Thank you very much for the invitation to come here. I hope I can be of assistance in your discussions. It's quite like coming in from outer space, not knowing too much about what you talked about before.
I want to touch on three things in my brief 10 minutes: first, to outline some of the main parameters and developments in crime prevention as it's evolving; second, to touch on issues of project implementation and evaluation; and third, to look at some of the challenges that those problems of implementation and evaluation pose for any policy development in the area of crime prevention and criminal justice that are relevant to the topic of social finance.
To give you a very brief account of my own background, I'm a sociologist and a criminologist with experience in the United Kingdom and Canada. Before coming to Canada, I worked for over 20 years in the Home Office in the research and planning unit of the crime policy planning unit. I carried out a number of studies there with regard to parental supervision, youth court sentencing, and particularly prisons, crime prevention, and prison rehabilitation. That included a random controlled trial of a prison rehabilitation program, which I'll come to later on.
In Canada I've undertaken quite a number of research projects for the federal government over the years, particularly on women's offending and women's prisons, including for the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women, on issues of restorative justice and policing and evaluation and trafficking.
I taught criminology at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia for 10 years, until I joined the International Centre for the Prevention of Crime in 1999. After 13 years I left the centre to have a little bit more free time, but I continued to work on issues of crime prevention in Canada and elsewhere. I am currently working as a consultant to ICPC for a specific project, which has made some constraints on me being able to give you fuller information today, or beforehand.
ICPC covers a huge range of things. I've covered many of those over the 13 years, from schools and women to hate crime and the role of local governments. I should stress that what I'm talking about here is on the basis of my experience and not on behalf of the centre. I should also make it clear that my experience in relation to crime prevention is the area that I'm talking about. I'm not an expert on social finance, although I have tried to become acquainted with some of the recent developments.
ICPC itself is a quite unique centre. It's the only international organization in the world concerned with crime prevention, founded by the governments of Canada, France, and Quebec in 1994, and wonderfully supported by the Government of Canada and its other governments. We can talk about ICPC, if you prefer, later on.
Much of ICPC's work is concerned with the crucial role of government in enabling and supporting the development of well-planned and strategic crime prevention, both policies and programs, that prevent harm and promote safe and healthy communities—and that save a great deal of money in the process.
Crime prevention, when I first became aware of it in the United Kingdom, was a task that was undertaken by beat police officers. It was primarily concerned with encouraging people to lock their doors and their car doors, and to lock up their bicycles. The standard joke in a police station for the crime prevention officer was, “So how many crimes did you prevent today?”
Since that time, crime prevention has undergone an extraordinary evolution in terms of its coverage in the space of some 30 or more years. It's become an international movement now. It is supported by two sets of United Nations guidelines, which set out the components for effective prevention and the principles on which they should be based.
Like Canada, many other countries around the world now have national crime prevention strategies and they fund projects on the ground. Institutions like the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Health Organization, UN-Habitat, UNDP, UN Women, UNODC—all of them now support the development of local citizen safety and security strategies, which are based on very similar principles for preventing and reducing the incidence of crime and violence.
It's now recognized, based on many years of experience and research, that crime prevention covers a wide range of approaches. It's not one particular thing you do.
There are four main types of approach. Social and educational approaches are a very big area that includes early intervention projects that work with families, children, schools. It can be targeted to particularly high-risk areas, or parents and families at high risk, or children at high risk, such as young people in gangs.
Secondly, there is community or locally based crime prevention, which works not so much with families and individuals as with communities and areas. They engage local communities, the residents, the businesses, and the local services, to work together to resolve local problems. Quite often it can include communities that are experiencing a lot of economic and social problems.
The third group includes a range of situational and environmental approaches, which focus on things that encourage offending and the opportunities offered by nobody being around, no street lighting, or poorly designed parks and buildings. Situational crime prevention is intent on reducing the rewards and the provocations for offenders, and making it much riskier for offenders to commit crimes.
Finally, the fourth approach to crime prevention is reintegration programs. These are programs that work with individuals, or groups with children, young people with adults, to help them reintegrate into society and into their communities when they are released from institutions or from care.
Projects and policies can be universal to everybody, or they can be targeted to particular groups who are at high risk, such as young people or elderly residents in an area.
There are now many strong evaluations of effective programs, and we know a great deal more about what seems to work. There are a lot of demonstrations of the cost-effectiveness and cost benefits of reducing the future criminal justice, social, and family costs that would be incurred if somebody became involved in a life of crime. Crime prevention practice and knowledge continues to evolve all the time, and there are a lot more things coming out.
Looking at the implementation and evaluation of crime prevention projects, there's a very active community of researchers and practitioners and experts working in this field, and it mirrors the evolution of prevention. Policy-makers want to know the best and most effective approaches, so they can use their resources wisely. There's long been an emphasis on finding what works. This has come to dominate crime prevention at various times, particularly in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. The “what works” phenomenon was very strong under Tony Blair's government.
On the basis of a number of successful pilot projects, many researchers have said that they know what works to reduce crime. The government listened to them and put a very large amount of money, something in the region of 550 million pounds, into the crime reduction program, for a series of programs to reduce residential burglary, truancy, theft around schools and schoolchildren, and violence against women, in some other targeted programs.
The most significant lesson from that very big program was that the implementation of projects—how they were set up, who they worked with, and who ran them—were just as important as the projects themselves. In other words, it was about the kind of thing that you were doing with people. What they discovered was that the people conducting the projects funded by the Home Office didn't have the knowledge and skills necessary to collect the right data, to run the project properly, to target the right people, to undertake the evaluation. It became quite a large exercise in the implementation failure of programs, in spite of the fact that they had started with programs that worked. That lesson has been taken to heart by many crime prevention specialists and governments since then.
The second issue around the implementation of crime prevention is the issue of evaluation itself. I'm sure that you've heard quite a lot about this already. There are researchers—and there are many different schools of belief—who have established a gold standard for evaluating whether a project has actually brought about the kinds of changes that you anticipate. This recommends the use of random controlled trials or quasi-experimental trials, where you have a control group and an experimental group and you measure the progress of both as you would in a medical trial.
Some types of crime prevention are much easier to evaluate than others, and you can use those kinds of trials very easily. So if you want to look at the effects of improved street lighting on rates of sexual assault or burglary or theft in an area, it's relatively easy and quick to look and see whether the street lighting seems to have made a difference. But evaluating the effects of a series of interventions in a neighbourhood—a kind of community and local crime prevention approach that might make improvements to public spaces, develop a youth club, and provide support to families or single parents—is likely to be more difficult and may take a much longer time to show some clear results.
Policy-makers have understandably been very interested in funding evaluated projects that have repeatedly shown success in reducing crime, and there's a number of blueprint programs that I know you've heard about already, which have been developed in countries including Canada. They pay particular attention to the kinds of problems the British experienced, which were the attention to implementation of the project and to careful control, making sure the project was delivered exactly as it was designed to be delivered. This includes the kinds of cognitive skills programs developed and used by the Correctional Service of Canada and the current National Crime Prevention Centre projects on youth at risk.
But we've also learned over the years that the context in which a project takes place is extremely important. Sometimes it's when you go abroad and look at what it means to implement these projects in South Africa or in Brazil that you begin to understand some of these difficulties—
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That's quite a big question. There is a report—and I can leave this with you—that was produced by the World Bank and ICPC in 2011, which is on public-private partnerships and community safety. It is in French, English, and Spanish. It deals with the issue of public-private partnerships.
I mean there's a kind of continuum. You may well have heard this, and I apologize if I'm repeating what others have told you, but you can be a private sector investor in crime prevention by giving baseball caps to the kids involved in the project, and advertising their football match. Or you can go in person and play football with them. Or you can give money to the project itself in quite a large way. Or you can say to the project, “What would you really dream of doing if you had enough money?”
So there's a whole range of ways, at that level, private sector partners can be involved in crime prevention, and I think have done for many years. I mean many of the banks do this kind of work here in Canada. There's the Regent Park housing in Toronto, which I think is a very good example of social finance. There's a lot of that kind of investment.
There are two things. One is that they're mostly doing it because it makes them feel better, and it feels that they're giving something to their community. So Canadian Tire, and Tim Hortons, and all of these organizations, Bata Shoes, have done this for many years because they feel it's part of their corporate social responsibility.
So I think there's the altruistic aspect of it, and I think it is tremendously important to encourage people with money to spare to invest in that kind of way. Then at the far end you have the social impact bond, as I understand it, where you're actually getting a return, and the pay-for-results models where you're getting a return on your money. In that case I think they would do it if they're interested in the social problems. Many of the models seem to be of the Vancity model in B.C., and certainly some of the projects in Britain are funded by foundations. They're not so much venture capitalists. They're mostly people who have a sense of social commitment in some sense.
For me social finance is in very large part about that aspect. The extent to which you can see it as something you do in order to make money, I'm not sure to what extent that is the major issue for many people who do it right now.
In terms of protecting taxpayers from misspent money, I think that's one of the issues. You can fund something, but if they're beating the kids to make sure that they don't run away, then this is not protecting the rights and the human rights of those kids. So the government has a responsibility to make sure of what's happening, in the sense that they know and have some sense of the integrity of programs. That goes back to the notion of doing something that you know has, theoretically, a good chance of having some impact.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I appreciate the opportunity to be here and to present in person. It's been an interesting experience so far.
My name is Kevin McNichol. I'm the executive director of HomeFront. HomeFront is Calgary’s coordinated community justice response to domestic violence. We bring together law enforcement, prosecution, defence, child and family services, shelter, treatment, probation, and victim services. We create a seamless response to break the cycle of domestic violence.
HomeFront began in May of 2000 as a national demonstration project supported by a federal grant from the National Crime Prevention Centre. Over the last 14 years, independent evaluations have shown two-thirds and one-half reductions in criminal reoffence rates for domestic violence. Additional evaluations of our prevention programming have found a 75% reduction in calls for police services, a 70% reduction in child and family service investigations, and a social return on investment of approximately $6.31 for every dollar invested, or about $16 million in value added back to the Government of Alberta, during the course of our pilot projects.
For the past several years, HomeFront has recognized a significant shift in the social discourse about the size of government, its role in providing services, and the ability to continue using tax dollars alone to support increasing demands. This shift has freed up space to explore new conversations about alternate ways to finance our social safety net.
HomeFront has been exploring those ways over the last number of years. We believe new social financing models must be explored, tested, and then permanently introduced to ensure an ongoing, large-scale, high-impact, and most importantly, more robust and sustainable social safety net. We believe there are a number of financial models. One such model might be social impact bonds, which we're talking about today. They hold a great deal of promise.
HomeFront believes itself to be a leading social serving agency able to participate in any pilot program for such an initiative. HomeFront represents a strong cross-sector collaborative model, has strong evaluation systems already in place, and has the ability to tangibly quantify and measure its social impact across a range of justice and social serving systems. Plus we have a history built upon innovation, and exist within a strongly networked, socially innovative community in Calgary and Alberta. All of these are elements that are critical to the success of these types of initiatives. I think we heard that from Dr. Shaw earlier today.
I want to share a few thoughts with you around what we've been pondering at HomeFront in our discussions around social innovation bonds. I have to say that I'm not an expert on that as a financial vehicle, but these are some of our thoughts in terms of how we would position ourselves and be able to make use of them as an agency.
Thought number one is that if we are going to embark on this journey, we need to change the conversation from one of cost savings to one of value added. In reality what happens is not a cost saving but a reallocation of existing resources to address previously unaddressed issues and areas, and/or to better address those already identified issues. For example, our prevention programs pair a police officer and a social worker who respond to non-charge domestic violence calls in the city of Calgary. What we found through our social return on investment analysis was that we saved about $100,000 per year in officers' time per district we worked in.
I can tell you, having worked in those districts, that there isn't an officer sitting in there for a year twiddling their thumbs. What they were able to do was reinvest that time to do better investigations with the cases they already had, provide better intervention, and/or reassign themselves to do other police work that was either under-supported or was unserved at the time prior to our coming in there to support them. So it's value added, not a cost savings.
The second thought is that we need to take a risk and try. In Alberta and Calgary proper, at least, I believe we are ready to take the chance and explore using alternate funding models to support our safety net. An example of this is the success of the unfortunately discontinued safe communities initiative that the Government of Alberta initiated across the province. It invested a great deal of resources and tilled the ground to already have in place a social return on investment evaluation methodology, which many of us as agencies have taken to heart and are using on a regular and routine basis.
It further challenged us to work in a cross-sector, multidisciplinary way. It challenged government ministries to also work in new and coordinated fashions—to stop considering problems from their specific ministry perspective and to start recognizing that when an individual comes before one of our services, often they will touch every one of the ministries that has that outward-facing client service focus. It's the same for agencies on the ground, and that's where the safe communities innovation initiative really challenged and brought us together to create that happening.
But we have to try.
We also need to accept that this type of funding will not be a panacea and relieve government of its obligation to support the social safety net. Instead, it might allow government to redirect its limited resources to more under-supported areas of the safety net, or enhance current initiatives that are already in place.
I think this is the critical piece to sustainability. Business knows this, that you want diversity of revenues in order to maintain a business model, and I think this gives an opportunity for us, as a society, to diversify the sources of revenue we have available to us.
Further, we must accept that not all areas will benefit from this type of funding. Social issues that might benefit will have clear and high public costs associated with intervention, interventions with proven or significant potential to produce net social value, the ability to collect and analyze data that demonstrates social impact, and are nested in strong, robust, collaborative relationships that span multiple sector stakeholders.
Care will also be needed to ensure that success doesn't breed success at the cost of other critical areas. I've heard some questions today around this, and I think it's good thinking. The example would be breast cancer, which has an overwhelming public awareness and fundraising effort that overwhelms and dwarfs many of the other common and lethal cancers that are out there and receive little public funding or awareness, but they are just as critical. I think this is a critical place where government needs to turn its attention, and I think it is the role of government to oversee to make sure that the cuddly bears don't get all of the resources. But I think that's always been the role that government has played in our society, to ensure equitable distribution of resources to support the social safety net.
For these initiatives to achieve their potential, they must fund the spectrum of services required to make meaningful change for the clients involved. Their strength will be found in the collaborative cross-service teams supported by this type of model. The data at HomeFront is clear. A client will be only as successful as the community that surrounds them. One service dosage from one service provider is rarely enough to address most multi-need, complex clients we deal with every day. Our research shows a clear cumulative effect of what we're doing.
To sum up, we know that coordinated, integrated, multidisciplinary service programs, embedded in a supportive community, create large-scale social change. What we need is the support, oversight, and authority of government endorsing the use of these models, encouraging the development of financial agents who provide the oversight and finance vehicles, and a desire by government to fiscally backstop and underwrite these efforts.
Thank you.
:
Thank you.
Bon après-midi, Mr. Chairman and honourable members.
Thank you for the invitation to appear before the House of Commons’ Committee on Public Safety and National Security regarding its study of social finance as it relates to crime prevention in Canada. The Edmonton Police Service appreciates the opportunity.
As stated, my name is Jacqueline Biollo, strategic coordinator, investment governance section, office of strategy management division, Edmonton Police Service.
The Edmonton Police Service has a history of supporting and/or partnering with community agencies to develop innovative programs and services that address the systemic barriers of vulnerable and victimized individuals, as well as those at risk of being involved, or those involved, in criminal activity. Systemic barriers include mental health issues, drug and alcohol addictions, homelessness, and/or a lack of employment skills, education, or training.
Through application processes, community agencies alongside the Edmonton Police Service receive various amounts of grant dollars to research, develop, implement, and evaluate crime prevention strategies. Specifically, some of these grant dollars were issued under a three-year contractual relationship with the Government of Alberta, Justice and Solicitor General, safe communities innovation fund, SCIF. The premise of SCIF-funded initiatives was to identify the social return on investment of each innovative project while developing innovative responses to issues such as sexual exploitation, electronic monitoring, or transitional housing.
The Edmonton Police Service partnered with more than a dozen community-led initiatives over the lifespan of the SCIF funding cycle. Complementary to the identification of education and awareness, prevention, intervention, and suppression initiatives, SCIF-funded projects were tasked with developing sustainability models in the anticipation that provincial grant dollars would not always be available to assist in sustaining the operational costs of delivering proactive or reactive, and much-needed, programs and services in the community.
The Edmonton Police Service and community agencies acknowledge that in order to sustain a strong presence of leadership and achieve stated goals, alternate means of financing—or revenue generation above and beyond government funding—needed to be found. The House of Commons committee studying the economics of policing recognized that crime prevention and early intervention have social and economic benefits, and recommended that the Government of Canada continue to make investments in these areas.
The Edmonton Police Service is currently only at an exploration stage to determine if social impact bonds can be a means to secure long-term funding to address the numerous systemic barriers that present in our community, which have a direct effect on EPS calls for service. The economic motivation for social impact bonds occurs via the savings created by innovative, preventative interventions that help reduce the need for government expenditures. For example, success may be measured broadly as a reduction in recidivism rates as a result of permanent housing
A social impact bond, or SIB, is a pay-for-success contract where a commissioning body—typically the government—commits to pay for the achievement of a particular desired social outcome. There are four players in a SIB: the government, the service providers, private investors, and an intermediary organization that connects all the players together. To date there are no live social impact bonds in Canada.
There appear to be opportunities for social impact bonds to support programs that EPS is involved with, specifically around supporting vulnerable and victimized persons, heavy users of services, and hard-to-house high-risk offenders.
As part of community agency-driven working groups, the Edmonton Police Service witnessed presentations and received information from Canada’s first built-for-purpose social impact bond intermediary, Finance for Good. Design and implementation include identifying program logistics, program evaluation methodology, impact measurement techniques, fundraising strategies, and other technical program needs.
Many of the economic savings generated from social impact bonds are byproducts of the focus on prevention and rehabilitation, instead of reactive actions driven by the treatment of symptomatic issues such as prison use, emergency medical care services, and traditional education models and practices
To inform future discussions for the design of a social impact bond-ready program to share with government and investors, including proven interventions, a strongly linked economic case specific to which government entities accrue savings, budgeted scale-up costs, and a risk profile that satisfies investors, the Edmonton Police Service received an estimated cost of work from Finance for Good of $24,000 plus a 10% administration fee plus GST, or approximately 1% of the bond under consideration.
The Alberta government's budget 2014 introduced Bill 1 to support innovation and provide the government with the financial resources to take full advantage of new funding opportunities for social and cultural progress in the future. A $1-billion social innovation endowment will champion the creation of new ideas needed to address issues such as reducing poverty, transitional housing, and family violence.
If the Alberta government commitment—or similar—for proposed programs is secured, remaining costs required for fundraising, establishing social impact bond governance and legal structures, implementation, and continuous measurement and reporting on results would be borne by the investors. Costs are negotiated based on modifications to the scope of service provided.
The fact that the EPS has a focus on strategic management and investment governance may signal that the EPS has an interest in social finance and is well placed to speak to downstream impacts of social finance, social impact bonds, and crime prevention through social innovation in Canada. It is important for the EPS to continue to lead discussions with community stakeholders, the City of Edmonton, Finance for Good, legal advisers, and the Government of Alberta in exploring the concept of social impact bonds and the process of advancing crime prevention through alternative and innovative funding sources.
The Edmonton Police Service is currently exploring all aspects of a standard social impact bond legal structure, including risk and liability, governance structure, investor interests, and the rights and obligations of all parties.
It is also important that the Edmonton Police Service take the time to make strategic decisions and implement strategic actions to position us for the future. This includes meeting with elected officials, senior bureaucrats, community partners, and key stakeholders to foster relationships and discuss issues of importance to the community and how legislative or financial support can assist or benefit law enforcement initiatives, such as education, awareness, prevention, intervention, and suppression.
Through discussions, the Edmonton Police Service will explore the concept of social impact bonds and the process of advancing crime prevention in Canada and acknowledge the growing costs of controlling and responding to vulnerable and victimized individuals. This response is of concern to all Canadians, and especially the government. We will address crime risk factors through strategic methods, such as education, awareness, intervention, prevention, and suppression. We will share evidence-based examples of successful pilot projects the Edmonton Police Service has been involved with, such as, for example, the SCIF-funded initiatives. We will acknowledge that sustainability is a challenge, support collaborative relationships, and leverage new partnerships and funding sources. Finally, we will influence social change.
While innovation, diversification, and strategic investment will mean greater sustainability, collaboration, and long-term success, the Edmonton Police Service remains cautious about the evidence to support the necessity of social investment and about how reasonable investments would be determined, what oversight regime would support initiatives, what recourse mechanisms are in place for investors who believe their investment produced less than desirable outcomes, the risk profile of assets to be held by the social investment bond, the amount of funds that may be disbursed from a bond each year, a usage policy that indicates the purposes for which disbursements can be used, and how the effectiveness of social impact bonds will be assessed.
The current economic climate has put pressure on budgets at all levels of government. As a consequence, there has been focus on the cost of policing and public safety. The office of strategy management will continue to review government initiatives and grant or funding opportunities and to act or respond accordingly.
In summary, social innovation to resolve complex social issues such as poverty or family violence requires new thinking, new approaches, and risk-taking that can be more effectively implemented outside of traditional government approaches.
Mr. Chairman and honourable members, the Edmonton Police Service is pleased that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security is exploring a study of social finance as it relates to crime prevention in Canada, and we thank you for asking us to tell our story of access to social financing mechanisms and their impact on safe communities.
I look forward to hearing your comments and answering your questions.