The tough road ahead
There is little new in the “action plan” to be debated by the Toronto Police Board on Thursday. Most of its 34 recommendations have appeared in one form or another in a string of reports commissioned over the seven years since the board promised to modernize the force and get its ballooning budget under control.
That most of the plan’s proposed new directions are old ideas is not a demerit, but an indication of just how difficult transformation can be. In any organization, and particularly for often-sclerotic police forces, reform is much easier conceived than implemented. The board must not only approve the welcome and overdue measures proposed, but also ensure that it has a plan to overcome the predictable obstacles.
The direction recommended by the Transformational Task Force, led by board chair Andy Pringle and Chief Mark Saunders, is the right one: more efficient, less adversarial, more embedded in and co-operative with the communities served. The most significant recommendations include:
A three-year freeze on promotions and new hires with a goal of reducing the force through attrition. With almost 90 per cent of the force’s $1-billion budget going to wages and benefits, there’s little alternative to shrinking the ranks.
An end to the controversial TAVIS program, saturating troubled areas of the city with specialized rapid-response units. Instead of building relationships, this heavy-handed approach often increases mistrust of police.
Assigning officers to neighbourhoods for a minimum of three years, allowing time to build relationships and establish trust.
Having highly paid uniformed staff concentrate on serious police work instead of responding to various bylaw infractions and other minor matters that could be better handled by others.
Taken together, the proposals would go a long way toward not just saving money, but also building a more effective police service.
Experts and police brass alike have long known this is the right path. The question now is whether the leadership has the will and a plan to navigate the inevitable internal blowback and assuage understandable public skepticism.
Predictably, the police union has already griped about the plan. Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack has claimed, against all evidence, that cuts would necessarily undermine public safety. He has even threatened that “job action” may be taken by officers “stressed by the workload.”
These concerns, while exaggerated, cannot be ignored. Several of the proposals would require a change to the collective agreement. One way or another, police leadership will have to find a way to get the rank and file on board. Unfortunately, the task force process seems largely to have excluded the police association and police brass have had little to say about how, exactly, they intend to get the union to co-operate.
This apparent divide between the rank and file and their leadership hints at the biggest obstacle to success: a police culture that’s famously resistant to change. While the task force has acknowledged that a culture shift is “the essential underpinning” of all the recommendations, its plan for achieving this is sketchy.
The issues at stake — public trust, public safety, fiscal responsibility — are too important for this effort to be added to the list of failed reforms. Critics are right that an important starting point will be an independent assessment of the cultural hurdles that will have to be overcome. Taking stock of and being open about the challenges is hard. It seems the police want to do the right thing. Now they must finally do it — and do it right.