Barrie’s first community safety and well-being (CSWB) plan includes new approaches to policing, the city’s two deputy police chiefs told council earlier this week.
“We are looking at the city through a different lens, one that takes into account the harm that crime causes,” said Deputy Chief Rich Johnston. “What do I mean by this? All crimes are not equal. A minor theft and a violent assault share one thing. They’re both counted as crimes. But counting them as equal because they are both crimes misses the very real impact that they have on the victim and the broader community.
“Historically, police services have reported primarily on crime counts," he added. "With harm-focused policing, we are treating response to crime with greater attention to the harm it causes to the victim and the broader community.”
Deputy Chief Wyllie Allan said safety and well-being plans, mandated by the province, are about finding new ways for municipal and community partners to work together to achieve shared goals that reflect community priorities. They build off existing efforts and encourage new collaborations. The Barrie Police Service is one of 15 partners that helped develop the plan and will help implement it.
“Within the Barrie Police Service, we have a number of resources that work fully or partially on implementing action items under the community safety and well-being plan or by contributing generally to improving community safety and well being,” Allan said.
While many elements of the community safety and well-being plan were presented to city council Monday night, there was a common theme in high-harm crime.
“The injury and fear that are created because of a violent physical assault is far greater than that of a minor theft,” Johnston said. “Our approach, while seeking to reduce total crime volume, is focusing on high harm. Research strongly supports this approach.
“We know crime concentrates. It most certainly is not spread evenly over a geographic area,” he added. “We also know that crime by harm is even more concentrated. Our CSWB teams are now deployed to proactively (be in) areas that are considered high-harm hot spots. We are targeting high-harm locations, testing evidence-based crime reduction strategies and tracking the results to be better able to measure the impact we are having.”
Johnston emphasized that front-line officers continue to respond to traditional calls for service, no matter the location and if need be CSWB teams will also respond.
“We recognize that this approach requires a balance,” he said. “This is about reducing the harm of crime and the number of crimes committed.”
Allan and Johnston also fielded a number of questions from Barrie councillors.
Coun. Natalie Harris asked about the decriminalization of now-illegal drugs, which would allow police officers to focus more on violent crime.
“Barrie Police Service has to follow the laws as they are written and we are sworn to follow the law that there is,” Johnston said.
Coun. Ann-Marie Kungl asked about the importance of crimes being reported online.
“If we can drive some of the low-harm crimes toward online reporting, it’s better for the community,” Allan said. “Even the online reporting gets the attention it’s deserving of for investigations and we have officers do that followup.
“The online reporting is a great tool for us to do that, as well as the other online services that we offer," he added.
“So much crime happens that we’re unaware of,” Johnston said. “If citizens are finding low-harm or low-level crimes occurring, please report them online. It gives us a better picture of date, time and location. We have finite resources and we can target them (crimes) better if we know what’s going on.”
Coun. Jim Harris asked about the effectiveness of deterring crime with regular police patrols.
“We are leveraging research and the issue we have debunked for a number of years and a number of decades, is random patrol, as an effective contravention tool,” Johnston said. “It is a challenge for a lot of us because it’s a comfort and the reality is we can be more effective if we’re far more targeted.”
Mayor Jeff Lehman, who sits on the Barrie Police Services Board, asked about sending police resources to places where there’s the greatest impact on the community from crime.
“A majority of the city of Barrie does not suffer crime at all, and I put that out there in terms of incredibly low to nil,” Johnston said. “And so it is not evenly spread and so we do try to police that even spread and there are some challenges with that.
“We know we need to be seen more, and there are strategies for that,” he added. “The harm for our victims has a reverberating effect upon our community. And that is an important factor we need to take into account. We need to target that far more effectively.”
Lehman also asked about the pandemic’s effect on crime and policing.
“Everything has been slower. We have seen even in this last lockdown… (where) our calls for service… had dropped noticeably,” Allan said. “This is for a lot of obvious reasons. Our communities are closed, restaurants are closed, people are staying home and we don’t have the same traffic on our roads. And we definitely see a climb in mental health calls and we have been very active in dealing with that.
“We will see our numbers go back to normal after COVID," he added.
Lehman praised the Barrie police department's work within the community safety and well-being plan’s framework.
“The effort that’s been made to actually look at patterns of crime in our community and better target resources are light years better than they were even a few years ago,” he said. “How we use that information now is a really great question.”
