I sometimes think there can’t be a worse manager of a public service in Toronto than the Toronto Police Services Board.
The board oversees the city’s single most expensive operation, the police service, which spends almost $1 billion a year, but it seems to devote little attention to police spending.
Last November it approved the spending allocation for 2015 without seeing the detailed budget. It made its decision on the basis of a summary report from the chief, a report significantly at odds with the detailed budget that was made public three weeks later.
The budget states that each of the 17 police divisions would lose an average of 10 front line officers — a total of 172 officers — something neither the chief nor the Toronto Police Association had mentioned. I concluded that the budget was not a realistic description of expected 2015 spending and that there was never any intention of cutting so many staff. I wrote an op-ed article in mid-January on that and other discrepancies between the chief’s report and the detailed budget.
Mayor John Tory left a message on my home telephone to thank me for the article, saying the board was reviewing the detailed budget. Yet nothing more has been said about the matter. This is hardly paying attention to money issues.
Then there’s staffing. The board has been involved in negotiations for a new collective agreement with the police association since last fall. These negotiations are never easy: the association always uses tough tactics to get a contract it wants. One pressure is lost revenue: in 2014 officers gave out many fewer tickets for traffic violations, so the city received $35 million less than the $75 million it had expected. The board needs all the muscle it can muster for these negotiations.
Having Chief Blair on board for the contract negotiations seemed like a no-brainer, but the board decided (for reasons never publicly declared) that it would not extend his contract, which expires in April. He’s leaving in a few weeks, and there’s no new contract in sight. Then board seems to have forgotten a cardinal rule of management: never stab yourself in the back.
The members of the police board are all honourable people. The chair, Alok Mukherjee, was impressively active in human rights before being appointed by the provincial government a decade ago. Dr. Dhun Noria has a strong resumé as a senior member of the medical community and is a successful business person and an active citizen. Marie Moliner is a lawyer, a senior federal bureaucrat in the field of heritage, with a long list of accomplishments. For the city, Mayor John Tory and Coun. Shelley Carroll are new this year. Coun. Chin Lee served some years ago. Andy Pringle, of the financial community and president of the Shaw Festival, is city council’s citizen appointee.
All honourable people, but as a group they do not provide good oversight of this service. When it comes to policy matters, the board often operates in the dark. The police service has announced it will soon begin a pilot project with lapel cameras, but the board has not publicly reviewed the terms of reference and assessment and won’t allow the public to address these issues at a board meeting.
The Privacy Commissioner for Canada has expressed concern over the use of lapel cameras, concluding that the board “should establish written policies and procedures that clearly identify the program objectives and set out the rules governing the program.” That has not been done.
The police service decided to encrypt police radios. Until now, police radios were accessible to anyone with a scanner and used by the media to attend incidents and report on what happened, as we know from the shooting of Sammy Yatim on a streetcar.
The media is now shut out. Police promise to report on incidents, but it would be folly to think they will report on cases where officers make mistakes or overreact and shoot someone.
The board has refused requests to schedule this on a public agenda so that people can ask that Toronto police follow the Regina example and give the media the codes to break into the encryption. Why ensure less transparency?
The picture is clear: the board may just be the worst public manager of the city’s business.
Post City Magazines’ columnist John Sewell is a former mayor of Toronto and the author of a number of urban planning books, including The Shape of the Suburbs.