Victoria police Chief Jamie Graham stands accused of ignoring the memory of slain six-year-old Christian Lee, but Graham is being unfairly pilloried.
Faced with having to balance competing priorities, the chief has decided to pull one of his officers from the regional domestic violence unit, which was created in the wake of the Peter Lee killings.
When Lee killed his family and then himself on Sept. 4, 2007, the cries of "never again" came swiftly. It was clear that many things went wrong in the weeks leading up to the slayings inside the house on King George Terrace.
Lee's wife Sunny Park had tried in vain to protect herself and her six-year-old son Christian from the husband who had already tried to kill her by crashing his Land Rover into a utility pole.
Park had to take her complaint of abuse to three different police departments. It was more evidence of the dangers of fractured police service in the capital region. As seems to happen when a crime exposes those dangers, police and municipalities pushed aside calls for amalgamation and set up an integrated regional domestic-violence unit, adding to the patchwork of regional units.
The unit was up and running in July 2010. It was staffed with police investigators, victim-services workers and a child-welfare worker. It was headed by a Victoria police sergeant, and Victoria, Saanich and West Shore RCMP each contributed one police officer.
When Graham talked about his decision to take his investigator off the team, he described the unit as a "luxury" he couldn't afford. He used the term in more than one interview, so it wasn't a slip of the tongue. The word only increased the outrage of those who fear the pullback is a sign that VicPD is slipping from its commitment to deal with the most difficult cases of domestic violence.
The other word Graham used was "crisis." The shortage of people in the department's detective office means there are not enough officers to handle crimes that have to be investigated. He has to put officers where they will do the most good.
The "crisis" leaves many scratching their heads because in the last five years, while crime rates continue to drop, VicPD's budget has increased 22 per cent and it hired 21 more officers, bringing its total to 243. The department argues that as the core city, it gets 64 per cent of the region's crime, including many serious crimes.
While the police board continues to ask for answers on the money-versus-crime-rate question, the department has commissioned an efficiency report and plans to restructure based on that report. The board plans its own efficiency study. The aim is to get the best use of the people VicPD has.
Graham is not abandoning the fight against domestic violence. VicPD still has one officer in the three-member regional unit. About two-thirds of the cases it investigates are outside Victoria, so the officer who has been pulled will be added to the staff available to investigate crimes in Victoria. Many of those are domestic-violence cases.
That makes sense from the point of view of Victoria police manpower. Of course, it's another symptom of the fragmented policing of Greater Victoria, where each department focuses within its own borders while crimes of all kinds transcend any boundary. However, VicPD, as much as it favours police amalgamation, has to live with the system that exists, which means looking after its own house.
When the system fails, as it clearly did in the case of Christian Lee's family, we all see it. When a team like the domestic-violence unit, which tries to identify potential tragedies and prevent them, works, we see nothing. There are no statistics for things that didn't happen.
Like other aspects of preventive policing, it's a tempting target for managers in times of tight money. Pull officers out of school liaison or community policing, where no numbers measure success, and put them on investigations, where charges can be laid and closure rates can be counted.
If residents are unhappy with the department's priorities, the police board has a role to play and must make its voice heard. Do board members want community policing or traditional enforcement?
Graham has difficult choices to make, many of them produced by our patchwork of police departments. In setting his priorities, he is not forgetting the lessons of Christian Lee's tragic death. He is dealing with the realities of policing Victoria and Esquimalt.
