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Cop boss takes aim

As momentum for a major shakeup of the Toronto Police Service (TPS) appears to be growing, the union representing Toronto’s cops has launched a pair of “communications strategies,” one of them mocking the head of the force’s civilian oversight board.

In response to what he describes as the “myths being peddled around police issues,” Toronto Police Association (TPA) president Mike McCormack announced the plans in the September issue of union magazine Tour Of Duty.

“The policing profession has the dubious honour of being bombarded daily with ‘absurd’ and often misinformed, biased and inflammatory comments from bureaucrats and public officials,” McCormack wrote.

The first strategy, “Just The Facts,” was rolled out in August in response to a Toronto Star article about proposals to streamline the force, and involved sending “fact sheets” to media.

The second, a “satirical poster campaign” dubbed “Absurd Is The Word,” takes aim at Toronto Police Services Board chair Alok Mukherjee’s suggestion that it may not be necessary to equip all officers with firearms and that civilians could be trained to handle some calls.

The first of the posters, which appeared on the cover of this month’s Tour of Duty, mis-attributes a quote to Mukherjee about “taking guns away” from officers (the phrasing was actually a Star reporter’s). The accompanying text reads: “All in favour of disarming our cops… raise your hands.” Below it is a photo of a man in an orange prison jumpsuit holding both his arms in the air, suggesting that only criminals would support taking guns from cops.

McCormack says the posters weren’t necessarily meant for public consumption. They will appear in police units as well as on the TPA website and Facebook page.

Mukherjee is not amused. He says the attack “speak[s] volumes about what the association thinks of the idea of transforming how policing is done.”

Councillor Pam McConnell, who sat on the police board from 2003 to 2010, says the poster campaign is a sign that the TPA sees the conversation about modernization as a threat. “The association still thinks of it as a we/they, bad guy/good guy” kind of thing, she says.

The feud between the TPA and the board chair comes amid fresh debate over what kind of police service Toronto should have and how much the public should be paying for it. A series of high-profile shootings has led to calls for officers’ use of force to be curtailed, and politicians are ramping up pressure to reduce police spending. The board’s decision to let Chief Bill Blair go when his contract expires in April has been widely seen as a consequence of his unwillingness to aggressively pursue cost-cutting reforms.

Successive administrations have failed to control the force’s spending. Between 2001 and 2011, Toronto’s gross police budget expanded from $592 million to $974 million. Over the same period, crime decreased 17.1 per cent and violent crime fell 14.8 per cent.

The costs of policing are also increasing faster than those for other city services. In 2011 the force accounted for 10.4 per cent of the city’s budget in 2014 it accounted for 11.4 per cent, with TPS expenditures hitting $1.1 billion.

In a mayoral campaign lauded for its straight talk, now-withdrawn candidate David Soknacki warned that policing costs are the “largest single challenge” to the city’s budget. Unless they are brought under control, Soknacki says, we will be unable to “afford to build the city we want.”

Toronto’s force isn’t the only one under scrutiny. A study released this month by conservative think tank the Fraser Institute found that Canadians everywhere are paying more for law enforcement even as crime across all major categories is declining.

Mukherjee, now in his eleventh year on the board, argues that the force is too reliant on armed, uniformed officers who command high salaries. He asserts that a maximum of 30 per cent of police work now involves fighting crime, while the rest is dealing with calls like domestic disputes and people in mental distress that could be better handled by people trained in areas other than traditional gun-and-badge law enforcement.

Mukherjee has plenty of data to back him up. According to police documents, only 23 per cent of officers’ service time is spent on “Priority 1” emergency calls. Twenty-one per cent is spent on calls like domestic incidents, personal injuries and people in emotional distress.

A 2011 Ernst & Young report found that 227 TPS positions of the total uniformed complement of over 5,000 officers didn’t require police training, powers of arrest or the use of a firearm, and that hiring civilians to do those jobs would save $3.7 million a year.

“It’s not possible to deal with the issue of the economics of policing simply by making some superficial changes,” Mukherjee says. “We need to rethink everything that we do.”

He says the TPA’s poster campaign signals “a refusal to engage in a debate.”

Over coffee at NOW’s offices, McCormack defends the posters, arguing that disarming part of the police force is “just not a reality.”

He says that while officers are dispatched to many incidents that may not initially involve criminality, “there’s a potential for disorder or criminality” in most cases.

In McCormack’s view, popular criticisms of police practices, including lucrative paid duty jobs and the shift structure that sees the city pay for 28 hours of police work every 24 hours, have been grossly oversimplified.

He stresses that the TPA is not opposed to reducing costs – he cites as an example the decision to farm out booking and forensic identification jobs to civilians. The TPS is also coming out of a three-year hiring freeze.

But the timing of the TPA’s campaign is no coincidence. Next spring, the TPS will get a new chief, and the board looks certain to pick a leader who shares Mukherjee’s vision of a revamped force.

That change in leadership will coincide with the expiry at the end of 2014 of the force’s collective agreement, which represents a chance to renegotiate the salaries and benefits that make up 89.1 per cent of the police budget. The outcome of the political battles that unfold over the coming months will play a big role in determining what the force looks like in a few years’ time.

Councillor Michael Thompson, vice-chair of the Police Services Board, warns that it will be tough to negotiate a cheaper contract, especially given the provincial arbitration system that many blame for inflating police contracts across Ontario. Thompson should know. As Rob Ford’s point man on the policing file, his attempts to rein in the budget were hamstrung by the 11.4 per cent pay raise over four years the city negotiated with the TPA in 2011.

Thompson describes reforming the police force as a Sisyphean struggle. “You’ve got a big ball that you’re carrying [up the mountain], and somehow you think that as you move further, it becomes lighter. It becomes heavier, quite frankly.”


2 million Estimated number of calls for service Toronto police receive each year

47 Percentage of calls that require a police officer to be dispatched

$592 million Police budget in 2001

$1.1 billion Police budget in 2014

17.1 Percentage decrease in overall crime between 2001 and 2011

Compiled by Ben Spurr

bens@nowtoronto.com | @bens

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