1. Police not enforcing traffic laws
2. Police staff increasing, again
3. Possible change in strip search practice
4. Introducing body cameras
5. TPAC seeking new members
Toronto Police Accountability Bulletin No. 117, December 17, 2019.
This Bulletin is published by the Toronto Police Accountability Coalition (TPAC), a group of individuals and organizations in Toronto interested in police policies and procedures, and in making police more accountable to the community they are committed to serving. Our website is http://www.tpac.ca
***
In this Bulletin:
1. Police not enforcing traffic laws
2. Police staff increasing, again
3. Possible change in strip search practice
4. Introducing body cameras
5. TPAC seeking new members
6. Subscribe to the Bulletin
***
1. Police not enforcing traffic laws
More pedestrians and cyclists have been killed in Toronto in 2019 than in the past 15 years. More collisions occurred in 2019 than in the past 15 years.
City Council has responded with a Vision Zero Traffic Safety policy to slow down traffic and design roads to be safer.
The police put little priority on road safety. The number of tickets issued for moving violations has dropped 66 per cent in the last ten years. Speeding tickets are down by a count of 140,000. There has been a 44 per cent drop in careless driving charges, a 93 per cent drop in unsafe left turn violations.
Here’s one example. In June 2009, 17,633 tickets were issued for speeding. In June 2018, 3353 tickets. The comparison holds for other months in that year.
See https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/12/11/140000-fewer-speeding-charges-how-toronto-police-traffic-tickets-fell-by-two-thirds-even-as-deaths-spiked.html
Obviously the police service has substantially reduced its attention to what happens on the roads. The traffic enforcement unit was disbanded in 2013, but the reduction in tickets for moving violations started before then – that just intensified it – and in any case most tickets for moving violations are given by general officers, not by the traffic unit. It is noteworthy that this reduction in traffic enforcement was never brought forward by management as a new policy. Management now implies that the reduction in traffic enforcement is because of the reduction in staff resulting from the Transformational Task Force which began implementation in 2017. But that’s a weak explanation: the reduction in moving violation tickets was evident in 2015 when the total staff (uniform and civilian) was more than 7500 – before the staffing reductions occurred.
At the same time as the police service decided ten years ago to reduce attention to traffic issues, the number of people arrested began to fall. Ten years ago police arrested just over 50,000 people a year. This year the number will be down to 36,000. Maybe the reduction is because Toronto has less crime and has become a safer city (except if you are a cyclist or a pedestrian.)
And the police have stopped carding in the past two years. TAVIS units no longer sweep through low income neighbourhoods. What is it the police spend their time on in 2019?
There’s a serious problem with the way the police force is being governed and managed. Those in charge are not paying enough attention to ensuring that good and appropriate policing happens in Toronto. We need a serious discussion about what we want police to be doing, apart from spending more than $1 billion of our property tax dollars every year. The place to begin is to get an independent study on what officers actually do during their shifts. The last time that happened was 40 years ago when Richard Ericson did his study of how police spent their time in Peel Region. (See his book `Reproducing Order.’) We need that kind of a study today for the Toronto police force.
2. Police staff increasing, again
The staff of the Toronto police service is expanding quite considerably. Adding uniform and civilian staff, one finds the following staffing levels: 2018: 4705 + 2099 = 6804; 2019: 4837 + 2334 = 7181; 2020: 4960 + 2490 = 7450. That’s almost a 10 per cent increase in staff in a three year period. No other city department shows anything approaching that level of staff increase.
The 2020 budget proposes to hire 140 new uniform staff for the Primary Response Unit; eight officers for traffic unit; 40 to act community officers; and five new Equity, Inclusion and Human Rights positions. These are all worthwhile initiatives, but as TPAC argued before the Board in late November, these positions can easily be found from within the service. It would be a matter of changing the shift schedule (so there are no longer as many officers working at 4 am as at 7 pm), and junking the rule that requires two officers in a car after dark Those two changes would free up enough officers to fill these positions from existing staff.
Senior staff rejected that advice and the Board simply approved the staff request for more officers. The extra cost for 2020 is more than $11 million, and since many of the new hires will take place in the second half of the year, at least double that in 2021. The police service (and Board) always assumes that it can spend whatever it wants and that City Council will not object.
3. Possible change in strip search practice
Be ready for small mercies. At the November Board meeting the chief asked to proceed with the use of a body scanner – at the cost of a cool $450,000 in public money – in lieu of performing strip searches at one station. One scanner is now being used in a pilot project and the thought was the service should buy a whole bunch more at $320,000 apiece with another $30,000 for training staff to operate each machine. Apparently police don’t like performing strip searches.
TPAC pointed out, as we have done before (see Bulletin No. 113) that Toronto strip searches 40 times more people arrested than any other large force in Ontario. Why not simply adopt the recommendations of the OIPRD and the Supreme Court of Canada and do a frisk first in order to see if a strip search is needed? We also noted that, according to police data, less than 3 per cent of strip searches reveal anything that can be considered evidence of a crime.
Mayor John Tory asked the chief if the current policy required a frisk before a strip search was undertaken and the chief waffled, saying it was usual practise. Mayor Tory asked for a report on strip search policy for the March meeting of the Board. Perhaps at that time we will see a more reasonable strip search policy introduced.
4. Introducing body cameras
The last time the Board considered the issue of body cameras was in the fall of 2016 when staff reported on a small pilot project. The staff report said that no decision had been made as to when cameras would be turned on and off by officers. Privacy issues had yet to be clarified. It was unclear if cameras would produce evidence which can be submitted to courts and whether courts will accept such evidence. No decision had been made about how to cover the cost of officers editing the daily takes, a cost expected to be very high in terms of officers’ time.
At the November Board meeting, the chief recommended proceeding with body cameras, proposing that $2.5 million be spent in 2020, and some $5 million in the capital budget over the next nine years. TPAC opposed these recommendations arguing there were far too many unanswered questions about the cost and usefulness of body cameras. Senior staff replied that a protocol had been developed that officer would have to turn cameras on before any incident – we asked to see a copy of this protocol and were denied – and that the privacy commissioner was now happy with the arrangement, whatever that meant. The Board, as usual, simply went with the staff report, so body cameras are now on the way.
5. TPAC seeking new members
TPAC would like to add a few new members to the steering committee, which meets monthly. The steering committee discusses policing policy and reviews agenda of the Toronto Police Services Board.
If you have an interest in joining the steering committee please let us know your interest at info@tpac.ca.
6. Subscribe to the Bulletin
To subscribe or unsubscribe to this Bulletin, please send a note to info@tpac.ca with the instructions in the subject line or in the text of the message. Our e-mail list is confidential and will not be made available to others. There is no charge for the Bulletin. Our website is http://www.tpac.ca.
- end -