The Toronto Police Services Board and the Toronto police released the final report of their joint Transformational Task Force, co-chaired by board chair Andy Pringle and police Chief Mark Saunders, on January 26.

The report, Action Plan: The Way Forward – Modernizing Community Safety In Toronto, is loaded with corporate buzzwords. It’s a glossy document, much like the promo material for a miracle drug, full of glib jargon and breathless claims but short on specifics.

That’s no coincidence.

The board hired Sandra Buckler as its “strategic communications advisor” to sell the report, complete with a video featuring Saunders and website inviting more public input. She will reportedly make more than half a million dollars for her services. Buckler gained notoriety as Stephen Harper’s first spokesperson, guarding the PM from media access.

The report makes 32 recommendations, 24 of which were contained in the task force’s interim report of June 2016. It proposes their implementation over three years, and claims that their completion will lead to as much as $100 million in savings in the police budget.

That’s an interesting number. It’s roughly 10 per cent of the force’s $1 billion budget – the same 10 per cent in savings that the board agreed to back in 2010.

Some of the major recommendations that would produce the most savings are also familiar. Those include improvements in scheduling, a three-year freeze on hiring, giving up crossing guard functions, reforming paid duty policing and reducing the number of police divisions.

Two community members of the task force, Jeff Griffiths, Toronto’s former auditor general, and David Soknacki, the city’s budget chief under David Miller, could have told Pringle and Saunders that Ernst and Young made the same recommendations to the city manager on ways to achieve service efficiency in October 2011.

Perhaps they did. It’s still all there, right on the TPSB website along with the board’s own August 2011 report on reducing the police budget through comprehensive organizational change, Avoiding Crisis, An Opportunity: Transforming The Toronto Police Service.

Like the soft drink maker who rebrands an old product as new, this report claims that policing under the Tory-Pringle-Saunders regime will go where it has never gone before.

Board chair Pringle offers in his introductory message that the report represents “the most comprehensive review of policing in Toronto that has ever been conducted. We are confident that our recommendations go well beyond all previous reviews and, implemented together, will result in comprehensive and long-lasting change.”

To be sure. If we set aside the skepticism prompted by past experience, the report, if fully implemented, could take the police service in a significantly different direction.

There are good suggestions related to neighbourhood policing, like focusing on calls that require a police presence and providing effective alternatives when that presence is not required diverting non-policing calls to other city departments and service providers smaller, more efficient police stations and fewer paid duty assignments.

What’s missing are the details. The concrete steps necessary to reform policing are not spelled out. Some recommendations cannot be implemented without the cooperation of the police union, for example.

And then there’s the reference to the need to change the police culture, a recurring theme in this and past reports.

The report promises to tackle the issue. However, its recommendations deal only with the formal features of police culture, calling for action on leadership and decision-making, people management and human resources strategy, technology and information management. Many informal features, like the preferential system of promotions, special assignments and mentoring, and unequal practice of performance assessment, are not only resistant, but undermine culture change.

The report promises to “get on with the job.” But the early signs are not good.

Mike McCormack, president of the Toronto Police Association, has already expressed his criticism both of the report and of a task force process that excluded the association’s participation.

Key recommendations with the greatest cost-saving potential cannot be implemented without the association’s support. Shift scheduling, for example, is in the collective agreement and cannot be changed unilaterally.

The largest savings will be made by reducing the size of the uniformed and civilian workforce. But the Police Services Act requires the agreement of the police association when permanent staff reductions are contemplated by a board or municipality. Also required: the approval of the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, the provincial oversight body responsible for ensuring that every community receives effective and adequate policing services.

But most importantly, to “get on with the job” successfully, the board and the service will need people in leadership who are change agents, with the necessary skills, qualities, attributes and commitment.

Whether the police service’s current leadership has such bench strength is an open question. One senior member of the service I spoke with recently expressed despair that Saunders appears to be rewarding and surrounding himself with people not known for their commitment to change and modernization.

It is known that several good people took retirement for this very reason: they saw no future for them in the current environment.

In the meantime, the report may have achieved its immediate purpose: approval of the 2017 police budget without having to meet the reduction target imposed by Tory and his budget committee on other critical services, namely those for children and the poor.

Alok Mukherjee served as chair of the Toronto Police Services Board from 2005 to 2015. He is a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University.

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