Better policing without further cuts on House agenda

Committee approves $200,000 in travel to study forces in California, Britain

Members of the House of Commons’ public safety committee have been approved to spend close to $200,000 this spring to travel to several cities along coastal California and in Britain as part of their study into how to keep crime-fighting costs under control.

With police operating expenses doubling in the last decade, committee members say they’re looking for innovative policing strategies that won’t drain government coffers and that will save them from having to cut frontline staff.

Yet some of the very cities they are planning to visit have seen deep cuts to police personnel in recent years.

Much of the planning for the trips has taken place in-camera — or behind closed doors — and an itinerary has not been finalized.

What is known is that a sixmember delegation has been given the green light to travel to San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, while another six-member delegation has been approved to travel to London and Manchester, England.

The MPs will be accompanied by committee staff, most likely a clerk and a researcher.

Minutes from the public safety committee’s meetings show that they had considered spending $193,088.95 to travel to Britain and $79,210.15 to travel to California. But the budgets were scaled back to $124,410.50 and $49,612.45. The amounts were approved by the House on Friday.

“We just want to find out the best way that we can continue a high level of policing and not have it be so burdensome for our municipalities, our provinces and our federal government,” Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, the committee’s chair, said in an interview. “There are things (these cities) have done differently. The last thing we want to do is start cutting police officers.”

Sorenson declined to go into detail about how the committee decided which cities to visit. But a recent posting on his website stated that the committee chose Britain “to see first-hand their implementation of a radically reformed policing model adapted to the same challenges that we face in Canada.”

The California cities, meanwhile, were chosen for their “award-winning community-oriented policing strategies.”

San Diego has been recognized as being an early adopter of the community-oriented policing model, in which officers work with neighbourhoods to try to prevent crimes rather than just respond to them. Under the model, officers regularly attend town halls and sponsor programs to keep kids off the street.

But in recent years, questions have been raised about whether that community-policing model can be sustained due to deep cuts to personnel.

“Is San Diego’s progressive policing legacy dead?” and “How budget cuts have forced SD’s hand on gang policing” are some of the headlines that have appeared on the investigative news website Voice of San Diego.

Assistant Chief Shelley Zimmerman said in an interview with Postmedia News that the number of budgeted positions within the San Diego Police Department has been cut by just over 300 since 2009 and that the cuts have taken a toll.

“We have little time to do proactive policing,” she said. “We don’t in many cases have that luxury anymore.”

But that doesn’t mean the police agency can’t serve as a model to the rest of the world for its communitycentered approach to policing, she said. Zimmerman noted that delegations from Europe have visited the city to study their policing model.

Kristina Davis, a crime reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper, said in an email that even though the city has traditionally operated with a leaner police force, the city continues to have one of the lowest crime rates among the nation’s big cities.

“The police chief often tells me that the department’s good relationship with the community is one of the biggest factors when it comes to our low crime rates,” she said.

Overseas, the Greater Manchester Police force — the third largest in Britain — has had to cut more than 300 frontline officers as a result of a 20-per-cent reduction in its budget, according to media reports. In a news release last month, Tony Lloyd, the newly elected police and crime commissioner for Greater Manchester, called the cuts “reckless.”

“We all recognize the importance of driving efficiency within the police service, and doing this — alongside working more intelligently with partner agencies — has allowed police to achieve significant cuts in crime while reducing costs,” he said.

“But the scale and speed of the reductions that have been imposed on forces is unprecedented and reckless. Here in Greater Manchester there will be 1,520 fewer officers by 2015 than there were just three years ago.”

NDP MP Randall Garrison, vicechair of the public safety committee, said opposition members approved the trips to Britain and California and will form part of the travelling delegations.

“The idea behind the travel was to look at best practices in terms of economics of policing. There were a number of suggestions made of where we might go,” he said, declining to elaborate because discussions took place in-camera.

He noted that opposition members believe there are Canadian cities that could be visited, too, particularly those that have shown leadership in First Nations policing.