“Like bending granite.”

That’s how challenging it can be to change attitudes, practices and perspectives within policing organizations, declared academic Dorothy Guyot, author of 1991 book Policing as Though People Matter, after observing the monumental task of reorganizing police forces throughout the United States.

Not impossible. But miles from easy.

Last month, a Toronto police task force unveiled its own attempt at taking on the proverbial granite bending — a road map to modernize Toronto police services, increase public trust and cut costs.

The result of a year’s work by a civilian and police committee led by Toronto police chief Mark Saunders and police board chair Andy Pringle, the so-called transformational task force report claims to have found $100 million in savings and recommends everything from redrawing the divisional map and overhauling emergency call dispatch to a hiring freeze.

“This plan defines the path to excellence for the Toronto Police Service. It envisions an organization that is an international leader in providing trusted community-focused policing,” Saunders and Pringle wrote in a Toronto police report, in advance of the police board’s meeting this week.

As the police board prepares to debate the final report , the document is receiving mixed reviews from experts and critics who know the monumental task requires calculated planning and clear objectives.

Overall, it is “a very good plan,” says Fred Kaustinen, executive director of the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards and an expert in transformational leadership.

“The stated intentions are noble, principles are contemporary, and the goals are both lofty and appropriate.”

Chief among those goals is what the task force calls “neighbourhood centric policing,” a response to public criticism that officers, often holed up in their cruisers, don’t know the communities they serve and too rarely build a rapport, leading to adversarial relationships.

The report includes the recommendation that officers be assigned to neighbourhoods for a minimum of three years, allowing communities and officers time to build trust.

“The single most important aspect of this plan is neighbourhood policing. Transformation here will make or break the entire initiative,” Kaustinen said.

Buy-in to the neighbourhood officer program — a brand of policing that prizes communication skills and crime prevention over catching bad guys — will require a force-wide culture shift, something the task force has acknowledged as the “essential underpinning” of the recommendations.

But while the report promised in its interim version released last year to tackle issues of culture change in the final report, critics say it has yet to clearly define the desired culture and spell out concrete ways to foster it.

“To show some authenticity in this process would be to define the culture, and say: ‘here’s what it is now, and here’s the vision of where we want to move it to,’” said Paul McKenna, an adjunct professor at Dalhousie University and public safety consultant who has worked with Toronto police and the RCMP.

The report’s recommendation tackling culture change called for a more “comprehensive people-management and (human resources) strategy for the service,” although the task force has not detailed what that would entail.

It did note that Toronto police culture should focus less on “hierarchy and seniority and more on identifying, developing, and rewarding people based on performance and merit,” and recommended a culture assessment within the next six months and developing a “change-management strategy.”

Meaghan Gray, spokesperson for the Toronto police, said the first step is to have an independent cultural assessment.

“It’s vital that we continue to listen to the community and our members on what they appreciate and what they would like to see improved regarding the Service,” she said. “The Toronto Police Service is a large and complex organization comprised of uniformed officers and civilians, who are vital to our common goal of community safety.”

McKenna, who has been involved in several police organizational reviews including an overhaul of the Ontario Provincial Police in the mid-1990s, called the report “clearly a good effort.” But he said it neglected to make truly radical recommendations to rethink policing — such as suggesting a civilian police chief be named in the near future — and downplayed the need for collaboration with the Toronto Police Association.

Police unions can respond to new organizational road maps in different ways, McKenna said. They can put up speed bumps, they can create a fast lane, “or they can become a road closed and shut down a lot of these recommendations.”

The Toronto police union has been voicing harsh criticism of the task force report, calling it solely a city hall cost-cutting exercise that will result in a dangerous decline in police ranks. On Friday, association president Mike McCormack dubbed the task force an “unelected group out of city hall” on Twitter.

Saunders has countered McCormack’s claims that a decline in the number of police officers will result in public safety risks, saying violent crime spikes have occurred when the city boasted high numbers of frontline officers.

Alok Mukherjee, former Toronto police board chair who was on the board when Saunders was hired in 2015, has also voiced his concerns about the union’s ability to derail progress on changes with some of the greatest cost-cutting potential.

That includes the long-standing recommendation that officer schedules be revisited to reduce shift overlap, and that the requirement to have two officers in every car at night should be scrapped. In 2011, an efficiency report from Ernst & Young found a simple shift schedule change could result in $25 million in annual savings.

Both measures require changes to the Toronto Police Association collective agreement.

“Unless the association agrees, you won’t be able to do it,” said Mukherjee, who in a recent article for NOW Magazine criticized the task force report for being “full of buzzwords but short on specifics.”

Kaustinen says transformational change generally relies heavily on two things: the clear identification of both desirable and intolerable behaviour, and the use of incentives to encourage the correct behaviour.

The second requirement is the leadership at the front line, formal and informal, he said.

“In this case, that is the sergeants and senior constables. Clearly police union leaders will be very influential in the success of this transformation, or its demise,” Kaustinen said.

The Toronto police board is set to debate the task force report Thursday.

What the task force has recommended

• The complete shuttering of the controversial Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) unit, a significant victory for communities who felt targeted and harassed by the tactics of TAVIS officers. The recommendation had already been completed as of January 2017.

• The closure of some of Toronto’s 17 police divisions through a redesign of the divisional map. The process would begin with the amalgamation of midtown Toronto’s 54 and 55 Divisions.

• Overhauling paid duty so that off-duty officers are used in situations only where their “skills, authorities and training” are necessary. The report recommends a 30-per-cent reduction in the number of eligible paid-duty assignments performed by police officers.

• Using alternative or shared service delivery of court services and parking enforcement, including using more civilians.

Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca

Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca

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