Our Findings

Police Service Board Policy

 

Provincial Compliance Requirements

 

Section 18(1) of the PSA’s Ontario Regulation 3/99 Adequacy and Effectiveness of Police Services required a police service to have a POU, or instead of having its own POU, section 18(2) permitted a board to enter into an agreement to have the service of public order provided by another police service. Regardless of whether the police service maintains its own POU, Section 29 of the Regulation required a board to have a policy on POU services. 

 

The ministry guideline, PO-001, included a recommended sample board policy for both contracted delivery of public order maintenance policing, or for a direct, combined, regional or cooperative delivery method. The sample policy included elements for the board to give direction to the chief on the method of POU services, composition, reasonable time for deployment, equipment, and training. Alternatively, where a board has an agreement to receive public order maintenance from another service, the sample policy suggests identifying the contracted board and including directions to the chief to establish procedures in consultation with the chief of the police service being contracted to provide the services of POUs. 

 

The requirement for a board to have policies with respect to public order maintenance is continued, with modifications under the CSPA and its regulations, including the requirements that all board policies must be publicly posted.

 

The IoP’s Findings

 

The inspection found that 10 board policies had not been reviewed or revised since they were initially created and/or had minor inconsistencies with the other documents, including board agreements or chief’s procedures. Of that number, seven were boards that did not have their own POU and relied on a police service agreement under section 7 of the PSA. 

 

Our inspection found that most boards appear to either copy the sample board policy from the PSM verbatim or had used a board policy from a comparable board. While the sharing and access of these templates is a good practice to drive some standardization and consistency for certain components (particularly as some boards do not all have full-time, professional policy staff) it does reveal risks of complacency and lack of oversight resulting in a policy that provides little or no relevant local governance direction to the chief. Put another way, to the extent that a board policy is legally required to govern the operational decision-making of the chief, governance done this way is weak, at best. One example that may seem minor, but is illustrative, is a board policy that references the police service from which the policy was obtained, rather than naming the police service for which the board has governance responsibility.

 

Further, of the three board policies whose services maintain their own POU, the inspection found minor inconsistencies, mainly around the naming of their POU. For example, over the years, POUs have been renamed several times, such as Crowd Management Units, Public Safety Units, Public Safety Teams, among others. Some of the board policies referenced their services POUs by a previous name and not the name currently used. Again, while a minor issue on its face, this highlights deficiencies in the board’s approach to reviewing, updating, and assuring the quality of its policies in providing appropriate governance to the Chief, and through them, to the service. Of course, where similar minor issues exist due to lack of regular review and updating of governance, the potential for a more significant governance gap to manifest becomes more probable. 

 

In analyzing this further, the inspection noted that several of the board policies had a review date scheduled. However, upon further inquiry many of those policies had not been reviewed as per their schedule. It is essential that boards follow a process to review and update board policies on a regular schedule. However, despite these minor inconsistencies and/or lack of review, the issues identified did not appear to impact police operations as required under legislation.

 

Boards should have a process to continually review their policies with regards to updates that may flow from new or amended legislation, or in response to local issues and experiences that give rise to a need for governance reform. The Chief should be engaged and consulted in the board’s policy-making work, as the governance infrastructure boards put in place through policy sets parameters on the Chief’s operational mandate.