The committee met at 9:09 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Doug Routley. I’m the MLA for Nanaimo–​North Cowichan and Chair of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act, an all-party committee of the Legisla­tive Assembly.

I would like to acknowledge that I’m joining today’s meeting from the traditional territories of the Malahat First Nation, and it’s an honour to work in the territory.

[9:10 a.m.]

I’d like to welcome all those who are listening and participating to this meeting. Our committee is undertaking a broad consultation with respect to policing and related systemic issues in B.C. We are taking a phased approach to this work and are meeting with a number of organizations and individuals over the fall to follow up on input we’ve already received and to learn more about new models and approaches that have been drawn to our attention.

For today’s meeting, we’ll be having follow-up discussions with the Vancouver police department and with E-Comm.

As a reminder to our presenters, all audio from our meetings is broadcast live on our website. A complete transcript will also be posted.

I’ll now ask members of the committee to introduce themselves. I’ll first call on my friend MLA Kirkpatrick.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you to our Chair.

Hello. I’m Karin Kirkpatrick. I am the MLA for West Vancouver–Capilano.

I’m here on the traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish First Nations.

T. Halford: Hi, Trevor Halford, MLA for Surrey–White Rock.

I am coming to you from the traditional territories of the Semiahmoo First Nation people.

H. Sandhu: Good morning, everyone. I’m Harwinder Sandhu, MLA for Vernon-Monashee.

I’m coming to you from the unceded and traditional territory of the Okanagan Indian Nations.

G. Begg: Good morning, Chief. I’m Garry Begg. I’m the MLA for Surrey-Guildford.

I’m coming to you today from the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Kwantlen, the Katzie and the Semiahmoo First Nations.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Good morning, Chief Pal­mer. Thanks for joining us. Look forward to the conversation. Dan Davies here, MLA for Peace River North.

I’m on the traditional territory of the Dane-zaa people.

A. Olsen: Good morning, Chief. Adam Olsen, MLA for Saanich North and the Islands.

I’m proud to live and work and come to you today from W̱JOȽEȽP in the beautiful W̱SÁNEĆ territory.

D. Routley (Chair): Thanks very much, everyone.

Assisting us today, very ably, are Karan Riarh, from the Parliamentary Committees Office, and Billy Young, from Hansard Services. I thank everyone.

I’ll now introduce Chief Constable Palmer, who you all know, and welcome him back to the committee. The purpose of the meeting today, as Chief Palmer has been made aware, is for us to follow up with questions. We’ve had the presentations, and we’ve heard a lot of what’s been done and what the problems have been. Now we’re really in a forward-looking mode where we’re looking for the solutions that our guests might suggest for us.

With that in mind, Chief Palmer, would you be comfortable with us going straight to questions from members?

Follow-up Discussion to
Presentations on Police Act

VANCOUVER POLICE DEPARTMENT

A. Palmer: Yes. Again, good morning, everybody. Adam Palmer, chief of the Vancouver police department.

It’s my pleasure to be joining you here today from the traditional, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people. I’m thankful to be on these lands.

Whatever format you would like. If you would like to go straight into Q and A, that’s great with me.

D. Routley (Chair): I think, given what the committee members have indicated to me…. They have a lot of questions for you, and we’d really like a full amount of time for that, if possible.

I’ll go straight to MLA Begg.

G. Begg: Good morning, Adam. I think today I want you to be introspective in a forward-thinking way. I wonder, sort of broadly, what keeps you up at night when you think of the future of policing.

I know that you’re the former chief of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. Without casting too wide a net, I think, from your vantage point, you have a unique opportunity to sort of point us in a direction that you think would be appropriate. I know that you have an overview of policing throughout Canada as well as here in British Columbia.

[9:15 a.m.]

With that stage, I guess my direct question is: what keeps you up at night when you think of policing in British Columbia and, by extension, Canada? If you could alert us to any situations that you see arising that you think will keep us up at night if we don’t get this Police Act reformed so that it is reflective of the policing needs of all of British Columbia.

It’s a very wide net, I know, but it’s the task that we’re faced with. We’re looking to you to set some signal posts for us to check along the way.

A. Palmer: Thank you very much for the question. My pleasure to jump into that one. It is very open-ended, so I’ll give it my best shot. I’ll just say, generally…. I do get asked that question a lot as the chief of police — what keeps me up at night. Generally speaking, I actually sleep quite well. I’m not hampered by sleep issues.

As far as things that are of concern to me, really more when I’m awake than when I’m asleep…. Trust and confi­dence in policing is a huge issue. I think that’s one nationally that we have to be very alive to. The public has to have trust and confidence.

We live in a free and democratic society, in a western democracy, and we’re policing by consent. We’re not a militarized police. We’re not an arm of the state that’s oppressing the people. We’re here to police by consent of the people, and we need to be accepted by the people, trusted and accountable to the people. That’s probably number one. I’ll get into that a little bit more.

Things that I would say normally, when I get asked that question about what keeps me up at night…. Actually, the health and welfare of our people is of concern to me. The well-being of police officers right now, the morale of police officers, the wear and tear on front-line police across this country — I’ve never seen anything like it. They’re under extreme pressure with COVID, a lot of the social discussions, which are important, that are taking place. But some of the media narrative has been very, very hard on morale for police officers.

All that aside, I think that we’re also in a really good position. Again, the province of British Columbia, kudos to you. You were one of the first, if not the first, province to come out and announce you were going to do a full review of the Police Act. Being very familiar with the landscape in Canada and also the United States, I would say that in Canada and, in particular, in British Columbia, we’re actually well positioned or already at a good starting place. We’re not starting from scratch on many of these things. We have a lot of amazing programs to build on and things to really be proud of.

I know that you will hear many different perspectives, which is important. I think it’s also important to hear that perspective from police about some of the great things we’ve done, where we’re at, kind of as a baseline, and where we can build from there. This has been a continuous journey for us. We’re not at the beginning of that slope. We’re part way up. We’ve got a ways to go, but we’ve got some great things to build on.

The mental health realm is one. I don’t know how much detail you want me to get into. I know there are going to be lots of questions. Particularly, mental health and addictions I know are a huge issue in our communities. I could elaborate on that significantly, if you would like me to. I just don’t want to hog all the time.

G. Begg: I don’t want to hog the time either, but I wonder if you could be more specific, rather than a general approach. There are specific things, I think, of which you’re aware that could be done or could be addressed by a revamped Police Act. Those are the kinds of things that we’re interested in. Sort of markers along the way that are precursors to everything else.

A. Palmer: Absolutely. Okay. When I spoke to you last time…. I know you’re getting hit up with all different types of things. Four very specific things that I mentioned to you. One was about the implementation of body worn cameras for police in British Columbia. I stand by that one strongly.

Oversight model in British Columbia. A huge proponent of oversight and talking about the amalgamation and better coordination between the OPCC, the IIO and the professional standards sections of individual police departments.

I find it astonishing that we’re all sitting here in 2021 and we’re still talking about the police investigating themselves. My goodness. We should not be doing that in 2021. There should be outside bodies that are doing the investigations of police. I’ve been a proponent of that for many years, and I think that this model we have now can definitely be revamped in that area. That’s an area where you have a lot of influence on this committee.

I also spoke to you about the health care system. I’m talking about mental health and addictions as well. That is an area that needs some help right now in our province. I’m going to really nail it on that one in a second.

[9:20 a.m.]

The fourth thing I talked to you about is very specific to my city, and that’s the Downtown Eastside and the overarching issues that we’re seeing in that community. It’s a community in distress, not just in Vancouver, not just in B.C. but in all of Canada. Really, it stands out in North America as a community in distress.

The fourth thing I talk to you about is very specific to my city, and that’s the Downtown Eastside and the overarching issues that we’re seeing in that community. It’s a community in distress, not just in Vancouver, not just in B.C. but in all of Canada. Really, it stands out in North America as a community in distress. I have some ideas on how we can make that community better.

I’m going to focus right now on mental health and addiction. That’s an area where…. We have so many discussions about police being involved in that space, whether they should be or not. What are the best programs? We hear about programs in Eugene, Oregon like CAHOOTS. We hear about ACT. We hear about Car 87 and Car 66 and all these different terms that we hear.

I’m just going to nail it down, I think, to some very specific points that I think you need to be aware of. We have some great programs here in British Columbia that we can grow on and that are really international best practices. I’m going to tell you about three right now.

I think you’re familiar with Car 87, so I won’t belabour it. That’s one where…. It’s the partnership car between police and mental health professionals. That is a great program. We’ve had it since 1978. We assist people in crisis with officers, in plain clothes, with specialized training and with psychiatric nurses, and we have great results going out into the community.

That is a reactive program, and I think that’s important to remember when you hear about these partnership cars. That is solely a reactive program. That is not proactive.

I guess an analogy I would like to use from health care is…. That’s like going to help the person that already has stage 4 cancer. They’re really in crisis. I’m, actually, really interested in these programs…. Let’s help prevent people from getting cancer. When they get the first signs of cancer, let’s get them on a really healthy path so they don’t get to stage 4 and they’re not in a life-or-death crisis.

The two teams that we have that are so leading edge in that area and working closely with Coastal Health are our assertive community treatment teams and our assertive outreach teams. These are very proactive teams where we work with the health care professionals. I know you will get a perspective from many different people in the community on what police should be involved in or not involved in.

I had a meeting last week with our board and executive and with the board and executive of Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care. I need to give full kudos to Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care. I think, in this city, we have built the most progressive approach to mental health in North America. I haven’t seen anybody else with a better program than what we have right here, which is proactive.

This involves information-sharing agreements. It involves situation tables where we sit down daily with the health care professionals. It involves an early-warning system where we identify people before they’re in crisis. We will come across people that are having a high number of incidents where they’re contacting police — they’re suffering from apparent mental health issues — and also an extraordinary number of hospital visits.

I think for many of us sitting here at the table, just intuitively, as Canadians, we would say: “If you’re having ten interactions with the police a month and 15 visits to an emergency department, 25 interactions like that in a month….” I think we would all be somewhat horrified and think: “How can that possibly be?” For any of us, to even have one interaction like that, it would be a significant event in our life. To have dozens of interactions like that is astounding.

What we’ve done is develop that data platform. We sit down every day — police officers that are specially trained, a limited number of police officers, with health care professionals — and we look at the data. Who are those people that are coming into regular contact with the cops and with the health care system, and how can we get out there proactively in the community to help them?

This is data-driven. I’m just going to give you a couple of stats.

What we’ll do is sit around that situation table. We’ll talk about individuals that are at high risk of decompensating. We’re seeing lots of visits by police or ambulance or health care.

We go out, and we visit those people proactively in the community. We’ll knock on their doors. A very low key, a very soft approach. A psych nurse and a plainclothes police officer. It’s checking in on them, seeing how they’re doing, making sure they’re staying on track, making sure they’re going to their visits to Strathcona Mental Health and checking up that they’re taking their medication.

When we check on them…. If they’re doing great and on a good track, then we just say: “Okay. Thank you. That’s great. If you need us, here’s our number. Contact us. We’re here any time you need us.” If they need help, we can drive them to appointments. We can take them to hospital, if necessary. In many cases, those health care professionals can give medication right at the door.

Through that program, where we’re proactively going out in the community, we have reduced…. Over the past six years, since we’ve had that program in Vancouver, there are 2,700 people that we’ve touched that way that are at high risk of decompensating. We have reduced their calls for service by well over 50 percent for police and over 60 percent for health care visits.

[9:25 a.m.]

Those are data numbers that actually show that this program works. You’re not going to see another program that has those kinds of results — significant reductions in health care and police interactions. That’s separate from Car 87. They’re all part of that interwoven system that we have, but I think we really need to focus on that proactive stuff.

Again, I don’t want to hog all the time, but I do also recognize, though, that in Vancouver we are fortunate that we are in a large metropolitan area with the biggest city and the biggest police department in the province. Metro Vancouver generally, metro Victoria generally and some of your bigger centres — like Kamloops, Prince George, Kelowna — will have advantages as far as resources and things that are available to help the community. I realize that it will be more of a struggle in some of the outlying communities and places with less population.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Go ahead, Trevor.

T. Halford: Chief, you touched on 99 percent of what I was going to talk about with mental health and what you guys are doing.

In terms of some of the other models that you mentioned briefly — we’ve talked about them on this call — what, to you, is standing out, outside of our jurisdiction in B.C. specifically, of what is really working? What is something that we can look to adapt — I won’t say in real time — in fairly rapid fashion, whether it’s CAHOOTS or the Memphis model and things like that? Are you having those conversations with those jurisdictions? Have you visited them, or have they visited you? Maybe where you’re at on that.

A. Palmer: Thank you for your question.

I’m very familiar with the Memphis model, actually. A lot of the stuff that we developed here in Vancouver back in the ’80s and ’90s was based on the Memphis model. Then we’ve morphed it and actually grown on that.

I’m very familiar with CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon. We have reached out to Eugene, and I know all the details on that program. It’s a very different set of circumstances than a large metropolitan area like Vancouver is in, but there are some good takeaways. The other piece of that which, I think, comes into the conversation quite regularly, is: what about those calls where you don’t have to have police officers attending? I think that’s worth talking about. With the CAHOOTS program, they have calls where you won’t have a police officer go at all, and they’ll provide assistance in the community.

In Vancouver, what we do with that is…. We have other programs in place. We have a thing called IHOT, the integrated housing outreach team. We have the OOT, the overdose outreach teams, which are like street nurses. We have the Vancouver access and assessment centre that runs out of VGH, which takes about 7,000 calls per year. We have these other entities that are run by health care or other service providers that are helping people with housing, with mental health, with addictions, that are not police and that provide an amazing service. They take away those calls, and VPD doesn’t even go to those types of calls.

Many of those calls that you hear about, which are taken away in Eugene, Oregon, were already taken away in Vancouver. We’re not responding to those types of calls. There are still a small number that we do respond to and that I feel we don’t have to, but we’ve done very detailed data analysis on this. We’ve looked at all the calls that we respond to with mental health as a factor, and 84 percent of those calls will still require the attendance of police for one reason or another.

The reason, I’ll just point out to you, is that if it’s a criminal offence — I’m not talking about criminality where somebody that has a mental health issue may be a suspect — there’s a high victimization rate amongst people in our communities that have mental health issues. For example, in Vancouver, you’re 15 times more likely to be the victim of a crime if you have mental health issues, 23 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime if you have mental health issues, and 19 times more likely to be the victim of crime if you’re suffering from homelessness issues.

People that are marginalized in our communities, that have all kinds of issues that they’re dealing with, and challenges, are being victimized in our communities. If there’s criminality involved, whether you’re a suspect, victim, witness or reportee, the police will still be involved because that is bread-and-butter investigating of crime for the police.

There are also elements under provincial statutes, under, for example, section 28 of the Mental Health Act. If somebody in distress, suffering from an apparent mental health disorder and are a danger to themselves or others, there’s a statutory requirement on the police to apprehend that person and take them forthwith to a physician. That would be another bucket in there.

We also have a number of those calls — about 26 percent of them — where it’s actually the health care providers calling us because they don’t have the resources, the training or the ability to go out in the community and deal with it. On many of these calls — I just think you have to be alive to it — when we talk to Vancouver Coastal Health, when we talk to the psychiatric nurses that work with us, they are not comfortable going into many of these situations, the majority of these situations, without police officers present — in plain clothes, low-key.

[9:30 a.m.]

The nurses will do the majority of the talking, but having that police backup…. Some of these situations, quite frankly, are dangerous. About 12 percent of the cases involve weapons. We’ve broken it down very specifically through our data and know, exactly, those numbers.

In Vancouver, we get about 700 calls for service every day. When we’ve looked at the numbers, there are probably about six of those calls that we could still shed off of our call load. It’s a very small number. But if we’re able to give those to overdose outreach teams, to the IHOT teams, to ACCS, those types of programs, we do that.

We also work with our jail. Our jail has got very advanced programs where for people that come in, either with fentanyl addiction issues, any kind of addiction issues, mental health issues, we have a stream there where we can get them on a good path before they leave our jail, so we’re not just taking somebody into the jail, spinning them around three times and then sending them back out. We’re actually trying to get them onto a good path as we head them out.

Also, the downtown community court is closely dialled in with our mental health resources so that when somebody is going through a criminal justice issue, our mental health teams are dialled in with that, as well, to provide that person assistance.

I’m a firm believer in: let’s help people out before they get into the criminal justice system. I don’t want it so they’ve got to be arrested or charged before we can give them help. Let’s help folks out when they’re suffering in our communities.

There’s lots of different stuff out there, little bits and pieces of takeaways from all these programs. But again, every community will be slightly different in British Columbia. I think we can take the lessons from Vancouver. Surrey is doing some great work as well. So is Victoria, Eugene, Memphis. You can take a lot of those things. We’ve taken them and kind of synthesized them into the Vancouver model, which we’re very, very pleased with. I think there are some great takeaways that you could utilize there.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you.

Go ahead, Dan.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thanks for that, Chief. Thank you, as well, for allowing me to do a ride-along there last week. It was extremely enlightening for myself. I had the opportunity to go out with one of your outreach teams for a few hours and just saw how that worked. It was incredible — the work they do.

What really got me was going into some of these SROs that are in Vancouver with your plainclothes members there and seeing the relationship, which was unbelievable — first-name basis with every single person that we came across. There was a lot of respect there. Like I say, it was really enlightening to be out with that team, and I encourage my colleagues, if they’re able, to try and do the same.

Also, I had the opportunity to experience and see the…. Well, I also learned, for Car 88 and Car 87, one’s night shift and one’s day shift, which I didn’t understand. To see how they roll out — it wasn’t what I thought it was. I was a little….

It was certainly, again, a learning experience for me to understand. My idea around that Car 87 and Car 88 program was that they’re out doing the front-line stuff, but they’re more of that support and trying, as you say, and getting people before they get into the system, helping and supporting and such. Like I say, it was really neat to see all that work, and again, I thank you for the opportunity to come out.

I have a number of questions, and again, I already recognize our time is halfway gone, so I won’t take all the time here. I guess if you…. One thing that we’ve heard quite a bit is support for police officers. We heard this yesterday as well — mental health supports. Obviously members of police forces — it doesn’t matter where they are — experience a lot of trauma themselves, compared to what the average person does, which puts a lot of strain mental-health-wise, which obviously impacts their performance at work, their performance at home, their performance, generally speaking, and how they deliver.

My first question is: what other things are you looking at, and what supports do you feel that we should be looking at to support you in providing a service to your members?

A. Palmer: Yes. Thank you very much for that question.

I heard that you were out with us. I’m sorry our schedules didn’t align. I didn’t get a chance to meet you, but I appreciate you coming out and looking at the front lines, firsthand, what’s going on. I think that’s so important.

I would just offer, to any members of the committee, if any of you…. I know some of you are from the Lower Mainland, but if any of you are in Vancouver and want to come out with us and either go out with a front-line patrol officer or one of our mental health units, that offer is standing. I would welcome you to come at any time. We can make it fit around your schedules, and we’re really happy to do that.

[9:35 a.m.]

As far as officers, yes, the pressures are significant. I’m just going to talk about a couple of things quickly and then, perhaps, some things that we could do to help them.

COVID-19 has hit people significantly hard in society as a whole. For example, we’re meeting here today on Zoom and we’re talking and having a great conversation. Police officers, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, a lot of those front-line people and people in other industries never had that luxury of being able to meet by Zoom, self-isolate, stay out of the fray. They’ve been out there.

As soon as COVID hit, we were just continuing on, 24-7, 365, putting in protocols at great expense to keep the service to the public up there. The unfortunate thing is that with the inherent nature of policing, there are going to be times where you will have to touch somebody, whether it’s breaking up a fight or arresting somebody. So you do have to come into close contact with people sometimes, and it’s very stressful for officers and for their families. They’re put under a lot of pressure.

Then we also saw…. Again, I mentioned that after the tragic murder of George Floyd down in Minneapolis, we saw a social justice change in the world for the good. I think these conversations are so important. But it has put an incredible strain on officers, and we have seen sick time go up. We’ve seen WorkSafeBC claims go up. As you know, within the last few years, they’ve started to accept PTSD claims and things of that nature — operational stress injuries. These are real issues in our community.

The average person in their life will suffer a handful of traumatic incidents in the range of about six to eight, whether it’s getting cancer or having a loved one die or whatever it is — things that will really hit us to the core as human beings. Police officers will suffer those six to eight things as well, but they will also suffer about 150 other events in their life, through their work, that are so traumatic: seeing extreme violence, blood, murder, homicide, people that have died in car accidents, abused children, women who’ve been victims of really violent sexual assaults — really traumatic things that will impact them way more so than the average community member at large. That’s well documented by psychologists.

That’s sort of circulating around all of this. Plus, the fact is that in Vancouver, assaults against police officers are up 51 percent over the last five years. In Metro Vancouver, it’s around 50 percent, so the numbers are quite consistent. We’re seeing more and more people….

It’s not necessarily punching somebody in the face, although that’s happening. We’re seeing officers getting kicked and punched and scratched and all that. But things like biting, female officers getting their hair pulled…. Officers being spit in the face has become quite common, which is absolutely disgusting. I will say that I would rather be punched in the face than spit in the face. It’s degrading and insulting, and we’re just seeing a dramatic increase in those types of events.

I talk to every single officer in my department when they’re the victim of any kind of an assault, and I have a very good handle on that.

We have many programs at VPD and in policing, RCMP and other municipal police, to assist officers through peer support, through critical incident stress management, through our HR processes. There are many different programs available. Our unions, the B.C. Police Association and the Vancouver Police Union, have done a great job of working with us to develop some of these programs, but this is going to be an ongoing challenge for us. This is something that we need to provide support for and realize that, in British Columbia, we spend way more money on police oversight than we do on training and supporting officers.

The oversight is important, but let’s not forget that our people are our most valuable resource, bar none. And I’m a firm believer that if you have a strong, healthy, happy workforce, physically healthy and mentally well, with good morale, they will provide better service to the community.

If you have a bunch of people that are disgruntled and upset and mad at the world and nobody likes them…. It’s just human nature with any human being that if they’re feeling like that all the time, it’s going to reflect on the way they do their job. So let’s support these folks that have a really, really tough job in our community.

I acknowledge that when we go to hundreds of thousands of calls per year in Vancouver, sometimes things go astray and we don’t get it right. We make mistakes, and we do things that we would like to have a redo on and things that shouldn’t have happened. But in the heat of the moment with hundreds of thousands of calls and making split-second decisions, sometimes things go sideways that shouldn’t have. But well over 99 percent of the time, things go well. It’s the old airplane landing safely at the airport, and nobody cares. Something goes awry, and it’s front-page news in our profession.

[9:40 a.m.]

Supports through…. There are great programs with the unions, with our agencies. We could send you some stuff, again in writing, offline. Mental health supports, WorkSafe supports, training supports…. There are all kinds of programs, from more general programs that we give to our officers to really intense programs that we can take officers that may be suffering from severe PTSD and operational stress injuries to, to help make them healthy again and get them back on track.

When I came on the job 34 years ago, there was none of that. We would go to a call, and the next day, bang, you’re right back at it. The hon. Mr. Begg, I’m sure, can relate to that when he was a member of the RCMP. Back then, the supports were just not in place.

Agencies have come a long way. There are some really good practices across the country that we can build on. This is going to be ever-evolving. We need to keep these folks healthy when they go to work every day.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): One final, quick question.

We’ve heard a lot about de-escalation, the challenges of…. We see in the media…. It seems over-exertion of force, overuse of force, other issues around understanding cultural differences — and police recognizing that. The overrepresentation of Indigenous populations — that systemic piece that we’ve been talking about a lot.

I want to tie all of that back into: what’s missing from police training that we — the collective we — need to improve? We are still seeing these issues happening today, whether it’s in the justice system or otherwise. There is a significant difference, overrepresentation of marginalized population in the system. We see all of these issues.

Can some of this be addressed in the training, whether it’s at the JI or Depot in Saskatchewan? What is missing?

A. Palmer: Again, that’s a really large one to unpack, but I’m happy to make some comments, being cognizant of time.

Use of force is something that…. When police have interactions with the general public, it’s important to know the context. It’s less than 1 percent in my department — and I think it’s a pretty standard number across the country — where force is actually used. It’s used infrequently.

De-escalation training and calming things down, I always say…. I tell the recruits: “It’s your job. You have to bring calm to chaos. When you come into these calls, you’re going to be dealing with people on the worst day of their life, people who are looking to jump off bridges, people with weapons, people who are involved in domestic violence, organized crime figures. You’re dealing with some pretty violent people sometimes — even bar fights, things like that. You’ve got to go in, you’ve got to be professional, and you’ve got to calm things down and get control of a situation.”

Sometimes force is used by police. Sometimes people are intoxicated. Sometimes people may be on drugs. There could be mental health issues. There could be people that are extremely violent and dangerous who are stone-cold sober. But they may be involved in organized crime, and they don’t want to be caught. Many circumstances where we would have to employ force…. Nobody wants to employ force, but that does happen.

You brought up training. It is very important. I’m a big proponent of training. I will say that the playing field is not level across the entire country. When we’re talking about British Columbia, again, you should be proud that in this province, through the Sol Gen’s ministry…. Mr. Farnworth and the police services division have actually done a really good job of making sure that we are staying up to speed on modernizing training in British Columbia and looking at things that are important to British Columbians and our communities.

Listening to our communities, not just from the police perspective but what they’re experiencing, what they’re feeling and where they think we can do better…. We have to listen to all that, and we have to be alive to all that and build that into our training.

I just want you to know that the amount of training that police officers get in British Columbia is substantive. In my own department, crisis and de-escalation training, we’ve been focusing, really — I mean, even when I came on the job, we had that — on it significantly since 2012, long before the provincial government came out with standards on that. Fair and impartial training, implicit-bias training for police officers, and Indigenous-police relations are some of the training that we do now, currently.

Indigenous cultural safety training has been embedded in our training for the last decade. We’re doing Circles of Understanding workshops. We do training at the Justice Institute for all recruits on anti-racism, bias-free policing. They have to do projects where they look at things like restorative justice, homelessness, Indigenous populations in our communities.

We do community awareness training, culturally safe practice training, trauma-informed practices — so when you’re dealing with people who are victims of crime who have been really traumatized. Culturally sensitive training, where it’s not just if somebody is a victim of sexual assault, but if there’s a cultural component to that as well.

[9:45 a.m.]

Trauma-informed practices. Road to Mental Readiness. Neurological and neuromuscular degenerative disease training that we’ve done. Autism awareness. 2SLGBTQ awareness training. A lot of Aboriginal and Indigenous cultural competency training here at the VPD. Sex-worker awareness training that we’ve done. Youth at risk training. Homeless awareness training. Geriatric mental health training, as well as all the provincial standards on crisis intervention and de-escalation that the province does.

We go beyond that training. That’s the bare minimum requirement in British Columbia. We give our officers about 5½ extra weeks of basic training at VPD that is not provided at the Justice Institute. So when people graduate — I think it’s a 22-week program, roughly, of classroom training — after that, we add on an additional 5½ weeks of training to make sure they’re up to our standards, which are higher than the provincial standards. Also, training in major case management, when you’re dealing with serious incidents, and how we approach victims of crime.

We have other training courses that we’re going to be delivering in Q4 this year and into 2022 on anti-racism awareness training for police officers. More coming up on mental illness awareness training, more on homelessness, more on sex work.

There is a ton of training going on in my department, and other departments in British Columbia will be there, to a different extent. There’s some that’s baseline provincial training, but many departments, like my own, have gone beyond that in providing additional training. I can’t speak to what individual departments have done, but I think sometimes people think that the cops are starting at a baseline — they get no training; they don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of training. I will say that we’re welcome to more training.

Again, this goes back to my earlier comments about police legitimacy and accountability and acceptance in the community. People need to know, and we probably haven’t done a great job sometimes, quite frankly, of getting our message out about the training, about these great programs we have, the proactive programs. We’re working with community. We’re working with professionals like the health care professionals to keep our community safe.

Happy to work on more training. I think it’s great. But just be informed that there’s a lot of good training going on, and we could provide that to you, what we’re doing at VPD, and there may be some lessons learned. It’s like, okay, you could take this from Vancouver. You could take this from the RCMP. You could take this from Victoria. Let’s look at that, and let’s really use all that expertise we have — or it could be from the States or back east — and build an even more robust training program that we have for police in British Columbia.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much for that. Mine is pretty tactical in nature.

In order to save time here, perhaps, Karan, I’ll read it into Hansard. But we can use it, and Chief Palmer can perhaps direct it more specifically to a person that can answer.

I’m very interested in what you were talking about, on the preventative side — the data platform that you’re looking at, identifying people who have multiple interactions with police, so that can be de-escalated or managed prior to that.

It sounded like it was a specific program that you’ve got. I was curious about resources and who did that, where they did it and how that worked. But that’s a very specific question to that activity. So perhaps I can ask someone that oversees that directly, as opposed to your time right now.

A. Palmer: I can answer that quickly for you. Yes, we have put a lot of time, effort and resources into developing a very robust analytical capability in Vancouver.

We have about 30 analysists that work for the VPD that do all kinds of work. We have PhDs working for us. We have many people with master’s degrees and specialized training. The adjunct professor who teaches analytics at Simon Fraser University is a full-time VPD officer, a special constable, and he does the analytics training at SFU off the corner of his desk, because he’s a doctor up there. So we’ve got in-house expertise.

We put money into very advanced technical systems. I can pull you data on anything you can imagine under the sun. We’ve got very robust platforms. But developing that…. We call it the early warning system, so pulling that data out of the people that are at a high risk to decompensate and have issues in the community.

We developed that ourselves with Vancouver Coastal Health on our two data platforms because the police have very good data and so does health, but sometimes that data is not shared well. So that’s where we went that extra step and developed the information-sharing agreements that have gone through the Privacy Commissioner and making sure that it’s a limited number of people that would have access to that. It’s not all officers. It’s very specific people that have training in that area, that work in the mental health sphere all the time.

If you want more information on that, we have a report and I also have a video that we’ve done that explains some of that, which we could send to you.

[9:50 a.m.]

If you wanted more details, I could connect you, definitely, with Supt. Lynn Noftle, who oversees that area, and Insp. Randy Fincham, who oversees that area of expertise in our department. A lot of it was developed in-house by our folks.

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you very much. I’m very interested in the preventative nature of that. Thank you. I appreciate that.

A. Palmer: You’re welcome.

D. Routley (Chair): Go ahead, Harwinder.

We’re over time, but people are very interested in asking these questions.

H. Sandhu: Thank you, Chair. It’ll be quick. I have other questions, but I’ll ask around….

First of all, thank you so much for highlighting mental health and some other areas and the work that’s being done.

When we talk about systemic racism…. We’re all aware that B.C. has, according to a 2018 independent study, the highest rate of deaths in the country when it comes to police-involved deaths.

We talk about training and more training. What are your thoughts…? Is that the only answer? So far, it doesn’t seem like it. Do you think…? What about the proper screening done before hiring? We’ve seen, at different workplaces, that trainings are mandatory. People go do that eight-hour session or whatnot.

We’ve heard from group presentations, and it seems like…. What are your thoughts about if we look more at screening tools for different, other areas, or do you think training would address these big issues that we’re facing?

A. Palmer: I think you’re absolutely correct. I appreciate you recognizing the mental health aspect. I was just going to say that’s so important not only for the community at large but also for our people internally.

As far as looking at issues that are systemic within policing and issues that could be improved upon, certainly, training is one of them. You did hit on another area that is very key: the screening of police officers and making sure that we’re getting the right people into the profession.

Again, you’ll find…. That is not standardized across this province. There’s certain standardized training. There are certain things that people have to go through to qualify as a municipal police officer in British Columbia or, if you’re an RCMP officer, at Depot, for sure. But training and hiring standards are different in Vancouver, Delta, Victoria, Transit Police, the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police — you name it.

There’s a lot of different things that go on, like looking at — diversifying the workforce, of course, is very important — educational requirements, volunteerism, work references, physical, medical, written tests. There are all kinds of things that go into the process. It’s very in depth — polygraphs, psychological testing. There are many different things.

I will say not every agency does all of those things. Some of those agencies do some of them but not all of them. I would say some do that screening process better than others. So there are some best practices that can be learned there. I agree with you 100 percent.

That could be something that I think could be interesting for your committee, from a standardization perspective, especially for municipal police. Of course, the RCMP are a little bit different because they’re national. Standardization on some of those practices would be an interesting area to look at.

Getting the right people, though, is key. One of the challenges that we have right now is…. Across North America, not just in Vancouver — RCMP, B.C., Canada, throughout North America and in other places in the western world…. When I talk to my contacts there — in Europe, the U.K., Australia — we’re seeing, generally, the number of applications for police officers are down. We’re seeing….

Again, it’s probably a sign of the times. I think with a lot of the narrative that’s going on, a lot of people are thinking: “Well, maybe I’ll take another career path.” They find it interesting. “But with all the stuff going on, I think I’m just going to take a pass for now and see how things play out.”

We have some amazing people, young people in our communities, that step up and do this job, which is a very challenging job. But we are still missing some people that just really are turned off by the profession, quite frankly. Our numbers are down from where they used to be.

The other piece of it is also attracting the right people. It’s not just the screening process that you go through but looking at the outreach programs. That, again, varies from Vancouver to RCMP to other municipal departments, online versus in person versus building community relationships so that you have a relationship….

For example, I’ll just use our cadet program. We’re involved with kids ages 15, 16, 17 in high school that are part of our cadet program. It’s kind of like if you think of Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, navy cadets, that sort of idea.

[9:55 a.m.]

We have police cadets in Vancouver. We get teenagers, many of whom are suffering from challenges in their life, such as…. They may have a parent in jail. They may have alcohol or drug issues in their family. There may be mental health issues at play. Or there may be none of that. Everybody has a different story in life.

We take in kids, and kids sometimes that need a leg up in life, and we bring them into our cadet program. We’ve had hundreds of kids go through that program. We teach them about leadership. We teach them about team-building. We do athletics, as well, with them. We teach them about community giving. We teach them skills like public speaking. We teach them all kinds of things that aren’t your traditional things that you would learn in school, like the old reading, writing and arithmetic and that sort of thing. We teach them things that are actually really good life skills. Whether they go on to become police officers or not, they will be better citizens because of it.

A lot of those kids that had a thought, “Well, maybe I do or maybe I don’t want to be a cop” kind of an idea now are convinced that they do want to. Even with some of the kids that came in, the parents kind of nudged them and said: “Hey, why don’t you do this program?” Others wanted to do it on their own. But now they’ve seen that it’s a really rewarding profession, and you can make a huge difference in people’s lives.

These kids now that we’re getting that are going through that process, from teenager to wanting to be a police officer…. We’ve created a continuum here in Vancouver, from a teenager to becoming a special municipal constable where you can do…. We have two-tiered policing here, so you’ve got regular officers, but then that second tier…. That would be another one. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything on that, but that would be another area to really look at, where you can take away some of those duties that you don’t need a fully armed police officer to do — things like directing traffic at car accidents, guarding crime scenes, collecting forensic video evidence or transporting property. You pull over a vehicle with ten stolen bikes. Why do you need a cop to take those bikes to the property office?

It’s using special municipal constables who get paid less, but they’re generally younger, and they’re people that have an interest in policing. They get more experience. It’s that continuum from teenage cadet to special municipal constable to becoming a police officer.

The really good thing about that program is that not only does it let that person know whether they want to be a police officer, whether it’s for them, but it also allows us, as a police agency, to do…. It’s really like a job evaluation. We look at that person over the long term and see if they’re cut out and have the right personality to do this type of work. They’re thoughtful, and they’re compassionate, and they’re problem-solvers, and they’re respectful people. It helps us know what that person is like because they’ve been part of our organization sometimes for three or four years before they even apply.

There are a lot of things to unpack there.

H. Sandhu: Thank you for saying “the right people.” I think, on that note, we should also take into consideration having people from Indigenous and some other cultural backgrounds to build that trust that you mentioned in the very beginning. Trust and confidence are something. Thank you. I really appreciate those ideas.

A. Palmer: You’re welcome. I would just say, on that note, just so you know, in our cadet program we have a separate Indigenous cadet program, as well, where we work with Indigenous youth. But in our cadet program — which we’ve put, I think, about 350 or 360 kids through it — many of those kids are Indigenous. If you looked at a picture of our cadet program, it represents the mosaic of Vancouver. It really does. Male, female, different cultural diversity — it really shows. If you were to walk down the street in Vancouver, you’d see that in the kids in our cadet program.

A. Olsen: Thank you. And thank you to my colleagues for your questions.

Just to take off a little bit on what Harwinder was just asking about, Chief, one of things that we’ve heard fairly consistently is safety within policing departments. I know you can’t speak on behalf of other police departments in the province, only on behalf of Vancouver police department.

One of the challenges with respect to recruiting is going to be the perception that workplaces are not necessarily safe for gender-diverse people, for BIPOC officers. Once they make the decision to become part of policing, the workplace is toxic for them, and many end up leaving the profession with some bitterness that they got into for one reason and had to leave because they raised some issues and were not supported by the leadership.

What is your police department doing specifically and what are you doing as the leader of that department to ensure that your workplace is safe for officers with diverse backgrounds, whether it be gender diversity or Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, generally?

[10:00 a.m.]

A. Palmer: Thank you very much for that.

This is another really important area. We do want safe, healthy, respectful workplaces, and there’s so much work that needs to be done there. I will say that, again, from when I started many years ago, we have gone light years in the right direction in that area.

You may be fascinated to know that in the Vancouver police department, 53 percent of our people are not white males — 47 percent are; 53 percent are not. The majority of people that work here are not white males, and we have come a long way from the old days of the six-foot-tall, 200-pound white male with a moustache that’s a police officer.

That is not the case anymore in Vancouver and in many other departments. I think, quite frankly, we’ve gone leaps and bounds in the city. I’ve got over 400 policewomen that work in Vancouver. They are out in the streets, working with the public. We’ve got incredible diversity in our staff, both ethnic diversity and gender diversity.

In 2019, I started a respectful workplace committee because I wanted to get together people from different ranks, different divisions — what I mean by that are different worksites, whether you’re in operations, investigations or administrative areas — people of different seniority, and ethnic and gender diversity as well, to get a good cross-section of people.

Whether you’re somebody that has got one year on the job and you’re just starting out your career or you’re somebody that has 35 years on the job and you’re very experienced and maybe high-ranking, we get a wide cross-section of people in that room and look at what we’re doing well and where we have gaps. We have those tough conversations about what’s not working and how we can do things better, because having a supportive, inclusive workplace is key.

I will say that when you look at our academy classes that we’re bringing into the department now, they are so diverse and have such incredible talents. It’s just absolutely remarkable. Over time, you will see the demographics and changes in all police departments. In my own, we are seeing, as people retire and new people come in, that that diversity improves every single year.

The diversity is important, but it’s also about getting people with the right skills and training. They’re respectful people, and they’re thoughtful people. This workplace committee has done a great job. As a result of that, we’re looking at changing policies. We’re looking at training issues. We’re looking at recruiting issues.

We’re also doing an equity, diversity and inclusion review of all of our policies, our training materials, our HR materials, our regulations and procedure manual, our jail manual, our HR manual. We’re going through every single policy or training material piece that we have in this department — that’s a very diverse group of officers and civilian professionals doing it — looking at it through an EDI lens and making sure that we don’t have relics in there of our policies that were developed way back in the ’90s or early 2000s that don’t meet the proper requirements of a healthy organization in 2021. We’re changing those.

Those are coming through, and we’re looking at all those items — whether it’s wording changes, assumptions that are made in policies or different ways of looking at things. We have an active committee of about five or six people that are working on that full-time, going through all of it. You can imagine that in a place the size of VPD, there are thousands of pages of documents to go through, and they’re going through every single one, every policy, to make that better.

Putting a committee like that in place is huge. Being aware of your policies and procedures…. I would say that for any police organization, that’s a best practice to do. We have external people working with us as well, looking at our policies and making sure that these are the right policies for a modern police agency in 2021. We did have some things in there that were antiquated and that needed to be changed.

I’ll just give you one example. We had one in there where it referred to the chief constable as a “he.” That’s a throwback to…. Probably, that was written back in the 1980s or something, when the chiefs were always men, but the world is changing dramatically, and we can’t make assumptions like that anymore. We’re removing all that, and we’re changing the narrative with our people to make sure that everybody is in tune to that.

I will tell you that with young people coming into the organization, there are no issues with buy-in or any issues with people having that as a hard sell. They expect that of our organizations, and they expect us to be thoughtful, caring and compassionate.

D. Routley (Chair): Thanks. We’ve over time, but I’ve got one more question.

G. Begg: Thanks, Adam. One quick question about training.

[10:05 a.m.]

As a training officer, the only thing that we really monitored was attendance. You’d check off the box; so-and-so received the course on Indigenous relations. There were no real metrics attached to the impact, or the affect, of the training on the individual. So I wonder what policies and procedures you have in place at VPD to ensure that the training is not only received but becomes practice.

A. Palmer: Thank you for that. It’s a great question.

As a former training officer, I’ll tell you that is such an important aspect of it. In the old days…. We were the same back in the day, where you would tick off a box whether somebody showed up at training or not. There are many different ways that we can do that. One is, for example, on the policy side of it. If we have something that’s a policy change, something that is of significant value to our members that they need to know…. I’m not talking about a policy change like “Fill out form A for your annual leave as opposed to form B” — not that kind of thing — but anything that we do to do with dealing with the public.

I’ll use our handcuffing policy as an example. This is very topical, and it’s happening right now. In our handcuffing policy, that is one where we’re making some significant changes through civilian oversight, through the Vancouver Police Board, working with our board, working with an outside consultant and coming up with a modern 2021 handcuffing policy. That’s actually going to our board next week. But I’ll just tell you the internal processes to get towards what you’re saying.

Once that policy is approved by our police board, which is their responsibility under the Police Act, that will be sent out to all police officers. We have an electronic tracking mechanism called PowerDMS at VPD, where we can send it out to all sworn officers, all civilian professionals or both. We can send it out to the entire department. People have to read it. You have to sign off on it electronically that you have read and understood that policy, so there’s accountability there.

The other piece of it, though, is building that into your physical training. With something like handcuffing, there’s an intuitive read of it. We can all read a handcuffing policy. But the actual putting of that into practice and how that plays out on the street…. So then our training officers that work at our tactical training centre take that policy and they build that into the narrative and to the instruction on how to do handcuffing — and not only how to do handcuffing, but how you document it.

We don’t parse off and segregate our training anymore. Many years ago — you’ll be familiar with it — we used to do firearms training. Then we would do baton training, then OC spray training, then Taser training and then wrist locks and handcuffing. Everything would be separate. Go over here and do this, and go over there and do that. Now our officers, when they go into training, don’t know what the scenarios are going to be. We do so much scenario-based training with our officers that when they come in, it could be a situation where you’re going to come in and you’re going to de-escalate that verbally, and that will be the end of it.

The next officer may come in, and it may be something where they have to go hands-on with somebody and handcuff somebody. It could be right up to something that includes deadly force, but you don’t even know walking in the door, because that’s the reality of policing. We don’t segment it out so that everything is siloed anymore. It’s all one continuum, built in with the policy piece as well. That’s an ever-evolving landscape.

We also are firm believers in…. Again, resourcing is an issue, but we do have the luxury here in Vancouver of using actors and role players in our scenario training, so you’re not just looking at a computer screen or you’re not just talking about it notionally. Some of them are our cadets. Some of them are university students that come in, and they do these acting scenarios. We use it with our public order group for crowd situations. We use it for scenarios like domestic violence. Whatever it is, we have actors that will put the officers through their paces.

I’ll tell you, as you would know, when you have actors and you’re dealing with a scenario like that, it does up your adrenalin and your stress and your pressure, and it makes it more real than dealing with it notionally.

We also make a concerted effort, and it’s mandatory…. We have four mandatory training days per year. Officers in patrol on the front lines have to come in for four mandatory training days per year. It’s not like a once-a-year one-and-done they’re coming in for. It could be police intervention. It could be de-escalation. It could be cultural awareness training. It could be legal updates. It could be a number of things. But we give them four full days of mandatory training every year on topical issues in policing to make sure they’re staying up to speed, because you cannot rest on your laurels on any of this stuff.

D. Routley (Chair): Thanks very much. I don’t see any more questions. I want to thank you very much, Chief Palmer, for coming back and also for all of this insight that you’ve provided us.

From my perspective, I would like to just finish by asking…. It’s really impressive, this approach that’s being taken in trying to be in the forefront of 21st century policing. We appreciate that.

[10:10 a.m.]

If you can give some thought — this is asking you to do yet another thing for this committee, and I know that’s a stretch — and think about sections or elements of the Police Act that inhibit your ability to achieve what you’ve talked about here today. If there are aspects of the act that are equally antiquated, and we know there are, that stand as obstacles to the accomplishment of some of these goals, could you perhaps give a head shake to that for us. Maybe even a letter would be deeply appreciated, I’m sure.

A. Palmer: I will provide some written material to your staff. We do have their contact information. We’ll make sure that we forward that material so that you have as much information as possible.

I just want to say again, in closing, from my perspective: thank you so much. I really think this is important work that you’re doing to improve public safety in British Columbia. It is leading edge, I think — what you’re doing — across the country. My hat goes off to you, and I’m really excited to see what kind of results come out of this committee. I believe the final report will be in April. I look forward to seeing it and implementing whatever changes you come up with.

D. Routley (Chair): I can say, as an observation, that there are lots of problems, and there are some poor outcomes out there, for sure. But the efforts that people are making within policing aren’t a light switch that gets turned on and off. And generational change…. I’m relieved to hear of the efforts that are being made. Thank you for describing them for us.

All right, committee members. We’ll take a five-minute recess before we invite our next guest. We’ll be back in five.

The committee recessed from 10:11 a.m. to 10:20 a.m.

[D. Routley in the chair.]

D. Routley (Chair): I’d like to welcome everybody back to our meeting of the Special Committee on Reforming the Police Act in British Columbia.

For this section of our meeting, we’re inviting back and receiving more information from Oliver Grüter-Andrew, president and CEO of E-Comm.

Thank you very much, Oliver, for joining our committee again. I think you know all of us. We’ve all met here. So I won’t belabour, with further introductions, more of your time.

With that, I think members have specific questions that they’d like to ask. With your agreement, we’ll get right to them. If you have any initial comments, go ahead now.

O. Grüter-Andrew: Hello. I just lost the sound somehow, but I’m back now. Can you hear me?

D. Routley (Chair): Yes, we can hear you.

I was just suggesting…. We’re very grateful to have you join us again. Knowing everybody on the committee, I won’t belabour, with further introductions, your time. We’ll pretty much go straight to questions, but if you have any initial comment, now would be the time. So I’ll hand it off to you.

E-COMM

O. Grüter-Andrew: First of all, thank you very much for having me back and giving me the opportunity.

I’m again here speaking from the beautiful territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people in Vancouver.

I’m looking forward to the dialogue, and I’m looking forward to the actions that follow this dialogue.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much.

With that, Members, if members have questions.

G. Begg: Welcome back, Oliver. Pretty topical to have you here at this time because of the emerging issues in E-Comm, particularly related to staffing.

I wonder if you can fill us in or give us a more global sense of what is happening and what steps are being taken to handle it.

O. Grüter-Andrew: Are you specifically asking about the delays in 911 calls and the ambulance downstream? Okay.

The situation is that there is a higher than anticipated, higher than ever before, number of ambulance calls coming into 911. So callers requesting ambulance service. Part of that is that the Ambulance Service itself has difficulties receiving and processing all these calls. That’s well established.

We know that Minister Dix has committed additional resources. The money is available. The Ambulance Service is working very hard to hire, train and then deploy those additional staff to deal with the demand that the public has at this time.

What happens at our end is…. We’re not understaffed for 911 calls relative to what’s expected of us, relative to what we are funded for and relative to normal process. At this time, because of the excessive demand compared to other times, we get into situations where the handoff from E-Comm’s 911 call taker, who will have said to you: “This is 911. Do you need police, fire or ambulance….?”

The handoff to the Ambulance Service call taker can take significantly longer than it historically takes. Instead of being seconds, as it typically takes, it can be minutes. It can be many minutes. Our call takers are obliged to stay on the line with a caller until the handoff to the person at the Ambulance Service is successfully completed. Of course, while our call taker waits on the line, they are not then able to take the next 911 call that’s coming into the queue of somebody waiting to hear: “Do you need police, fire or ambulance?”

That’s the bottleneck delay that we’re in at the moment. What’s being done about it is that the Ambulance Service is working as hard as possible to find the number of people, the right people, and train them to be able to close that gap on the downstream side.

[10:25 a.m.]

As you will appreciate, when we are on the line with an ambulance caller, we can’t help that individual. Our people are not trained. They’re not authorized to give medical advice.

We have put in place some escalation options with the Ambulance Service. So if we’re able to discern that the nature of the call is particularly acute, we are able to work with the ambulance on giving that call priority. There are many, many other things that we’re doing in partnership with ambulance to relieve the pressure on a day-to-day basis. It’s a very positive partnership. But that’s where we’re at with that circumstance at the moment.

Now, I should ask…. There is also a staffing issue on our part, on the police call-taking side, which is a funding issue for us. I’m happy to speak to that, too, if you would like to hear about that as well.

G. Begg: Please.

O. Grüter-Andrew: On the police call-taking side, for many years now, volumes have increased, but also the complexity of the calls have increased. That’s a reflection of everything that’s been discussed at this committee. I was listening to your dialogue with Chief Palmer just earlier. It’s reflective of everything that the chief talked about, in terms of the societal pressures, the increases in mental health situations, in opioid situations, and many, many other founts. As a result, our ability to process calls coming in has been diminished.

There are two types of police calls we take. We take the 911 calls, but we also take the non-emergency calls — that’s when you call the ten-digit number to reach your local police department — for the agencies that we serve. It’s a pool of people that answers both types of calls.

You will appreciate that when we have high demand, we prioritize the emergency calls, because that’s where life-and-death situations typically come to reach us. So we deprioritize non-emerge, and at that point, there can be very long wait times for non-emerge calls. I’m not talking about just a few minutes. We’re talking 30, 40 minutes.

That is a resourcing issue, and that’s also well documented. That’s also well communicated. That’s being discussed by us and has been for a number of years with our police agency partners, with our city partners. We’re all trying to work together to resolve that problem too.

Funding is an issue there, but so are practices, so is the consistency of practices, so are the little things that have come out of the history of how we handle these kinds of inquiries from the public that can make the process a lot more complicated. More work needs to be done to opti­mize how we actually support the public in their different levels of needs.

As you can picture, the two issues that I’ve described are right now compounding. When we have 911 calls building up, waiting to be answered, we try to divert everybody, as possible, to those 911 calls waiting to hear: “Do you need police, fire or ambulance?” That then further depre­cates our ability to answer police calls, which then further pushes down the attention we can give to non-emergency calls.

The whole situation right now is very much compounding, and it’s very much affecting all emergency services — police, fire and ambulance.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Thanks very much for coming back and having this discussion with us. A couple quick questions…. Well, a couple questions. I won’t say they’re quick.

Understanding that you have multiple contracts throughout the province and such, when a mental health call comes in — I think we talked about this last time, briefly — are there any…? Do you have any of your contracts with these different areas that actually have designated someone specialized in answering or dealing with mental health stress calls, or is that dealt with by just one of your regular operators and then forwarded on to police, fire, ambulance?

O. Grüter-Andrew: It is the latter. Our staff have some general overview training of handling mental health calls. For the most part, it’s in the selection of the people when we hire them, on how they’re able to support mental health circumstances.

Unfortunately, our funding circumstance is such that we cannot provide the depth of training to our staff that we would like to provide and that some of our agency partners are able to provide. So we have a deficit there that we need to step up on. However, in the whole setup, from a policy, a legal obligation and a responsibility point of view, we’re limited today in what we’re able to provide.

[10:30 a.m.]

Typically, a call comes in. It’s a mental health call. Unless there’s a specific ask for ambulance or for fire, we most likely put this through to the police dispatcher, who will assign an available officer.

Now, with certain departments, there is the possibility of identifying an officer resource that is specialized. We have heard about Car 87, Car 88, and that’s an option. But those options are relatively few, and for the most part, we assign a general officer, and we have to rely on the training that the officers have received to handle the situation on site.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Recognizing your contracts with different areas, could you give us an idea, just to get my understanding? Understanding that there are different contracts, different levels of service being offered to different areas, what would — you don’t have to identify the region, by any means — a minimum service contract look like that you provide service for, versus a full delivery-of-service contract? If you could explain.

O. Grüter-Andrew: Our contracts are very consistent. One of our objectives is to be a consolidated service centre so that we can provide benefits of scale to the different departments — police, fire and the 911 service that we provide. So there isn’t much diversity today. The diversity in the services comes more from the history where certain agencies have asked us to do some additional things — for example, transcriptions. In some cases, we monitor the bait car that operates in some police jurisdictions. And there are a few other things like that.

For the most part, our service is not differentiated, and it’s not specialized. It hasn’t evolved. I was delighted to hear earlier, from Chief Palmer, about the extensive evolution that police service, certainly in the VPD, has undergone over many years. I have to be honest and tell you that our part of the emergency communication flow has not been able to undergo anywhere near that same evolution. I think the opportunity is there to catch up and make a more valuable contribution, as I recommended the last time we were able to speak.

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): That nicely leads into my final question — Chair, if I might — around the training of your personnel. Recognizing cultural diversity, anti-racism training that we see in many organizations, even the ability to recognize biases, what kind of training…? If you could take a moment and explain the training that your personnel receive before they hit the phone lines in E-Comm.

O. Grüter-Andrew: We do have diversity policies. We have specific policies on how to capture certain situations that arise, whether they are of a violent nature, of a crisis nature. The policies that we use are written for us by the agencies.

Under the emergency-side types of calls, from police agencies as well as fire agencies, there is a lot of consistency. On the non-emergency calls, there’s a lot of diversity. Certain communities like to have a more, call it, intimate service for their residents than certain other communities do, and a lot of that is driven by community bylaws and council expectations and other such policies.

Our call-takers and dispatchers are trained in those policies and the diversity of those policies that are given to us by the agencies. Then we also impart on them a degree of commonsense understanding of minority diversity, ethnic diversity in our communities.

Our call-takers and dispatchers do come from all walks of life. The chief earlier was referring to the visual appearance of, say, the cadet classes and how they really match the profile of the population. We’re not far behind that, I would say, so there comes a natural element of that in our communications on the floor.

If you’re asking me if we’re in a position to provide 2021-level education of our call-takers and dispatchers in the way that I think we all, including our staff, would like to see, the answer is no.

The reason is that for every hour that I pull a call-taker off the floor right now, I lose yet more ability to get to those 911 calls, to answer those police emergency calls and to help those ambulance services. We are so tight at this time that we couldn’t even think about doing that, unfortunately. But it is something that I, personally, consider necessary for the benefit of the public and the benefit of our staff.

[10:35 a.m.]

D. Davies (Deputy Chair): Sorry, Chair. If I might just further, on the same level….

Again, excuse my ignorance on this subject here. Walk me through the steps of someone before they apply. Are there minimum requirements for an individual to apply? Then from the time they apply and get the handshake, “Yes, you have the job,” what is that gap between: “Yes, you’ve been hired,” and “Now you’re on the phones, answering them”? Is it a week-long training? Is it a month-long training? What does that look like?

O. Grüter-Andrew: I’ll walk you through that. It is a little bit to unpack as well, so please bear with me. The hiring process is a significant funnel process. We actually get a lot of applications. I don’t know for this specific year, but historically, we have around 3,000 to 5,000 applications for the 100 or so positions that we might post every year. The funnel gets very quickly whittled down, because we do look for certain criteria and experiences on the résumé, even though, technically, the minimum bar is not that high.

In practice, we’re looking for people who have life experience, who bring diversity, who can speak to lived experiences of their own — whether they’re negative or positive — in interaction with emergency services, who can bring that to the table. We’re also looking for people who are resilient, who can learn, who can adapt. In that respect, we’re not all that different from our colleagues in the emergency responder services themselves.

There is a multi-step interview process. There is what I call a tool service that we use, essentially, for them to demonstrate some of their quick thinking ability. One of the keys kills is typing, because all the information is communicated through the keyboard, to officers as well as to radio. As you listen to a caller, you type that information into the computer-aided dispatch system. So you actually have to be able to do that, and you have to be able to think on your feet.

Once we give somebody the handshake to say, “Welcome on board,” a nine-month process begins. The nine-month process starts with, first, a week or so of familiarization with the very concepts of the organization and training to answer the 911 calls only — it’s “911. Do you need police, fire or ambulance?” and “For which city?” — and to learn the complexities of passing the call to the right agency. We have to pass that call to one of over 150 police destination points and hundreds of fire departments. That’s something to learn.

Then we put those callers out on the floor, and they do that job. They do what’s been called a 911 queue job, under supervision from team leads and experienced staff, for a period of time. The period of time varies depending on the nature of the individual, but typically, it’s a number of weeks.

After a number of weeks of that, we bring them back into the classroom, and we train them on the call-taking skills. We have devised classes for VPD, for RCMP and for other municipal independent police departments.

At this point, you get exposed to their diversity of policies. VPD accounts for about half of our call volume that’s asking for police. There is an initial base of training that we give people, and when we put them on the floor, they will initially only be exposed to VPD calls, because that’s all they have been trained for.

Some other people are initially only exposed to RCMP calls and to the calls for other independent police departments, such as Saanich PD or New Westminster PD. That training in the classroom is, off the top of my head, five to six weeks. It’s a fairly intense interaction experience with your instructor, after which you go back out on the floor.

At that point, you’re going into what’s called mentoring, which is the most critical phase of all, because now you need to put your classroom training into practice. The way that works is that you have an experienced call-taker who is what we call double-plugged with you so that the call-taker is listening in to all the dialogues going on.

Depending on the proficiency of the new hire coming out of training, either they are asked to watch that experienced call-taker for a period of time, or we go straight into where the new hire actually answers the call, and the experienced call-taker is behind them. There’s a very defined process of capabilities and competencies that the call-takers need to show.

The mentor is specially trained as well. As a mentor, they need to be able to validate that that individual is developing the capabilities and competencies in practice to answer those calls, to understand the diversities, to understand the protocols, to understand the sequence in which questions need to be asked and then how they need to be entered into computer-aided dispatch so that dispatchers can relay them to the officers.

[10:40 a.m.]

That process can take, typically, six months until it’s fully complete. It can be quicker; it depends on the individual. Some people are more naturally inclined, of course, and we adjust it to the ability of the individual. Only when that process is complete, and only when your mentor and your team supervisor are satisfied, do you get signed off to be on your own, answering calls on the floor.

Even then, when you’re on your own, answering calls on the floor, you’re put into a group of peers on your team who have more experience than you do. You have a team leader, you have a supervisor, and there is still a lot of handholding to help you to be successful as a call taker in that situation. In a high-level sketch, that’s how you become a call taker at E-Comm for police call taking.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you. For myself, Oliver, I wanted to ask about communications during disasters. It’s away from the Police Act, perhaps.

I was recently told that the radio systems on HF frequencies between 3 MHz and 30 MHz do not require line-of-sight communication devices and can, in a sense, call out of, say, a community in a deep valley that’s remote. Otherwise, only a satellite phone would be their option if Internet is down and phone lines are down during such a disaster as an earthquake. The Forest Service used to use these frequencies to monitor wildfires.

Now there are people, apparently, who are proposing that these frequencies be available to remote communities in order to be able to call out. If they use a satellite phone, there’s essentially one number that they can call into, so you would have a lot of different communities trying to figure out how to use a satellite phone, for one thing, but also clogging up that line.

Is there any option for HF radio within the organization?

O. Grüter-Andrew: I’m not an expert on radio frequencies and those technologies. We have those experts. So I could certainly have somebody get back to you on that specific question.

That said, we also provide the radio system for emergency operators and responders in the Lower Mainland. That’s one of our services, one of our business lines. Police, fire and ambulance across the Lower Mainland use that radio network. It is designed as a technology, with frequencies selected to operate largely in urban areas, because that’s what we have in the Lower Mainland. I can’t speak to the radio systems that are provided by other enti­ties in other parts of the province.

What I can tell you is that there is a range of technology options, either now available or emerging, that can help improve the communication between the person in the emergency and the possible responders that can come to their aid. You may have seen recently that there is something called what3words, which is a technology that can be used through an app to pinpoint your location, but it requires you to have a phone signal to be able to communicate over an app.

There are some other options, and there is a new backbone technology for 911 about to be deployed across Canada, notionally known as next-generation 911. I believe I spoke about that a little bit the last time I was here.

It is my opinion that there is an opportunity to improve the communication and connectivity with emergency services across the province if we take a holistic view. At the moment, those decisions are made very locally, and they are constrained by locally available understanding, knowledge, talent and funding. I think we can do better as a province. I think we can raise that discussion and the selection of the best technologies for the best circumstances in our very varied geographies to a new level if we tackle it more holistically at the provincial level.

[10:45 a.m.]

K. Kirkpatrick: Thank you, Oliver. Obviously, you will track whether something is police, fire or ambulance in terms of looking back at your stats and what percentage is which. Is there any way to kind of break that down a little bit further to determine how many of those calls are mental health–related?

O. Grüter-Andrew: We can’t, really. The reason is that even though we classify the calls, on the basis of our understanding, in the computer at the dispatch database, the data is then the property of the police agency. The police agency can provide those numbers. As we know from dialogues, including with Chief Palmer earlier, certain agencies have a very deep understanding of how those calls break down. I would have to refer you to those agencies.

I do understand that that’s a little complex because every agency has their own data and varying levels of analytics capability. However, I do know that at the BCACP level, the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police, there is a good understanding of how those calls break down.

K. Kirkpatrick: That’s interesting. What we’re trying to kind of think about is: if there were that other option of police, fire, ambulance, mental health — we spoke about that before — and there was the ability to transfer to, say, a crisis centre for some kind of mental health triage, I wonder how much of your time that would free up to focus on other things. But as you say, you can’t answer that. It’s a question I’ll consider….

O. Grüter-Andrew: It’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer, to sort of assume how much time would be freed up by that.

For me, in those discussions, principally, this is a matter of emergency responder effectiveness — getting the right type of help, in the right moment, to the person in need. As we know, and again heard from Chief Palmer earlier, certain jurisdictions are well advanced in that thinking and have a lot of on-the-ground ability to specialize in the nature of their response.

We heard about Car 87. We heard about the ACT teams and other such creations. Again, it’s not necessarily holistic and consistent. As you know from our previous conversations, I believe there is something that the emergency communication service — I’m speaking for E-Comm in this — can contribute that would advance us in this even further.

G. Begg: Oliver, I wonder at the sort of domino effect of the ambulance service’s inability to patch over a call, or the delay in that — which, to me, speaks to your surge capacity as a unit. In the Lower Mainland at least, we’re ripe for a natural disaster here. I’m wondering what your surge capacity is. What is built into the system for those odd or rare occasions when we have a multiple-fatality event or whatever? Have you built in some surge capacity so that in an incident like that, we wouldn’t have this kind of situation?

O. Grüter-Andrew: A very good question. Obviously, the suggestion with ambulance is unprecedented, both in terms of its magnitude of the call demand that the ambulance service has to deal with at this time and the extent to which it continues.

We do have other incidents that lead to significant spikes in demand. Windstorms are a good example. We last had a significant windstorm event, I think, in 2017, and before that in 2015. They also lead to our services being flooded. That tends to affect our fire departments, predominantly. We have worked with our fire partners to have what we call a mass call awaiting protocol when we adjust our processes and we have a better handle on it.

Our surge capacity is principally based on the people within our pool of operations. We have 911 call takers, police call takers, fire call takers, dispatchers and training resources working at any given time. What we can do and what we are doing right now is that when moments become critical, we move people temporarily off one duty into another group duty, because a lot of people are cross-trained. What it does mean is that, then, other activities go on hold.

A good example that I talked about earlier is when we have a buildup of 911 queue wait times at the moment, and we do pull police non-emergency call takers to answer the 911 line…. I’ll be blunt with you. I would not recommend making a non-emergency call at that time. The time to be served is just too expensive.

[10:50 a.m.]

There is a limit to the surge capacity. Now, could it be improved? Absolutely. It’s a matter of scale, obviously. For example, if we had integrated operation of all police emergency communication centres in the province, we would have a larger pool of people where we could make those shifting decisions. If there were a major event in one location — whether it’s on the south Island or in the Lower Mainland, with an earthquake or windstorm or other such events — it would give us access to more resources to surge to the part of the population that needs the help most urgently at that time.

Again, it is one of our recommendations to this committee to elevate police dispatch authority from the municipal to the provincial level and support a single, integrated provincial call-taking and dispatch service — in part, exactly for that reason.

R. Glumac: Thank you for, the last time you were here, bringing up the New Zealand model — the whole idea of asking for police, fire, ambulance or mental health. You introduced us to that concept, and we are going to be following up with the New Zealand 911 team on that. I look forward to that. I wish we could actually talk to you after we talk to them. We’ll probably have some questions after we have that conversation.

Just in anticipation of that, I understand that in order to do something like this effectively, I guess, what you’re saying is that you would have to make the whole 911 system at a provincial level. I wonder if you could say a bit more about what kind of changes would be needed to have our 911 accommodate asking for mental health assistance.

O. Grüter-Andrew: Well, certainly this kind of solution could be introduced in the way that we’re structured today. I do know that there are moves underway in selected jurisdictions to do exactly that. Where we do provide the police call-taking and dispatch services, we participate in that with great eagerness.

To me, this is a question of equity across the province — and efficiency, cost-efficiency, as well — of the approach taken. Let’s say that E-Comm’s police partners said, “Yes, we will do this,” and we do create that kind of additional service. We couldn’t introduce the choice at the 911 level, because 911 comes in from any jurisdiction around British Columbia.

A mental health call would likely still go to the police-call taker the first time, in the first instance, as it indeed does in New Zealand. But now the policy would be adjusted for the police call-taker to have the ability to push the call out to a psychiatric nurse, perhaps, and attempt to de-escalate the situation, and then take next-step action — which is, again, what’s being done in New Zealand, with some success.

The problem would be that if in the scenario where we did this with our partners, it would then happen like this for Vancouver, Burnaby, Delta and Richmond, say, but it wouldn’t happen in Coquitlam and in Surrey — which isn’t to say that they couldn’t do their own thing, along the same lines. But how do we make it consistent? That’s the first question. How does a caller who lives in Surrey and works in Vancouver — and has such an incident in Vancouver one day and in Surrey the next day — have a consistent experience, know what to do from the first time around and receive the same standard of response?

It becomes a lot more difficult, because now we have all these different players that need to agree on policies and practices and put it all in place. That’s to say nothing of our remote and rural communities, where the resourcing to make something like this happen is so much more challenging than it is in the densely populated metro areas that we have.

To me, this is all about equity. How do we make sure that the people who need that kind of support and for whom it is a better life and health and emergency-support experience, have that equitably across British Columbia? To be quite clear, in my opinion, if we don’t achieve that, it will again be our remote and rural communities and it will again be our Indigenous communities that will be left behind on this.

[10:55 a.m.]

That whole process will be exacerbated, in that inequity, with the introduction of next-generation 911, that technology overhaul that I was referring to. Not only does it replace crumbling technology that we’re suffering with today, but it does introduce a lot of new opportunity to route calls, to provide specialty service, to bring in culturally sensitive support.

It needs to be thought through, planned and deployed. If we don’t do that at a provincial level, it will again vary from location to location. I fear that the well-resourced coastal communities and urban communities will be able to figure it out, but we will leave behind more of our rural and remote communities. The digital gap — the digital divide and inequity in emergency communication — will grow. I worry about that.

D. Routley (Chair): Your description of the nine-month process and all the varying levels of experience and guidance people receive before they’re, in a sense, sent out, not really on their own but fully engaged…. It’s a long process, and I can see how that would be very difficult to shorten. That makes this current situation very, very difficult to cope with. I really appreciate the efforts that you’re making. Everyone in this organization is facing a lot of pressure right now. That’s clear.

We’d like to be of assistance to having that not be the case. I wonder if you can identify any regulatory or legislative obstacle that the Police Act or other acts create and that unnecessarily makes that process difficult. Is there any streamlining or improvement that could be made?

O. Grüter-Andrew: Well, it’s a very fair question, of course. My short answer is yes, but I think it’s less in the tweaking of a particular section of one act or the other, whether it’s the Police Act or the emergency health act. I think it’s more to recognize the integrated nature of emergency communication and emergency response in any jurisdiction and to look at the fragmented nature of the policy- and decision-making around those things in British Columbia today, because of the way it has just grown historically.

The 911 service, in terms of its standards, practices and policies, is dictated by the regional districts. That’s set out in statute. So we need to take instructions, technically, from 27 individual regional districts on how to go about answering and processing a 911 call. In practice, almost all of it funnels down through the Lower Mainland process because that’s where we have an actual policy handbook, but you can see how making changes would be very difficult. You do have to go to all of these entities.

We then have, at E-Comm alone, 40 different fire agencies for whom we dispatch and 33 different police agencies. There are, of course, many more fire and police agencies around the province that are driven by specific policies of their communities. Many of them haven’t been looked at in many years. They’re just there because they’ve been for many years.

Making positive change in a fragmented system like this — where key elements are provincially owned, such as the B.C. Ambulance Service, other elements are municipally owned, and some elements are local government– and regional district–owned — it becomes very, very difficult and, I would say, nigh impossible to move that. You have to really look at the whole entry and flow of emergency communication. That’s part of what we’re seeing right now in the Ambulance Service. Our colleagues in ambulance don’t stand alone. They’re also connected into our hospital systems, and they’re connected into our GP and other parts of the health care system.

We need to look at it holistically. With the fragmented levels of governments and ownership of these services, it becomes very difficult. You have so many people, technically, to speak to — which is why we’re also advocating the uplift of those policy areas to the provincial level. Establish a provincial-level authority for 911 setting of policy and standards. Again, establish a provincial-level call-taking and dispatch authority for police.

That’s not taking opportunity away. That’s not taking care away from any local community. That’s not dictating to local communities how these things will be done. That’s creating the opportunity to iron out all those historic disconnects and to put in place the things that will make a very positive difference for the whole of British Columbia. That’s why I’m very much an advocate of those processes.

[11:00 a.m.]

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you very much. I really appreciate that answer and all the information you’ve shared with us. I don’t see any more questions. I know that a couple of members have a very hard stop here at 11. We were tardy in our appointment with you today, and we apologize for that. We’re really very grateful that you were able to accommodate our time here and give us so much help, I hope.

Members, if you have questions, we can forward them further questions, particularly after the other news we might have, as was mentioned by Rick.

Thank you very much, Oliver.

O. Grüter-Andrew: May I add one reflection?

D. Routley (Chair): Yes.

O. Grüter-Andrew: I would like to add one point. I would like to speak to the people at 911 and for the people at 911, and not just ours but for the ones that work at Surrey Police, the ones that work at B.C. Ambulance Service. I want to impress on this committee that our people in emergency communications are under the same strain, as we heard earlier from Chief Palmer, that his officers are under.

I will tell you that our people are at a breaking point. I will tell you that the need to reform the system that we’re in and to make some changes to some of the funding, frankly, as well, is burning. Our people are burning out, and I fear that we will lose so many of them. The system will fall apart even further if we don’t address that.

For the sake of the public and for the sake of the first first-responders, the people who answer the phone and try and get help, we need to see change.

D. Routley (Chair): Those are very important words. We’ve taken it very seriously and take it to heart.

O. Grüter-Andrew: Thank you for having me.

D. Routley (Chair): Thank you, Members. We have a few people who have a very hard deadline, so I think we won’t have time for deliberation. But we’ll look for an opportunity for an in-person meeting next week, when we’re in the House. If people have a convenient opportunity, hopefully, to get together, we’ll work through Karan in the office to set that up.

Anything else, Karan?

K. Riarh (Clerk to the Committee): No, I don’t think so.

D. Routley (Chair): Okay, then I think I would ask for a motion to adjourn.

From Deputy Chair Davies, seconded by MLA Kirkpatrick.

Motion approved.

The committee adjourned at 11:03 a.m.