Peter Sloly's departure from the top ranks of the Toronto Police Service comes as no great surprise. He wanted to be chief and lost out to Mark Saunders in a close competition for the top job last year. It never seemed likely that he would stay on a deputy chief, playing second fiddle to his former peer.
What's significant is not that he left, but what he said on the way out. "Until policing stops being focused and driven on that reactive enforcement model, it will continue to be exponentially costly," he told a forum last month. "We run around all over the city in the most unfocused way, reacting to what you call us for, as opposed to trying to understand what's going on and … putting our most important resources in the best place."
He said that if police made better use of their resources and embraced modern technology, such as Internet-enabled mobile devices, the force could probably get by with several hundred fewer officers. That argument annoyed the police union, which called his remarks nothing more than sour grapes, but his candour helped ignite a necessary debate about the future of policing in Toronto.
The old model of policing – men and women in uniform, responding to complaints – is inefficient and ruinously expensive. Toronto's policing costs now exceed $1-billion a year, draining resources from other city services. In an era when crime is generally down, there is no excuse for maintaining a bloated budget and a bureaucratic, hierarchical force. Reform is long, long overdue.
For years, the Toronto Police Services Board has been pushing police commanders to change how they do things.
The previous chair of the board, Alok Mukherjee, argued over and over that the force needs to transform itself from top to bottom, becoming more flexible and handing more routine tasks to civilians.
Academic analysts agreed. "Many of the duties that police perform," Christian Leuprecht wrote in a 2014 paper for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, "can be performed as effectively and efficiently by non-sworn members, special constables, community-safety officers or private security companies." He concluded that "Canada's police are pricing themselves out of business."
Police commanders often counter that, with so much of their spending going to officers' salaries and benefits, they have only limited ability to control costs. Police union leaders maintain that, to be safe, the city still needs to keep a good number of well-trained officers in the field.
But modernizing the force doesn't mean disarming it. It doesn't mean letting criminals run free in the streets. It just means working smarter, giving potentially dangerous tasks to armed and uniformed officers and tasks that are usually less dangerous to others. In Britain, community-support officers are allowed to perform duties such as escorting prisoners to jail. Some British forces have more members out of uniform than in it.
When the police board was doing its search for a new chief to replace outgoing Bill Blair, it put a premium on reform. When the board selected Chief Saunders, Mr. Mukherjee said he was chosen because of his leadership qualities and his willingness to embrace change.
Now, that willingness is being put to the test. Is he really the man to transform policing in Toronto? With his blunt parting remarks, Deputy Chief Sloly has thrown down the gauntlet to his one-time rival. Let's see how the chief responds.
Marcus Gee