 Good afternoon everybody and welcome back. I'm Kurt Newman, Corporal with the E-Division RCMP Crime Prevention and Program Support Services Unit. I'm accompanied today by my Sergeant and Boss, Sergeant Frank Pollacelli. He brings over three decades of policing experience to the table today, but just wanted before we get going, Sergeant Frank Pollacelli and myself, we provide support and guidance to over a hundred RCMP detachments on youth strategies issues throughout our province. We sit on various committees and represent our organization on those. Firstly, I just want to acknowledge all the great work being done by the government and all the speakers here today on bringing light to such a topic, cyberboying, and I know Premier Clark has done a fantastic job over the past several years on on bringing this to the forefront. A lot of people probably don't know, but since 1999 youth have been a strategic priority for the RCMP across Canada and when I take a look at why the youth are, is because what we want to do is we want to reduce crime and victimization among such a vulnerable population and one of the ways in which that we accomplish this within our our line of work is that we want to make sure that we take a balanced approach. You can see up on the PowerPoint up there, it's a balanced approach on how we're going about going about doing our business. In 2008, the RCMP released a report talking about the significance of our relationship between school districts and our organization and it says that this is probably one of our most valuable relationships that we can form. We have the young people in school and that's why when I take a look here, what do we see up there? We see pie. Everybody likes pie and you know what? So we thought we'd have to come up with the acronym for that and Sergeant Frank Pallicelli came up with this acronym. He modeled after Spergel's model of gang suppression but it's about prevention, intervention and enforcement. We must continue to ensure that we take this balanced approach. One person that really struck a chord with me was Chief Constable of the Calgary Police Rick Hansen and he was talking about the gang issue several years ago and I'm sure many police chiefs have also said this as well is we won't be able to arrest our way out of this problem that we have to do more and that's why we need to have that balanced approach of prevention, intervention and enforcement. Talk about the enforcement aspect Sergeant Frank Pallicelli. First of all, bullying is not a not a legal term. It's an occurrence that's oftentimes ambiguous at the onset. These are the sections under the criminal code of Canada that are usually relevant in cyberbullying cases. If you look at them you'll see that many of those these sections are oftentimes are also ambiguous in nature and difficult to prove and typically with ambiguous threats we tend to under respond. We have to that's why these sort of forums, gatherings, partnerships are important for us to help us recognize some of the circumstances of cyberbullying and and address them. It's a changing world. It's changed a lot since I started policing and I think you know we're doing a little bit of catch up. The Youth Criminal Justice Act provides for options other than the judicial system for dealing with first offenses for dealing with some of the lesser serious offenses. I think some of these options are being under utilized and I think that through an integrated approach we can we can work with other agencies to best curb the the bullying behavior. So I think that the greatest opportunity we have at this point while we need enforcement we need sections like these to deal with more severe cases to deal with ongoing or you know situations that we do we need the greatest opportunity for us to really mitigate bullying and to have an effect on that behavior are within the other components of PI and that's within comprehensive and integrated intervention and prevention initiatives of which we've we partnered with another agency a number of other agencies over the last few years to deal with those things. Everybody probably agrees that we are very good at doing the enforcement where we need to do more work is probably on our intervention and prevention side. When I think of intervention I think of that it's probably one of the greatest opportunities that we can have to make a difference in a young person's lives. It's things like school-based threat risk assessment where the police officer's part of that team that goes out there and we try to identify the root causes of the criminality but we don't always have just root offenders of crime we also have root offenders of victimization as well. We have what is called chronic victims of crime so we need to address those and it has to be a multidisciplinary approach whether or not it involves mental health all of our health authorities a good example of that was our youth mental health and addictions workshops we didn't do that alone we address the causes of youth mental health and addictions with Fraser Health Authority Interior Vancouver Coastal Health Authority on and on and on and we went around the province and we educated our members as well as the people within those communities whether or not they were the government agencies that provided service to those youth people with respect to mental health and addictions but that's what it's about it's about forming those partnerships when we're talking about addressing it it's cyberbullying is not just a police problem it's not just a school problem it's not just a parent problem we need to address these together in order to be effective to be an effective youth officer you have to know the resources within your community and making those proper referrals to that. And prevention ideally it's like Robert Peel said way back the measure of an effective police agency is the absence of crime not the ability to respond to it so ideally we prevent these things before they happen and in order to do that we have to partner with the experts inside you know dealing with young children with parents and my wife is a is a kindergarten teacher and the work that she does that helps us down the road to prevent crime is unbelievable. All her work is about socializing and working and playing and working together. Some of the programs that we've brought in well we put on the youth officer training program where we did introduce mental health and addictions. We have people from education talking about working with children to teach our police officers that skill set. Anyways as well as that our office and Vijay Maranasi from our office had lead on developing a package for internet safety called iSmart and we distributed that to all 102 of our detachments many of the school districts and some of the non-governmental organizations as well that deal with youth and it's a very comprehensive package you brought together a group of people from education and other agencies working with youth to to develop it. Youth officer resource toolkit is something where it's a living database I guess of some of the best practices out there in the prevention field. Other organizations units within the RCMP are the digital investigators computer evidence. Well it's our it's our internet or technical crime section and they put on a training for that and also probably our most advanced unit in working with this field of cyber safety and cyber crimes would be our integrated child exploitation unit and that's it. I think we support strength-based type training and oftentimes that has to be delivered by other organizations but we can play a big part because we sometimes deal with we always deal with the symptoms both with the victims and the perpetrators so I think we have to from a prevention standpoint feedback into other organizations of care that can help deal with this behavior. I just want to say thank you I just want to just pass along one story as a school liaison officer and sorry large attachment large lot of peak kids in the school. There's not a time probably every few months that I can't go walk through a mall or clothing store or something along those lines without someone shouting out your name and some of these kids have are now young adults and so I was in Army Navy not too long ago and I hear this guy yell out Newman. I turn around and I see this guy and I'm thinking wow this guy's big and he's coming straight towards me. I'm thinking to myself at this point in time is it fight flight or freeze. Well the kid sticks out his hand a young man sticks out his hand and says do you remember me and you know what I met thousands of kids but of course I said of course I do and you know what he said you made a difference in my life and it wasn't from being that black and white police officer that we always see portrayed in the movies but it was because that we used our discretion and that we may have given that person the opportunity to be able to grow and develop into a young man and contribute to our society because that's what it's really about. So anyway on behalf of Sergeant Frank Pallichella and myself we really appreciate being here today and giving this opportunity. Thank you.