Police officers across the city will now have time for proactive policing built into their day, thanks to changes their work week taking effect this week.

Mundane though it may seem, the force’s new shift schedule experiment aims to make a big impact on everything from traffic enforcement to community policing to the overall visibility of officers.

Simply put, Toronto police are making time for it.

“We’ve never built that into the staffing model,” Acting Supt. Greg Watts said of proactive policing, which until now has been done when there was time but had not been given dedicated place in an officer’s day.

Starting Monday, officers in the majority of the city’s divisions will spend 70 per cent of their shift responding to calls for service and the remainder doing preventative work, said Watts, who is overseeing the one-year pilot project.

For decades the bureaucratic, thorny issue of when officers work has caused tension between the Toronto Police Association and the Toronto police board, the two parties to the shift schedule.

Before this week’s changes, most police officers across the city were on what’s known as the “compressed work week,” made up of three overlapping shifts. Among the central criticisms of the schedule is that it’s highly inefficient, staffing 28 hours for each 24-hour day. It also sends approximately the same number of front-line officers out all times, regardless of the demand for service.

The one-year pilot, which impacts the majority of the city’s front-line officers, has been dubbed the first major change in officer deployment in 35 years. In a statement Monday, both police association president Mike McCormack and Toronto police chief Mark Saunders attributed the change to collaboration between the board, the union and the police service that McCormack called “unprecedented.”

“The stars have finally aligned,” said Watts.

Past efforts to alter the schedule have put the board and the union at loggerheads. In a 2016 interview, McCormack said the compressed schedule was “pretty well bullet proof,” though he entertained the possibility of making changes in the name of officer wellness.

Watts said gains have been made more recently through consultation with officers as well as through a U.K.-based law enforcement schedule consulting firm, paid for by the police union. Using data, including the periods of high demand in each division, a series of possible shift changes were drafted, all more efficient and better for officers’ health than the compressed work week, he said.

Each of Toronto’s 17 divisions voted on which schedule they wanted to test, many choosing one that sees officers working longer shifts fewer days in a row. That schedule was tested at a Scarborough police division last year to rave reviews, Watts said.

“What we saw was an increase in member satisfaction, and an increase in efficiencies as well,” he said.

Like the schedules rolling out across the city Monday, the Scarborough pilot saw officers spending more time on proactive policing. Watts called the experiment “a big positive,” saying early results showed traffic enforcement in the division was 25 per cent higher than the across-the-service average — “a pretty incredible number.”

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Toronto police have faced heated criticism for their declining traffic enforcement rates. Late last year, police released numbers showing a marked decline in criminal traffic enforcement since 2013. A Star analysis of provincial Highway Traffic Act tickets also revealed a significant drop in enforcement in 2018 compared to a decade earlier, including a 44 per cent drop in careless driving charges.

Watts said the police service is currently examining the data from the 41 division pilot project to get a detailed understanding of the impact of the schedule change.

With Star files