Recommendation 2

Boards should enter into section 14 agreements to ensure adequacy of POU resources

Where a police service does not maintain its own POU, the board must ensure it has a valid agreement in place, in compliance with section 14 of the CSPA, to have another board or the OPP Commissioner provide POU services. 

Boards should ensure they update any previous agreement under the PSA to comply with section 14 of the CSPA and applicable regulations. This should be undertaken after thorough consultation with the chief, with consideration for what a ‘reasonable time’ for POU deployment should be locally, in different sets of public safety risk circumstances, having regard to the new CSPA factors, namely:

1. the policing needs of the community,
2. the geographic and socio-demographic characteristics of the police service’s area of policing responsibility,
3. the total population and population density of the police service’s area of policing responsibility,
4. the presence of critical infrastructure in the location where the POU is to be deployed,
5. information about public order incidents in the police service’s area of policing responsibility within at least the previous three years, including information about the scope and severity of the incidents, and,
6. best practices in relation to response times for POUs. 

Boards and Chiefs should also consider past/current practice and known or predictable capacity issues (informed by data and trend analysis) that may arise from the ability of the police service that historically provides POU services to meet current and evolving demands. A copy of any policing agreement made under section 14 must be provided to the IG.