A year's worth of police work was summed up in 4 pages, with total of 11 articles maxing out at 450 words a piece. To compare, my blog yesterday was nearly 200 words.
The report also shares a striking resemblance to the Vernissage newsletter I get from the National Gallery.
Graphic content (pie charts and information cyclones) and photo's (pictures of police with kids, with dogs, on bikes) make up as much of the review's content as what is written about policing in Ottawa over the last year.
The report does have a few nuggets of information.
Of the more than 900,000 calls made to the police in 2009, less than 40,000 of them lead to charges of offenses. According to the information cyclone, this adds up to a police solvency of 35 per cent.
Without documented explanations, these statistics come off looking a lot like Madoff Math.
Crime is down for the fourth year in a row in Ottawa - dropped 2.6 per cent from 2008. For that same period the number of police grew by 4 per cent, and the budget by 6 per cent.
My roommate, the criminology major, made me wonder what crime prevention expert, Irvin Waller, would say about this. For context, his main body of work is called Less Law, More Order.
The police said that this pamphlet version of a year end report was more accessible to the public than traditional reports, and that this was their main goal.
I forgot to ask "What about transparency?".
So those are our choices - either a glorified edition of Owl magazine and a 500 page bureaucratic bowel movement.
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