HALIFAX – Halifax Regional Police respond to upwards of 150 calls every single day. The push is on to bring more transparency and awareness to how those calls and the day-to-day grind of police work actually unfold.
A 2006 Mayor’s Round Table on Violence in HRM identified transparency in policing as a challenge to tackle. Since then, analysts have been devising a way to publicize the daily ‘blotter’- basically a list of every call that comes in to police each day, from noise complaints to public intoxication to homicide.
Currently, there is a Watch Commander’s Report that is sent out at least twice daily outlining ‘crimes of note’. For example, the latest report from March 27th, 2013 noted a bank robbery in Dartmouth. The blotter, however, would be indiscriminate in what it lists.
There are critics of the process. Journalist Tim Bousquet with The Coast, a free weekly circulated in HRM, says he’s been pushing HRP to release the blotter for the past three years, noting it’s been a long seven years since the issue was identified at the round table talks. “One you know we spend over $70 million a year on our police department,” he says. “It’s our money. We have every right to know what the police are up to.”
There has been more disclosure from the force in recent months though, with the highly publicized launch of the city’s online crime mapping system. It highlights five types of crimes and plots them online on a weekly basis. Constable Pierre Bourdages agrees the mapping is a good step forward and that the blotter is another step in the right direction. “Crime mapping is one of the aspects of that type of disclosure, which was launched about a month and half ago,” he says.
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“We did receive some requests from journalists several months ago, asking for, to see what we go through over the course of the day.” He says there are analysts working right now on designing some sort of new software or widget that would integrate the blotter, not only into the current Watch Commander’s Report, but also eventually into the online crime map. “As you know crime mapping only provides information on five different calls, there is limited information. This would be a step further,” says Bourdages. A test blotter exists right now, though it is preliminary in its design.
If and when the release of the daily blotter comes to fruition, it would be a first for a Canadian city. Bousquet, who is an American, says there is no reasonable explanation for why the public isn’t made aware of all police activity. In the States, every police force publicizes all of their calls, he says, from cats in trees to kidnappings. “In Canada it’s not public in any city. And there’s no legal or constitutional reason for that difference,” he says. “It’s just cultural.”
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Bourdages sees it as a way for police to strengthen their relationship with citizens by being open and honest about what is happening in all corners of the city. “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible and to provide our citizens with the information that things are happening in this city. There are suicides and there is violence,” he says.
To that end, Bourdages does express some concern over how to create a blotter system that would still effectively protect victims of crimes such as domestic assaults, sexual violence and suicide. One way to do that, he says, is to be selective when identifying the street the police were called to.
He also points out that the current test blotter doesn’t explain how calls unfolded. Bourdages says there’s a hope the final system will include a ‘description’ column. The reasoning, he says, is that not every call is what it seems. For example, a call may come in as ‘shots fired’. The system logs that automatically as a ‘weapons call’. But, if police arrive to find that it was fireworks or a back-firing vehicle, the case will be closed as a ‘noise complaint’. Right now, the test system has no way of explaining that progression. There is no firm timeline for the release of the blotter. Bourdages says it will be a matter of months.
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