Deputy Chief Peter Sloly, passed over for Toronto’s top cop job last year, says blowing up the current policing model is the only way to slay the force’s $1-billion-plus budget.

“Until policing stops being focused and driven on that reactive enforcement model, it will continue to be exponentially costly,” Sloly told a forum Friday afternoon.

And unless radical changes are made, Sloly said, he fears for the future.

“I’ve never seen policing at this low a point in terms of public trust and legitimacy. I feel there’s a crisis in the offing, not just here but right across North America.”

Sloly also dared to say what few police leaders will admit publicly: that a thoroughly modernized police service could operate with fewer officers without compromising public safety.

“We run around all over the city in the most unfocused way, reacting to what you call us for, as opposed to trying to understand what’s going on and . . . putting our most important resources in the best place,” Sloly said at the small gathering hosted by the Studio Y fellowship program, which is backed by the MaRS Discovery District, a local centre for innovation.

If the Toronto Police Service leverages technology and “big data” and optimizes existing resources, Sloly told the forum, “we can probably drop ourselves by several hundred police officers, which represents tens of millions of dollars.”

By ensuring every officer on the street has access to the Internet on a mobile device, “we can shrink the footprint of what we need in terms of police stations” and equipment, and “exponentially expand the abilities and the capacity of the police officers,” he said.

During the 70-minute question-and-answer session, carried live on the Internet, Sloly spoke candidly on a range of subjects, including being racially profiled as a young black man in Scarborough.

“I know what it’s like to be scrutinized, and stigmatized and followed, and investigated (and) not quite sure why.”

He also opened up about his disappointment that he did not fulfill his dream of ascending to chief of police. Last year, the Toronto Police Services Board chose Mark Saunders to replace Bill Blair, now a Liberal MP.

“I’m still going through the five stages of grief,” he said at one point.

Sloly also had some sharp criticism about the service where he has worked for the last 27 years.

“On the capital side of it, we are wasting money on infrastructure. Bricks and mortar should not be our investment strategy,” said Sloly, one of four deputy chiefs.

And he said the TPS, like other police forces, was too slow to appreciate the power of social media — which might have led to different outcomes at Danzig St. and the Eaton Centre, the scenes of multiple shootings in 2012.

“Both of those, in my humble opinion, we could have been alerted to, had we had a full-on strategy in place,” he said.

After being promoted to deputy chief, Sloly recalled telling senior command that the service needed such a cyber/social media strategy. “The actual response was laughter. ‘That’s what pimply-faced kids do in parents’ basements. Why would we be investing in that?’”

Now every department across the service has a proactive, cyber-social digital element, he said.

On Sunday, Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said he was unaware of Sloly’s remarks so couldn’t comment.

But Saunders said a new task force, which he is co-chairing with board chair Andy Pringle, is committed to “transformational change.”

“That’s what I hope to glean out of the task force. The only difference is I’m not doing it through rhetoric, I’m doing it through comprehensive research and trying to figure out what best fits the City of Toronto,” Saunders said.

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Sloly said Friday that during his interviews with the police board, which includes Mayor John Tory, he spelled out “a full plan to modernize the police service” that involved emphasizing crime prevention over enforcement.

As well, he told the board he would tackle “the single biggest issue in policing anywhere in the world . . . the issue of trust and legitimacy, specifically the issue of carding, Sloly said.

“It didn’t quite work out for me.”

Since becoming chief, Saunders has defended carding — the now-suspended practice of officers stopping, questioning and documenting citizens in non-criminal encounters.

Police observers viewed Sloly as a reformer who was unpopular with the Toronto Police Association, which preferred Saunders — the status-quo candidate seen as a cop’s cop.

Sloly explained his role as the lead on the PACER (Police and Community Engagement Review) report, which contained 31 recommendations to address carding and systemic disproportionality in policing.

“Yet to be implemented, and yet to be fully embraced. I was removed from the file; I won’t give you all the gory details,” he said.

Sloly added he paid a price for “picking battles I shouldn’t have picked.”

“I’m still bleeding from multiple cuts in the back and the front,” he said.

Sloly, 49, whose contract expires in December 2017, said he has his “head up” for his next opportunity, while ensuring he earns his “hefty” paycheque (he was paid $241,000 last year).

He urged members of the audience to turn their attention to the province opening up the Police Services Act, the legislation governing policing in Ontario.

“It will be the single biggest opportunity that the public has had in the last quarter-century, and probably will have for the next quarter-century, to fundamentally change policing, including issues like carding.”

On Sunday, Sloly told the Star he was trying to be forthright with the group of young, progressive stakeholders attending the forum. “They wanted to talk to a police leader and I wanted to give them the most honest explanations,” he said.

“These are very complex times … particularly for policing, and no one’s got easy answers.”

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