City police to look at trimming shift length

The Saskatoon Police Service will explore the possibility of changing how it schedules officers in an effort to make its service more efficient and effective, but such a move would “take some time,” as it would need to be bargained with police unions, says Chief Troy Cooper.

The Saskatoon Police Service patrol unit, which has boots on the ground 24 hours a day, has officers working four days on, four days off on staggered 12-hour shifts. This results in officers working more than 40 hours a week and, as such, they accumulate earned days off. When those days are taken, it creates holes in staffing that need to be filled. The shift schedule is protected by a bargained agreement with the officers’ unions.

A third-party review of the police service, which was completed by independent consulting firm perivale + taylor last summer and released to the public this month, recommends that the length of shifts be reduced to eliminate earned days off.

“The Agreements are currently heavily weighted towards employee convenience at the expense of effective deployment,” the review notes.

Robert Taylor, a representative of perivale + taylor, was at a Saskatoon board of police commissioner’s meeting Thursday to answer questions about the review into the police service. He told commissioners, including Chief Cooper, that the Vancouver Police Department has adopted a model “that’s probably the best in the country”: Officers work 11-hour shifts four days on and four days off. Rather than getting earned days off, they end up owing the company time each fiscal year, which is when they can be scheduled to do training or provide staffing for special events that require high levels of police presence.

Speaking with reporters after the meeting, Cooper said changing to an 11-hour shifting model from a 12-hour shifting model “is something we’ll look at of course.”

“It’s a bargained benefit and if we want to change the shifting as they mentioned tonight to an 11hour shift as we see in Vancouver, that’s something that has to be bargained fairly and that’s a process that takes some time,” Cooper said.

The review into the Saskatoon Police Service spent considerable ink discussing the service’s low Patrol Availability Factor (PAF), which measures the proportion of time officers have to do preventive work as opposed to responding to calls.

The report said the most effective policing is done when the PAF is at 40 per cent. The overall PAF for patrol cars and patrol sergeants within the Saskatoon Police Service in 2015 was 30 per cent. In order to raise the PAF to 40 per cent without making any other changes, a 30 per cent increase in staffing would be required, the consulting firm said.

However, perivale + taylor’s report points out that the Saskatoon Police Service could look at adding resources in a more strategic manner; instead of deploying the same number of patrol officers each day and shift regardless of workload, the service could create a new deployment model that would increase deployment during busier times.

Cooper told reporters that the service’s PAF needs to improve and people are looking at how they can do that.

“It’s a complicated sort of discussion to have, but certainly we’re already involved in those discussions,” he said.

Another recommendation of the report was that the police service identify jobs currently being done by sworn officers that could be better done by civilians. For example, the report pointed out the service’s 911-communication centre is supervised by a sergeant who often has no background in communications or radio systems. Such a job could be done better and for less money by a civilian, the report argues.

Cooper said he doesn’t have a problem with “civilianization” of the force, but said there would need to be a “case-by-case analysis” of each situation.

“There certainly are some parts of the organization that could be handled by a civilian rather than an officer and we’re going to look at all of those things and we’re going to actually look at it with the people who are impacted as part of an action team … Certainly there are many models of policing out there that use a mix of police and civilians and we’re going to find what works right for the City of Saskatoon,” Cooper said.

Cooper said the police service will provide public updates on its progress toward all of the recommendations outlined in the perivale + taylor report. Some of the recommendations — such as having a plan in place to deal with a cyber attack and creating a telephone response unit — have already been completed. Others are in the works. And those that involve bargaining collective agreements will take time.

“(The recommendations) are opportunities for us to have discussions about what we’re doing, question why we’re doing it the way we are, but the solutions we arrive at might not be the same as the ones perivale + taylor recommend," Cooper said.