The Ontario Provincial Police is being undermined by the fact that one-quarter of its full-time constables are unable to serve on the front lines, including an increasing number who are on leave for reasons of mental ill health, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk said in a report.

The force’s frontline service is made up mostly of constables, the lowest-ranking officers whom citizens most frequently interact with, and whose duties include conducting patrols and making traffic stops.

In her annual report on a range of provincial offices and operations, Lysyk’s office published 18 audits on Wednesday. Several were related to the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, while others pertained to its management of its police force, homelessness in the province, and education.

Many problems that Lysyk identified in her probe of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) boiled down to staffing.

The OPP is headquartered in Orillia, which is north of Toronto near the Muskoka region. From 161 detachments and stations, it polices 327 of the province’s 444 municipalities, where about 16 per cent of Ontarians lived last year.

Also last year, 111 of the 230 municipalities that kept comparable records of frontline officers’ hours found that police were fulfilling less than three-quarters of the service hours the force thought were necessary, and that, in 26 municipalities, officers were working half the time they were needed.

Understaffed regions solved fewer crimes than ones that were better staffed, Lysyk’s report points out. Nor has the OPP “taken sufficient steps” to evenly distribute officers in the jurisdictions it’s responsible for.

At the end of 2020, the OPP employed 2,522 civilian employees and 5,577 police officers, including 3,933 frontline constables. But 26 per cent of full-time constable positions were vacant in 2020, leaving just 2,905 on duty.

“Vacancies in frontline constables appear to be contributing to a decline in the service levels provided by the OPP to municipalities,” Lysyk told reporters on Wednesday.

Of the more than 1,000 missing constables at the beginning of 2020, just 12 per cent of the positions were unfilled. One-third of the constables were on long-term leave, due mainly to traumatic experiences — causing the OPP’s workplace-safety claims due to post-traumatic stress disorder to “rapidly increase.”

Another 37 per cent were unfilled because of officers’ “accommodated working arrangements,” many for mental-health reasons. Accommodated working arrangements can include administrative roles and only daytime shifts.

The remaining 18 per cent were temporarily reassigned to non-frontline positions.

“The OPP is losing frontline officers, and officers still on the force are experiencing traumatic stress and related wellness issues,” Lysyk said in a news release. “Our audit concluded that the OPP is not consistently delivering provincial and municipal police services efficiently and effectively.”

Lysyk also said the OPP hasn’t estimated the increase in stress-related vacancies and how they’ll affect the force.

The auditor general also found that detachments don’t schedule officers efficiently. Most service calls come in between the peak hours of 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. From 1 a.m. to 7 a.m., meanwhile they drop off by 75 per cent. But OPP detachments schedule only 25 per cent fewer constables for the relatively quiet overnight shift.

Constables also take most of their vacation and work the fewest hours in August, the month in which they get the most service calls.

Lysyk also identified several accountability problems in the OPP:

Officers’ violations are increasing, yet inspectors of inappropriate behaviour “lack authority to drive improvement.”
The force doesn’t accurately track or monitor how long officers take to respond to calls.
Nor does it measure its own performance against explicit targets, as it used to.

“Our audit concluded that the OPP did not have processes in place to consistently deliver provincial and municipal police services efficiently and effectively,” Lysyk’s report said.

Partly because of the problems Lysyk identified, the OPP’s payroll is now fatter, even though fewer officers are working. The force is also doing less preventative policing, all while coping with a similar crime rate and more service calls.

The OPP’s total budget was $1.2 billion last year, and has gone up in all but one of the last nine years. Its budget is now 26 per cent higher than in 2011.

OPP officers also spent half as much time on patrol in 2020 (975,000 hours) than in 2011 (1.87 million hours).

Meanwhile, service calls increased by 19 per cent from 2011 (716,500) to 2019 (851,500). Calls in 2020 (722,500) were still higher than in 2011, but the auditor general said they were unusually low because public health measures kept more people inside and alone.

Ontario’s crime rate has shrunk over the last decade, but, since 2014, the number of incidents reported every year in OPP jurisdictions has remained about the same.

This story was updated at 4:58 p.m.

AG Report 2021: Cops’ mental-health absences are undermining OPP

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