Neighbourhood policing pilot to launch in October

Neighbourhood response teams are set to roll out in three highcrime areas next month in what Ottawa police hope is a pilot that will eventually lead to teams across the city.

Interim Chief Steve Bell said Monday at the police board meeting that the pilot is a “reinvestment” in the kind of neighbourhood-based policing that not only solves crime and social disorder issues but also builds relationships with the community.

In 2017, police tried a new service delivery model. Before that, the force employed a district model of neighbourhood officers to deal with community-specific issues. Various areas of the city had groups of officers who patrolled the regions and addressed resident and community concerns.

But facing budget constraints, and in a bid to become more efficient, the service began a radical restructuring — which ended up dealing a major blow to its neighbourhood policing model. Neighbourhood officers were folded back into patrol and instead of being free to deal with the needs of the neighbourhood on any given day, they were expected to respond to 911 emergencies as they happened. The community was outraged. Gone were the relationships and the quick action of officers who knew all the players and knew how to solve issues.

“Community policing is frontand-centre for us every single day,” Bell said Monday. “We know that the community feels we’ve drifted away from that.”

It created a gap in the service police could provide the community, Insp. Ken Bryden said.

Beginning in October, three teams of nine officers — five constables, a community police officer, a school resource officer, a traffic officer and a sergeant to oversee them all — will deploy to three neighbourhoods. Vanier/Overbrook, Heron Gate/South End, and Carlington/Caldwell were selected as pilot areas based on calls for service, violent crime and property crime rates and numbers of shootings. The rates of crime in those neighbourhoods are greater than the rates citywide, sometimes even double, Bryden said.

Police last year had conceived of a small team of officers who would move throughout the city. That plan was scrapped once both the board and community members said having officers dedicated to the geography of a neighbourhood was vital to success on the ground.

The community also said they wanted those officers to be with them for some time — high turnover rates in a job where you need to gather and produce local intelligence just wasn’t going to work. Police agreed there, too.

Aside from having each team staffed by two officers on a temporary one-year developmental assignment, the rest will work on the team for at least five years.

Officers will work with residents, community groups and business owners on a daily basis to identify issues. Each team will be expected to carry out its roles with crime prevention and intervention in mind.

“These police officers will arrest bad people for doing bad things,” Bryden said. But they also will

work on long-term solutions to address the issues they see, work with other social agencies to find the best kind of intervention and focus on dispute resolution.

“This framework needs to be built on meaningful and lasting relationships with the residents,” Bryden said. “These officers will have the time and the capacity to do that and to fill those voids.”

Police hope to gradually introduce more teams as future budgets are approved. They have also commissioned a study to evaluate the teams and the Ottawa police neighbourhood policing model. The study will begin with a public survey that launches next month alongside the neighbourhood response teams and a final report is expected in March 2021.

Neighbourhoods in which there is not a pilot response team will remain on the 2017 delivery model until there are more teams. syogaretnam@postmedia.com twitter.com/shaaminiwhy