The mayors of Victoria and Esquimalt say they need more information before drawing any conclusions about the Victoria police department’s failure to meet its own targets for responding to calls in a timely way.
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins both said the police department has provided insufficient detail for them to properly assess the situation.
“Obviously, we need to take it seriously, but we also need to ask more questions about how these benchmarks are set,” Helps said in an interview.
Police Chief Del Manak will present Victoria council with a third-quarter update Thursday that shows his department missed all but one of its response-time benchmarks in both Victoria and Esquimalt.
For priority one or life-threatening calls, the department expects officers to respond in seven minutes or less 95 per cent of the time. For priority two, three and four calls, the department wants officers to be on the scene in 12 minutes, 40 minutes and 90 minutes respectively, 90 per cent of the time.
Manak said in an interview that the department has missed most of those targets in all three quarters this year.
But Helps and Desjardins said it’s unclear exactly what that means. “In the report, it says that priority one and priority two and priority three [calls] aren’t met, but are they one minute off? Are they five minutes off?” Helps asked. “So I need a little bit more information to understand what’s going on.”
Desjardins echoed those concerns during Manak’s appearance before Esquimalt’s committee of the whole Monday night.
“What isn’t helpful is just to say: ‘No, we’re not meeting them,’ ” she told the chief. “So hopefully in the future we’ll get some more information on that.”
Manak said that there are no standardized benchmarks across police agencies. Victoria created its own targets based on an analysis of its call-response averages over five years, a survey of community expectations, a review of standards adopted by other police departments and an overall assessment by senior managers.
“It’s very unscientific,” Manak told Esquimalt councillors. “It’s one of those things where we did the best we could with the data that we had looking at five years back and what [other] agencies had.”
Manak said in an interview that his department is working on providing more detail about the missed targets. But he said three quarters of missed targets is concerning and points to a lack of resources.
Helps, who co-chairs the police board with Desjardins, said there are reasons for optimism. She said Manak’s efforts to transform the department and make more efficient use of existing resources show promise.
As well, she said the proposed police budget for 2020 calls for the hiring of four special municipal constables to ease the workload for regular officers.
At the same time, the police board has asked the province to intervene and authorize the hiring of additional officers that Victoria council refused to approve this year All of those things could make a significant difference to the department’s performance measures, Helps said. “My expectation is we’ll see a bit of improvement here when the chief reports next.”
