Playboy playmate Jamie Graham is NOT our police chief.
Myself, a B Channel camera-person and a B Channel reporter (I was just along for the ride) were the first to arrive in the council chambers. Jamie Graham was second.
Say what you will about Graham, but he’s a cool character. Casual, and this is a good word to use I think to describe a cop, disarming. If I had just met him and had no idea he were the police chief (and all that that means), I would find him to be friendly and engaging. Good qualities I guess for someone who has to represent something like a police force publicly.
He asked us if we were there to present (which is a question one gets a lot in different council chambers, considering the presenters usually make up 80% of the audience and the media another 20%.) We told him no, we were media. Television? No, online.
“It should be a snore-fest tonight.” he warned us.
That was pretty much the case.
The B Channel News crew is working on a story to be posted on the site about Grahams’s presentation, so I won’t get into too many details.
Sufficed to say, there were some interesting points made during Graham’s presentation, and I learnt a bit about crime in Esquimalt (referred to by one councillor as ’small town type crime’) and how it differs from crime in Victoria (referred to by said councillor as ‘big city type crime’).
Overall though, I felt the presentation was quite useless, and I even felt at one point that Jamie Graham felt the same way.
Statistics about calls received? Honestly though, I had a fun hour or so looking at the stats, and gained a bit more understanding about what kind of calls officers respond to daily. If I were a city councillor though, I would need a much different set of data. Like information about how the force dealt with those calls.
I learned last year that the VicPD answered over 40,000 calls. The stats presented to us last night confirmed that if anything, the force runs a good set of telephones. Even that is unclear in these stats. I’m not saying it ever happens, but how do I know they’re even able to answer the phone half the time?
What I’m trying to say is, what were we supposed to take away from this presentation? Graham himself even admitted to a distrust of statistics as a measure of performance. If this is what Esquimalt council asked for, I’m much more worried about council then I am the police.
Council was gushing all over Graham with gratitude for coming to see them. I guess they realize the alternative could be having the RCMP patrol their town, an agency that isn’t as friendly and forthcoming with it’s information.
For their part, the councillors tried to ask some good questions, but failed miserably. At one point one of the councillors even wondered aloud why the busy commercial centre of town had a higher crime rate then the rest of the township. Hmm. shoplifting doesn’t seem to be much of a problem in the residential parts of town. Guess the cops are doing a better job there.
So, carry on citizens with your decent lives. There is nothing of interest to see behind the doors of police headquarters. Just a bunch of ringing phones and some statisticians crunching numbers. Thank goodness we don’t have any hard questions to ask of the only people in our society licensed to commit violence.
In this town, we trust each other enough that we needed put much effort into holding each other accountable. Ask the mainstream media about that one.
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