Mr. Pat Leahy:

I thank the Chairman. I will be brief. It is important to look at the entirety of what the police do in regard to such circumstances. The situation described by Mr. Todd is probably common to all police services, including our own. International research which is applicable to us clearly indicates that police forces spend between 10% and 20% of their time actingin extremis and 80% dealing with non-police issues. One of the core arguments for community orientation is that 80% of the force's time is not spent dealing with these issues, so we should try to engineer them out of the system or provide some sort of intervention as a police service rather than waiting for things to happen, which is what we are currently doing. It is very important that we know what we are talking about in terms of the volume described by Mr. Todd and what we do with the rest of our time because that will underpin the discourse on community policing and how we should change in that regard.