The way policing is structured and delivered in the province has come up several times at the Mass Casualty Commission leading the public inquiry into the April 2020 mass killing in Nova Scotia. But leaders of some municipal police forces say much is at stake if the new standards include paying the RCMP for specialized services such as serious crime detection, canine or forensic teams — services the Mounties have always provided without charge. “If you were to do a killing in this city, it can quickly get into the millions of dollars. You’d cripple the city, you’d cripple the police department,” Julia Cecetto, Kentville’s retired police chief, told a panel. interview last August.
How tracking services started
Throughout the investigation, senior RCMP officials explained details of the services provided to the province, as well as the value of those services. Former Nova Scotia commander Lee Bergerman recently told the commission that the force began tracking requests for specialized services from municipal police agencies in January 2021 because “every year we started with a deficit.” Head of Ministry Darren Campbell, the former Nova Scotia support services officer, told the inquiry that these services are “very expensive” as they require highly trained officers who are often diverted from other frontline duties, sometimes for hours or days at a time. According to a tracking document released through the investigation, the RCMP recorded 84 requests for assistance from municipal police forces between January and December 2021. The municipalities making the most requests were Amherst with 26 and New Glasgow with 16 — but each of All 10 municipal agencies, with the exception of Annapolis Royal, requested assistance at least once. The most frequently requested service, by far, is forensic identification, which was requested 54 times in 2021. (CBC) Head of Ministry Chris Leather, the former RCMP criminal operations officer in Nova Scotia, testified in July that those requests can require officers to travel several hours “to get to paper bags and fingerprint windows” for shoplifting and other crimes low level property. Leather said this is a “significant waste” of a highly trained officer and demonstrates the need for these municipal agencies to have their own general duty members trained to process crime scenes.
Municipalities were sometimes rejected
Since the RCMP began tracking service requests, some municipal forces told the commission they have either been denied these special services or made to wait days. Three of the municipal requests for service were “declined,” according to the RCMP follow-up document. “If we had a homicide or if we had a serious person that had a blocked roadblock that needed 911, people would eventually show up,” said current Kentville Police Chief Jim Butler. “But it’s the middle levels, you know things like the robbery we did, looking for a dog. I knew not to call [forensic identification] because they weren’t going to come, we knew it.” As a result, several municipal police chiefs said they now rely on neighboring municipal forces that may have more resources. Campbell said that in the Nova RCMP northeast district, which covers several counties in the northern mainland province, about 25 percent of the four-member forensics team’s time was spent on requests from municipal agencies. “So there’s a drain there,” Campbell said. The RCMP forensics unit on Downey Road in North Preston following the death of a 20-year-old man in 2016. (Anjuli Patil/CBC) Campbell noted the RCMP had no way to recoup those costs because Mounties can’t bill municipalities directly. Instead, they collect money from the province for the services they provide to municipalities, communities or counties of various sizes under a Provincial Policing Services Agreement (PPSA) or a Municipal Police Service Agreement (MPSA). But, Campbell and Bergerman said, because municipalities with their own police forces are not part of the PPSA, the Mounties have always simply absorbed the costs of those special services into their own budget. After decades of this informal arrangement, “there is now an assumption that the RCMP is required or responsible for providing these specialized services to all municipalities,” said Hayley Crichton, executive director of public safety and security at the provincial Department of Justice. January interview with the committee. “There is a significant reliance on our few key resources from the municipal police,” Crichton said. However, Leather said there is no legal obligation for the RCMP to provide these services to municipal agencies — and the province agrees. RCMP Supt. Darren Campbell was the support services officer at the time of the April 2020 shooting, the third highest ranking Mountie in Nova Scotia. (CBC) In a briefing note to the justice minister updated last January, provincial justice department lawyer Barbara Kerr said there is no “legal requirement” for the RCMP to assist any municipal agency under either the PPSA or the Police Act. As of this week, the province has not charged any municipal agencies for RCMP services. Although Crichton said most provinces have formalized how and when municipal forces pay for RCMP services through memoranda of understanding (MOU), these have fallen by the wayside in Nova Scotia. Campbell told the committee in an interview that the lack of MOUs is “awful” and singled him out when he arrived in Nova Scotia. But others told the committee that this was simply the way things had always been done in the province. Bill Moore, head of public safety at the Halifax Regional Municipality and former deputy chief of the Halifax Regional Police, told a panel Thursday that it was a “collective approach.” “There wasn’t a lot of formality in terms of inter-agency interoperability. Most of it was done with a smile and a handshake. Some even said some of the decisions were made on the golf course,” Moore said.
Confusion among the leaders
Many municipal leaders in the province echoed Moore’s impression during their interviews with the committee. In his testimony before the inquiry, Truro Police Chief Dave MacNeil agreed that chiefs assumed the province was paying the RCMP for special service requests under the PPSA because all Nova Scotians pay provincial taxes for the provincial police force — “whether you have your own police or not.” McNeill said while municipal leaders are at the table with the RCMP and the province to find a way to move forward with the payments, “there’s a cloud … it’s kind of an unknown right now.” Amherst Police Chief Dwayne Pike said in a committee interview in January that he is now seeking a formal Memorandum of Understanding with Truro Police for the use of the canine unit and forensic team, including payment, “because of the concern whether or not the RCMP might be able to provide those things for us when we need them.” The issue of how municipalities on their own will pay for special RCMP services is tied to ongoing work to update policing standards. The standards, which Crichton said in a committee interview were last updated in 2003, set a “minimum basic requirement” that all agencies across the province must meet and cover things like dog units, shows, training and more. . Hayley Crichton, senior Nova Scotia Department of Justice official, participates in a roundtable on intra-agency emergency communications in the Mass Casualty Commission’s investigation into mass killings in rural Nova Scotia on April 18/19, 2020, at Truro, NS on June 23, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan) The province has been trying to update the standards for years, but Crichton said it wasn’t until April 2021 that the Ministry of Justice set up two committees, including people from municipal forces, RCMP, government and police boards to finally finalize them. On Thursday, the department said the standards are expected to be completed by the end of March 2023. They will be presented to the justice minister for review, with the approved standards eventually becoming regulations under the Police Act. At a committee panel Thursday, Kentville Police Chief Butler said these discussions about standards and who provides services get to the heart of what Nova Scotians expect from their police. “It’s certainly normal for an agency the size of Kentville to wonder, will we be around 10 years from now? Or should we be around 10 years from now?” Butler said.
Councils could pay more
Councilors and mayors who spoke to the CBC about this special services issue said they had not followed the Commission’s discussion closely, but would monitor how the new standards could affect their budgets. “Certainly it could be a driver on the cost, which you know no municipality looks forward to. But I guess the bottom line — you have to do what’s fair when you need services,” New Glasgow Mayor Nancy Pelosi said this week. Dicks. Both Dix and Amherst Mayor David Cogon said that while policing makes up a large portion of their municipal budgets, they should never consider not calling in the RCMP or another force in order to save money. “The safety of our voters comes first. And so … we meet that demand every year through the taxes we raise,” Cogon said Thursday. Kogon pointed out that any new cost agreement should be a two-way street and ensure Mounties pay when they use municipal services like Amherst’s major crime unit team. Halifax and Truro police chiefs have already told the commission that they are currently sending their dog units or special services to the RCMP…
