Feb 05, 2010 - 11:33 AM

By Parvaneh Pessian

WHITBY -- An officer is busy issuing a speeding ticket in north Whitby when he catches wind of a dangerously escalating brawl on the downtown streets and is called in to assist.

The ongoing occurrence of this type of cross-area dispatch, which refers to when officers are assigned to a certain area of the community but end up being bounced around town in response to higher incidents of crime, continues to be a challenge for Durham Regional Police.

To address the issue by striking a more efficient balance in workload carried by frontline officers, a new deployment strategy has recently been put into action.

"The process was commenced as early as 2004 when we made the commitment to transform our organization to look at everything it is we do, all of our business practices and squeeze out all of those deficiencies," said Durham Police Chief Mike Ewles at a Whitby town hall meeting held to outline details of the new model to councillors.

The regional patrol map has been redrawn to establish new work zones for officers, rather than simply having them work within the confines of municipal boundaries, which has been the case since 1974.

As of Jan. 11, Whitby, or 18 Division as it was previously known, is now called Central West Division. Officers will be tackling a total of five patrol zones, instead of the original three. A portion of northwest Oshawa is now included in one of those work areas and overall staffing levels have been adjusted as required.

One of the advantages of the new model is more flexibility in shifting patrol borders in response to the ongoing growth throughout the region, specifically in sections of west Whitby or in the rapidly expanding Brooklin area, Chief Ewles noted.

"It gives us the ability, as the workload changes and as the community composition and the densities change, to realign all those zones on a constant basis, as opposed to the past where we simply tried to carve them up within the municipality," he said.

The changes are reflective of existing workloads and geographical barriers, said Inspector Dave Kimmerly, who led a portion of the patrol staffing analysis conducted during the development of the new work zones.

"It's no secret that Durham Region is very rural but also very urban and we have to model our police service delivery so that it's equitable to both a rural environment and an urban environment."

One of the key principles of the initiative is to create and encourage ownership of work areas by frontline patrol officers, similar to the zone policing model used in the 1980s, he added.

"This is not a new concept but we're still refining, we're still trying to get it right and we feel that we've now got the foundation in order to get that right -- where our officers are assigned to a work area and they can actually stay in that work area."

For Whitby in particular, where residents have witnessed a significant rise in incidents of vandalism in the downtown core over the past year, a higher concentration of police will now be directly assigned there. This will reduce the need to pull officers from other areas and allow more opportunity for those on the scene to be actively engaged in problem-solving.

"There's a process now where we can record that particular problem, officers can be assigned to it or mark themselves off on it directly and we can measure and track the efforts that have been made towards that problem," said Insp. Kimmerly.

Officers who are then assigned to that area for future incidents can access a database to familiarize themselves with the problems that have cropped up in the past and the solutions already implemented.

The new deployment strategy will require continuous evaluation to determine whether it is working toward providing more effective policing for the region, Chief Ewles said.

"Making a change like this has inherent risks," he said.

"We'll fail forward, learn from those risks and move on but that's the piece that we've got to look at -- whether this will better serve our community."