Police returning to neighbourhood's
Kris Ketonen of the CHRONICLE JOURNAL here in the city...a great read...
Tuesday, April 16, 2013 - 08:00
The Thunder Bay police department is overhauling how it deploys its officers and interacts with city residents.
At today’s police services board meeting, representatives of the force will present a new zone policing model and an accompanying Zone Watch Internet initiative, both aimed at creating a crime prevention partnership between the city’s police officers and its residents.
“The impetus behind it was going back to putting our front-line officers back into neighbourhood's,” said Thunder Bay Police Inspt. Sylvie Hauth.
“That’s the idea behind zone policing, is to give them back some ownership of an area, more visibility in an area, and increase the interaction . . . with the citizens of that area.”
On its surface, zone policing is something of a throwback to the neighbourhood policing system of the 1990s, when officers were assigned to various neighbourhoods and operated out of satellite offices.
There were drawbacks to the system, which led Thunder Bay Police to distance themselves from it.
“It started big,” Hauth said.
“We had quite a few offices. It had a really big volunteer aspect, so we were asking community members to be part of committees, to help (by) manning the office, answering phones.
“Not every area had the same response,” Hauth said. “Some areas had a lot better interaction, wanted to be involved, providing time, services. So we eventually shrunk the offices. Some got amalgamated, others . . . were closed.”
The offices couldn’t be staffed constantly by police officers. Specific officers were assigned to specific offices, so if the officer was on vacation, days off, or had to deal with court matters, for example, the office could sit empty for days or even weeks, Hauth said.
“There was really never a lot of continuity,” she said. “I know there was some frustration.”
That shifted into an overall community response approach, Hauth said. It involved a fluctuating deployment, moving people and resources to where they were needed.
“You deploy the team where the problematic areas are,” she said. “They concentrate on that area, fix the problem, identify who’s doing it, lay the charges and then move on.
“It’s more that approach of we’ll go where the issues are and . . . adapt,” Hauth said.
“I’m not saying that hasn’t been successful. However . . . we’re using a very small core of police officers.
“There’s really not that buy-in with the community.”
That will stay in place to a certain extent, Hauth said; the police will retain a team that can move to deal with specific issues in specific neighbourhoods.
“They are still going to be some project plans that may be above and beyond what can be done on the road,” she said. “Something requiring a little more co-ordinated effort, covert, maybe not as blatant as showing up in uniform with a cruiser.”
On the whole, Hauth said, there are some general similarities between zone policing and neighbourhood policing. But there are some important differences, too.
There will not be more satellite police offices springing up in the city. Rather, the interaction and ownership Hauth spoke about will come via assigning officers to a specific zone for a long period of time.
“That way, they get familiar with the zone,” she said. “They know the people that work there, people that aren’t supposed to be there, the usual troublemakers, and the people that live there.
“There’s a rapport that’s being built,” she said.
Officers will be encouraged to get out of the cruiser and walk through their zones and talk with residents, Hauth said.
The new system will be rolled out in the fall after the organizational work and training is done.
The city will be divided into six zones to replace the current beat system, which breaks Thunder Bay into 26 areas.
To designate the zones, police looked at the volume and types of calls each area of the city receives, Hauth said.
“We created a committee, which included members from the various levels of the uniform patrol,” she said. “We looked at how we do business currently — what are the calls that are coming in? Where do we spend most of our time? What are the really, really big calls for service that are really draining our resources, where officers are sometimes there for three, four, five, six hours at a time?”
Data from November 2011 to November 2012 was used in the study.
Police were able to determine the kinds of calls they receive most often. The top calls are traffic stops, follow-up investigations, Liquor Licence Act violations, motor vehicle collisions, abandoned 911 calls and domestic incidents.
More importantly, they were able to determine where the calls are coming from. That, Hauth said, allowed the department to map out the six zones in such a way that the call volume is distributed equally.
That’s a key difference from the beat system.
The beat areas aren’t equal in terms of call volumes. For example, the beat encompassing the downtown south core is one of the smaller ones, but it’s also the busiest for police.
At the same time, police will, through public education efforts, attempt to cut down on the number of non-police calls — such as noise complaints, which are bylaw matters — that officers are directed to deal with.
Meanwhile, police are gearing up to launch Zone Watch. The recruitment of its first members begins today.
Zone Watch is a private, police-run site. Members have to apply and go through training sessions covering the basics of policing, which will allow them to discuss issues pertaining to their specific zone, police executive officer Chris Adams said.
“It’s to replace community policing as it used to exist,” Adams said. “It’s to take us back to connecting directly, but in a constructive way.
“It’s going to feel very much like social, collaborative media,” he said.
“They’re going to be able to post comments about what’s happening in their neighbourhood, they’re going to be able to dialogue with fellow Zone Watch members and the police.
“It allows all of us in policing to basically be able to have a secure tunnel of communication.”
Zone Watch will not be a replacement for 911, nor will it be a place to report a crime, Const. Julie Tilbury said.
“It’s a place for you to dialogue, to explain what you think is going on in your neighbourhood . . . to come up with constructive ways that the police and the citizens can work together to help with crime prevention,” said Tilbury.
Zone Watch members will be the only ones with access to the site; non-members won’t be able to browse comments, for example. Some ideas will be shared with the public in other ways, Adams said.
The idea for Zone Watch came out of a realization that officers have to communicate with the public in a more open and constructive manner, he said.
“We needed to look at everything,” Adams said. “We really needed to look at our corporate website. . . . We also needed to look at our social media.”
The Zone Watch project, as well as the new corporate website, are being funded through a provincial government grant, Adams said.
More information is to be made available at today’s meeting of the Thunder Bay Police Services Board.
No comments:
Post a Comment