North Bay Police Service looking into SPEAR

North Bay Police Service and all four local school boards are ready to implement the "School Police Emergency Action Response" program locally.

Representatives from both post secondary institutions and all four area school boards along with the North Bay Police Service heard firsthand what SPEAR is all about and how it will benefit them during a presentation this week.

The project, developed by the Peel Regional Police in 2004, was the first of its kind and was born in response to the Columbine High School massacre that took place April 2o, 1999

“The catalyst really was the Columbine shooting incident and our service recognised the need to have a pre-event response plan in place in order to deal with a critical, violent, large scale incident at a school in order to ensure the safety of the school community,” explains Peel Detective Christine McIntyre.

“Today we’ve come and shared the SPEAR program, a little bit of the history the background, the workings of it, and how to implement it with the North Bay Police Service, the OPP as well as the school boards within the area and the post secondary facilities as well on how to set the program up and how it could work in this jurisdiction.”

McIntyre says the program is fairly cost effective and simple to set up because it is created by using regular off the shelf software. She also adds that Peel has come to depend on the program.

“We have used it successfully operationally three times since it rolled out in 2004 and investigatively we use it on a daily basis.”

“Our officers can pull up the information at any time and get a good look at the school, find out about the size of it any information that we need on that particular facility is at our finger tips.”

McIntyre says the program is suitable but not limited to armed suspects in the school bio-chemical incidences bomb threats and anything else that’s going to require an extraordinary deployment of resources within the facility.

Police Chief Paul Cook says SPEAR is an invaluable tool that will aid his officers should and emergency situation arise at a school.

“I think what they are doing right now is trying to plan for a major event in the schools, all of us have plans, each school has a plan, the police have plans, we all have policies as it relates to how we deal with a major emergency in the school this will bring some consistency,” states Cook.

“It will also force both the boards and the police to update the information to ensure that we have information that’s current whether that be contact information in the schools, accurate floor plans. And certainly by having the software available your first responders have accurate timely information, when you’re having to make decisions in a crisis, that’s going to assist as far as operational officers and emergency response people attending a scene in an emergency situation.”
Cook says that there is buy in from everyone which makes moving forward with the project easy

“The issue of school safety, whether that be the safety of the students in the schools or the staff, it’s very topical with some of the unfortunate incidents that have gone on both in Canada and the States of late, and so certainly this is one where you bring up the topic you’re going to have people attend, and that was seen today by the fact that we did have the boards attend as well as Canadore and Nipissing.”

Cook adds that while there is cost involved to start the program, North Bay is not looking to reinvent the wheel and will look to implement Peel’s model for North Bay. The chief also feels using Peel’s model the city can implement SPEAR in less than the 18 months.