asked chiefs what are the implications of the economics of policing, they responded that they feel they are under a lot of pressure. The reality is that an inflexible tax base plus fiscal constraint equals capacity erosion, and we've estimated that to be at about 12% in the last five years. Also, chiefs continue to have to manage under the highest expectations of public oversight, media scrutiny, and the highest bar of public accountability.
The discussion of the economics of policing really has to be raised up and elevated to another level. That's the responsibility of governments and governance: to set a workable national framework under which chiefs can then manage their workforces. We don't do that now.
I'm going to give you one example, just one, of our sector council work: an opportunity to derive real efficiency and effectiveness in workforce management. In the past five years, the sector council expended almost $5 million of taxpayers' money to develop a set of national occupational standards, researching and leveraging the best practices in three continents and consulting and validating findings with 900 subject matter experts across the country—the police people and supervisors doing and managing the work—and consolidating contributions from 70 police organizations and 90 members of steering committees or working committees. This is something that has been done for policing and by policing.
We now have in place fully defined, competency-based behavioural and technical standards for over 160 roles in policing in three broad work streams: general duty, which is constables through chiefs of police; general, specialized, and investigative support; and leadership and management from supervisory right up to executive command. All of these roles have been fully defined in terms of competency-based technical or behavioural standards.
Why is this important for our discussion about efficiencies and effectiveness? The logic goes as follows. If the work of policing is consistent across Canada and we can define that work and the competencies required to do that work successfully, then the roles and occupations can be standardized through national and provincial occupational standards. If we have standards, then like any other sector, such as doctors, electricians, etc., we can have standard processes and mechanisms to manage that work in a consistent and more effective manner.
Right now we don't have that. By that I mean national workforce management standards, including curriculum training standards, certification accrediting trainers and training institutions, and certification and qualifications for each role. Think of policing as a national company. We want all police officers to be qualified for their jobs and promoted only on the attainment of new and higher qualifications.
Progress is being made. Today's narrative has much improved, but it goes something like this: we promote by rank and base criteria, not by skills and competence; we compensate by rank, not by skills and competencies; and we recruit and train by rank, the same way we have for 50 years, not by skills and competencies. This leads to overqualified and overpaid workers doing roles that they probably shouldn't be doing. I think Dale McFee used the analogy of a turbo mechanic being forced to do oil changes. This often leads to a mediocre and demotivated workforce.
The result of the sector council-led approach on the competency-based work is the economies of scale that drive efficiencies. Build it once, use it many times. Then refocus the cost savings on operational effectiveness on the important areas of policing, such as organized crime and cybercrime.
Successive RCMP commissioners have stood before this committee and talked about the fact that they only have the resources to actually investigate 20% to 25% of the known organized crime in this country, let alone deal with issues of cybercriminality. To emphasize this point, through the work of the sector council facilitating the collaboration of many stakeholders, we now have a competency-based workforce management framework. It's made for policing and by policing. It's been embraced by managers and unions. It has clarity, objectivity, learner orientation, and employee focus, and it's a simplified HR management tool and process.
Implementation of this framework needs focus and leadership. As you've heard before, delegated responsible policing goes from feds to provinces, from provinces to municipalities, and creates a policing culture that works against a nationally led direction and transformational change. We've been slowly working with pilot police services, specific provincial ADMs, and keen individuals across the country in the police service boards and associations to start the change process.
The recommendation to the committee is very simple. It's going to take time; it's going to take some leadership, but five years from now, if focused and concentrated effort can be made, there should be a national qualification framework in place and implemented, while the window of opportunity, our Canadian economic opportunity, still exists.
Let me leave you with five points, a sort of vision, if you like, of Canadian policing. We recommend a national qualification framework based on national workforce management architecture; role-based, not rank-based, occupational standards; professional training and certification through rationalized, cost-effective delivery structures; rigorous leadership standards so that we have fully qualified leaders in deputy and chief roles; and a national college of policing, administering the training and education to national standards, much like they have in the U.K.
This vision requires a not-for-profit organization at arm's length, with full stakeholder involvement, to implement and administer. It requires a national competency-based framework for managing human capital, including certification and accreditation with collaborative endorsement from the provinces and from Public Safety Canada.
This not-for-profit organization would continue to work on the sector council, which, over the past eight years, has been building collaborative networks, improving the capacity of all stakeholders to work together in a sectoral environment, identifying common approaches to optimize resources devoted to the management of personnel on a national, sector-wide, competency-based certification and accreditation of police officers and civilians. In other words, continue this professionalization of policing in Canada.
As you can all appreciate, any new evidence-based innovation to change how we do business today requires political leadership and policy-makers to champion and advance these efforts and to engage in the necessary partners who can truly make a difference. That's not the case today. The challenge, really, is how we develop a digital-age response to an analog-age system and structure.
Thank you for letting me make this statement. I'd be happy to take any questions you have.
Good morning, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this morning to discuss the START program and our multi-disciplinary approach to working with at-risk youth and how it relates to your study of the economics of policing.
Eleven years ago, our community in Manitoba decided to work together to benefit the youth and their families who were the largest consumers of policing, child and family services, and probation services, while also showing significant school-based issues. These agencies decided to pinpoint the youth and their families, who had involvement with the agencies, yet didn't seem to be showing any significant improvement for it.
Their collaboration became the Selkirk Team for At-Risk Teens, or START program, and they were quickly joined by mental and public health services and addiction services. To date, this collaboration has resulted in over 1,800 case conferences on behalf of at-risk youth aged 11 to 18, with the goal of identifying, planning for, intervening, and assisting at-risk youth to become productive members of our community.
The key to the START model is the involvement of the youth and their family as part of the multi-agency team, and their ability to openly share and address what the real issues are. Understanding the reason behind the behaviour is necessary to creating a successful plan that provides a customized network of supports for the youth and increases their chance of success, while decreasing the burden on social service and policing agencies. Accountability is a big part of this model for the youth, the family, and the agencies. START also provides a longer-term approach—six months to years—depending on the intensity of the situation, as we have found that stabilizing a crisis is important, but it's not enough to build the required skills to prevent the next crisis from happening.
Many communities come together in multi-agency collaborations that eventually falter or are not productive, as all members of the group have another full-time job to do and it becomes onerous to maintain effectiveness, especially without consent to share information. The START model has a coordinator whose responsibility it is to set and chair the case conferences for the youth, to ensure that the youth and family feel heard and are engaging in the process, to advocate for the youth, and to follow up on plans created to ensure follow-through and ultimately a better chance at success, all shared with consent. This format works very well in smaller communities where there are fewer resources, or where workers are covering many areas, as the coordinator is able to ensure they are informed of any concerns or issues that arise with the client, even if they're not scheduled to see them for another few weeks.
The START coordinator is located in the RCMP detachment, making it easy for members to make client referrals of youth who are generating multiple calls for service and for the coordinator to share pertinent information with police when the need arises. We have been able to consistently show decreases in calls to RCMP after a youth is referred to START. Courts in our area have recognized the benefit of START and made participation in the program a part of their dispositions, and we frequently provide information to crown attorneys and justice committees to assist them in making more informed decisions. Additionally, START maintains a file that holds all the necessary information provided by each agency for each youth, a very necessary tool for situations where having all the facts at hand can assist any agency to make a more appropriate decision on how to intervene.
Our recent evaluation, funded by National Crime Prevention Services, has findings that are very favourable toward the program and speak to an increased inter-agency collaboration and achieving positive client outcomes for the vast majority of our clients, even with the continual increase in the number of client referrals each year and the risk level of the clients we work with. The program model has spread to three other communities in Manitoba and functions equally well with different demographics.
The START program is managed and funded by the involved community agencies and all three levels of government. Unfortunately, this year, our largest funder, Service Canada, is no longer providing funding to START or any of the other communities utilizing the model, leaving us with a shortfall that may be insurmountable unless we find another federal source of funding. This lack of funding also creates difficulties for other areas that are looking to duplicate this model in their communities but cannot get support at all levels of government.
It has been repeatedly said that law enforcement has become the front line for all social issues, and this will not change unless we offer a solution to coordinate the resources from all agencies to address the reasons behind the behaviours.
I have a quote in my office by Walter Barbee that says, “If you've told a child a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it's not the child who is the slow learner.”
If police are being called to the same home for the same reasons, and this happens often, then we haven't addressed the real issue and we need to look at the situation differently. That's what START does.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning.
Members of the committee, Mr. Chair, it is truly an honour and a privilege to appear before you today. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you to discuss the START program and its approach to working with our community's highest-risk youth and families.
START began as a response to a need to develop processes for various agencies in the city of Selkirk to communicate and plan effectively with its highest-risk youth and families. Agencies were already meeting and discussing cases in a well-meaning but often haphazard and uncoordinated fashion.
The various agencies also were not objective in how or why they would share information with each other. Sometimes information would be shared and sometimes it wouldn't be. This often depended on the motivation of various staff and their time availability to communicate and coordinate meetings with staff from other agencies.
There also often isn't a mandate that makes the sharing of information and case collaboration mandatory. In fact, there are often confidentiality barriers to sharing information with other agencies.
Case management policies often suggest that inter-agency collaboration is the preferred way to do your work effectively, but the degree to which different staff and different agencies actually do this is left up to the individual staff or individual program manager. Therefore, due to time and workload issues, which are significant, staff are often focused on meeting their individual agency mandate and not looking at youth, family, and larger community needs.
START addresses this with the help of a coordinator, who arranges and coordinates START or multi-agency case conferences. START has formalized this information exchange process and created a multi-agency management process to deal with the highest-risk youth and their families.
The impact of START has been very positive, as the silos of information in various departments have been broken down. The result has been the application of various departmental mandates and operating procedures toward a common set of goals and case plan with the youth and family.
START has changed the way my staff do their work. An example of this is that previous to START, my staff would sit in their offices, and virtually the only contact they would have with other agency staff in our communities was over the telephone or via the computer, largely due to time. They would carry out their duties and fulfill their mandate, often independently of other agencies' knowledge and/or involvement. Now all of my staff regularly attend START case conferences with other agency staff at various locations in the communities, and the START agencies all work toward a common set of goals that are case management-directed. This approach ensures that agencies are fulfilling their case management obligation to that particular youth and family.
Agency staff also explain what services they did or didn't provide to the START case conference from one meeting to the next, thereby enhancing service accountability. Also, if there are identified gaps in service, the START case management team strategizes on ways to meet the gap.
The impact of START has been to keep kids in school longer, improve family functioning, and hold youth accountable for their behaviour.
The impact of START has been significant. One of my staff said: “START is an invaluable resource to the community and to families struggling to stabilize their children. START can also bring resources to the table that are needed and not previously identified.”
Sergeant Mark Morehouse of the Stonewall RCMP detachment said that in the first year of the START model operating in that community, calls dealing with youth that were made to the detachment dropped by roughly 50%.
Our provincial justice funding support of three START model programs in Manitoba is a total of $21,000, which is a small investment compared with the benefit these services provide to the highest-risk youth, families, and communities.
The impact of START is also long term and preventative in nature by giving and guiding youth and families towards positive, pro-social choices.
Research has shown that multi-agency case management approaches are effective, and START has also shown this to be so. Our yearly evaluations have confirmed this, and our most recent evaluation, funded by National Crime Prevention Services, has shown that what we are doing is effective in the short term and preventative in the long run. This evaluation has also given us direction for enhancements and improvements, which we'll use to guide us in the future.
I personally believe that START and similar multi-agency case management programs are the way of the future for governments and agencies in meeting society's needs with its most troubled families.
I don't believe we can afford to do otherwise.
Thank you.
:
Good morning. Thank you, committee, for allowing us the opportunity to present this morning.
It is my pleasure to be able to present to this committee Saskatchewan's groundbreaking work related to community safety and new views of policing.
At the same time that overall crime rates are dropping, as most of you are aware, Saskatchewan leads the nation in many categories of crime. This is not the kind of trendsetting that I or my cabinet colleagues would like to be known for.
Similar statistics have led to a call to action. In Saskatchewan, government, communities, and individuals are taking a good, hard look at the realities of the numbers, in both the volume of crime and the costs incurred to combat it.
We know that finding capacity in an increasingly demanding policing environment has become a challenge for jurisdictions across North America. At the same time, the costs of administering police services, or for that matter the criminal justice system, are on the rise. The crimes, and the criminals who commit them, are becoming more sophisticated and more complex. This is all adding up to a situation that is becoming untenable.
Saskatchewan's deputy minister of corrections and policing, Dale McFee, has spoken to you previously about the incredible work that's being done in communities across the province to build a foundation for community safety and wellness. As he's pointed out, it began with Prince Albert's community mobilization initiative to reduce crime in that city.
From a larger perspective, the Hub and COR models being used in Prince Albert, and replicated in communities across the province, is a testament to how we as Saskatchewan residents got our reputation for innovating. We have taken a germ of an idea and turned it into a movement that gains momentum every day. Of course we're very pleased with this.
In his last representation to you, Dale McFee told you that reports out of Prince Albert show, as a result of the Hub and COR models, that the violent crime rate for that city dropped 11.8% in the first year and 31.9% in year two.
As the minister responsible for corrections and policing, I can tell you how proud we are to be recognized nationally and internationally for this work. As a member of a government whose jurisdiction is seeing dramatic growth in our population and economy, I can tell you there is excitement in the air. Our belief is that our potential is limitless. But I can also tell you it's a bit worrisome. It's worrisome because we know we have to have the appropriate foundations for ensuring that this growth is sustainable, and that any potential consequences related to growth, like the implications of burgeoning job markets, infrastructure deficits, and increased crime, are mitigated.
In fact, just a few months ago, Premier Brad Wall introduced the Saskatchewan Plan for Growth. This plan contemplates an articulate, thoughtful approach to continued growth backstopped by appropriate resources for maintaining the stability of necessary economic and social foundations. These foundations include safe, healthy communities. This is where the Saskatchewan government's Building Partnerships to Reduce Crime approach comes in. Government support through funding, technical resources, and innovative services, supplied by my ministry, provides communities that want to create their own community safety and wellness mechanisms with the means to do so.
By its nature, the Hub, as a community mobilization process, engages representatives of the criminal justice system, police, and probation officers. It requires the involvement of representatives from social services, health, and education agencies. To be relevant, the Hub needs to take a cradle-to-grave approach, addressing the needs of at-risk individuals from the time their risky behaviour first becomes known until they “age out” of the system.
Experts have recognized that the entry point for individuals to engage in anti-social behaviour is around the age of 12. This risk continues until around the age of 24. It follows that the province's recently announced child and family agenda, aimed at creating strong, healthy families who can benefit from Saskatchewan's growth, has taken into account this piece when creating its goals.
If we can get to these young people early with the appropriate levels of literacy, mental and physical health, and family and community supports, we can deflect many of the negative influences that result in lost potential from our youth.
Of course, this discussion is all about reducing the cost of policing to governments at all levels. There is more that we're doing in Saskatchewan, and I'd like to talk about this.
As a result of our work on building partnerships to reduce crime, we are looking at the human resources our ministries are providing as a continuum of support. The question is, what do I really mean by that? Representatives of the criminal justice system cannot work in isolation from health or social services when we know that around 30% of the individuals arrested for committing what might be termed “petty crimes” have mental health issues. We can't be successful in rehabilitating offenders if we know that they can't get jobs because they can't read. We need to include our education experts in the mix.
I would like to think that we're taking a holistic view of how we're organizing government around tackling these social issues. Resulting strategies need to be client centred. The old paradigm of delivering programs to fit the needs of a bureaucratic structure is just not on anymore. We need to look at how citizens are best served and organize our administrative structures around those needs.
For the next few minutes I'd like to turn our discussion to other ways the province is seeking out ways to mitigate increasing and rising policing costs. One of the solutions we're currently examining is an expansion of our existing model, special constables, beyond their current limited application. Right now, in Saskatchewan special constables are trained to provide law enforcement in first nations communities only. The advantage here is that individuals of first nations descent who are trained as special constables for their home communities are familiar with their own culture and social norms and know the people they are working with. In the same vein, appointing special constables in other communities to enforce local bylaws or to take on lower-risk community policing duties frees up sworn police officers to do the heavy lifting with the high-risk crime and criminals. Extending that concept further across the criminal justice system, correctional officials are also looking at a similar model for how low-risk offenders are being supervised in the community. By using the special constable model as it relates to probation officers, other resources are freed up to provide closer supervision on offenders who are posing a greater risk to commit crimes that are obviously more serious or more violent.
The point here is that by encouraging these innovative applications of what might be seen as old ideas, Saskatchewan is creating new practices that are already anchored in success. In aiming to chalk up additional successes we need to ensure that we are collecting the most accurate and appropriate evidence. Saskatchewan is embarking on partnerships with members of academia in the social sciences to create a centre of excellence for community safety. Dale McFee will have the details on that pursuit. Let me say that such a facility, whether it be bricks and mortar or the interconnectedness that our Internet brings, will create the ability to attach to academic and forensic evidence to up our game in building and measuring community safety models.
I can tell you that Dale has the support of Saskatchewan's provincial government as he pursues the actions and initiatives he has designated as priorities for him and his team. I am hoping that in turn my government can count on you for your support so that we can extend the reach of Saskatchewan's solutions to reducing crime rates and their accompanying social and economic costs.
Thank you.