Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Victoria, B.C. – The Bike and Beat Deployment pilot project in Patrol Division has been deemed a successful demonstration of integrating these functions into regular Patrol work and will repeat in 2025.
In the Spring and Summer of 2024, Patrol Division made a concerted effort to dedicate resources to bike and beat patrols in Esquimalt and the downtown core in Victoria when call volume permitted and capacity existed.
We recognize that this visibility is important to residents, but this capacity is contingent upon balancing response obligations, as high call volumes and other competing priorities can limit Patrol officers’ abilities to engage in proactive measures like this.
This pilot was used to determine the effectiveness of a Patrol officers’ ability to deploy on a mountain bike while still maintaining their primary mandate of responding to calls for service. A small group of Patrol officers were provided training and minimal equipment in an effort to determine what capacity Patrol officers had over the summer months, which is historically our highest call volume, to deploy on mountain bikes.
A total of two officers on two different Patrol shifts were provided with the training and equipment.
The objectives of this small group were to:
1) Respond to calls for service;
2) Provide a visible presence; and
3) Conduct proactive criminal enforcement.
Officers with the Bike and Beat Deployment Pilot Project
Responding to Calls for Service
Officers were able to deploy on bikes throughout the summer months. All the officers involved in the pilot, as well as their supervisors, commented on the ability of these officers to rapidly respond to calls. Officers found their response times to calls to be very fast, often times faster than cars.
“I think the best thing we’ve been able to do is to respond to calls with a much quicker routine response. My partner and I located two different high-risk missing elderly people and were able to be the ones who made the first police contact with them. On one occasion, my partner and I were able to go from Mary Street / Esquimalt Road to Fisherman’s Wharf before a Patrol member could get there in a vehicle, and we were able to locate a missing elderly person.
On more than one occasion, we responded to other members who called for help, specifically a police request for Code 3 cover, and a separate Bylaw request for the same. In both cases, we had a quicker or similar response time to help the members needing assistance as those who were driving cars.”
Increased Visibility
The officers felt a greater community connection and were constantly being approached by people to engage in casual conversation and ask questions. The high visibility of the officers provided countless positive interactions with community members and business owners. On one occasion officers were waved down by a business owner who was getting a large amount of theft from his store. Officers set up covert operations on the store and effected an arrest on-scene. This staff member mentioned she wouldn’t have called police unless she saw them ride by on the bikes. This was a great example of the impact the bike patrol team can have on small business owners.
Proactive Criminal Enforcement
The officers found their ability to be proactive on the bike very beneficial. They would often surprise the criminal element with their presence.
“It’s tough to quantify a lot of what we did since I can’t measure disruption and deterrence. We were given the task of being proactive and we tried to focus our efforts downtown where we could be a benefit to local businesses. Regardless of the time of day, we focused on downtown hot spots where bylaw offences or street disorder has the greatest impact on the community.
“To my surprise, the reception from the subjects of our checks was positive. There is something about rolling up on a bike versus rolling up in a police car that makes you more approachable, and I found that I’ve never been able to build a stronger proactive connection with the unhoused population that I have when on a bike. Some of the locals in the 900-block of Pandora started recognizing us riding through as the ‘Tour-de-Block,’ so if nothing else, they came to recognize that we were there, and we were involved.
“Even in responding to different incidents, it’s hard to say what we prevented. We attended a few different ad-hoc protests; one notable one was the gathering outside of City Hall that led to the ‘Stop the Sweeps’ meeting in City Hall. My partner and I spent the days leading up to that in Irving Park chatting with the residents. From there, we used that rapport to connect with the organizers of the event, many of whom were residents in the park, and continued to build on those relationships thereafter. It actually made it a lot easier to work Bylaw shifts since the rapport built when we were on bikes easily translated to credibility when trying to assist Bylaw with their enforcement.”
Evaluation
These efforts by Patrol officers on the bikes, in addition to regular beat patrols, were considered to be quite successful and showed the Patrol Division does have some capacity to provide beat and bike patrols. This capacity can be quite limited at times due to the heavy call volume experienced by Patrol officers, particularly during the summer months. The redeployment of Patrol resources during the Department’s recent restructuring, moving more resources to peak call volume times during the afternoon, also provided supervisors the ability to capitalize on the extra capacity by deploying bike/beat patrols.
Moving Forward
Plans are currently underway for a more robust and focused bike and beat deployment in both Esquimalt and Victoria by Patrol in 2025, as well as an additional robust Community Policing plan for participation from the entire Patrol Division. We are currently considering investments in technologies such as E-bikes, which will further increase a patrol bike officers’ effectiveness and timeliness in call response, as well V-Mobile, which will provide officers on Bike or Beat deployments to utilize CAD on their mobile devices. Additional officers across all four shifts will be given training with the goal of two bike officers being deployed daily in a Patrol capacity in the spring/summer of 2025.
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