POINT/COUNTERPOINT: Should York Region police make same cuts Toronto considering?

YorkRegion.com
July 29, 2016
Christine Van Geyn and Angelo N. Caravaggio

YES
By Christine Van Geyn, Ontario director at Canadians Taxpayer Federation

Despite a dropping crime rate, York Region continues to hire more police officers and spend more on policing.

Thirty cents of every dollar in the 2016 York Region operating budget is going to the police and net spending is set to increase by 3.4 per cent per year on average until 2018.

While other police boards across the GTA are pulling back on new hires and making attempts to bring their budgets under control, York Region council appears to have no interest in restraint.

Despite York Region having the lowest crime rates for a municipality of its size, the York Region council approved a 2015 budget that could see as many as 180 new police staff hired over four years and 22 new staff actually hired in 2016.

Meanwhile, a Toronto task force has recommended a freeze on hiring and promotions that would see 350 fewer officers by next year. The Toronto task force also recommended merging divisions and using civilians rather than the highly paid uniformed officers for certain duties.

The Toronto task force proposals are designed to save $100 million over three years, the vast bulk of which comes from savings in officers’ salaries. Salaries make up a huge component of the cost of policing in Ontario and York Region has extremely expensive police, with 70 per cent of officers earning more than $100,000.   

Police are an important and necessary part of our communities, but if crime rates are dropping and budgets are soaring, those new officers and their six-figure salaries will mean higher and higher property tax rates.

York Region should take a page from Toronto’s book and look at ways of bringing the police budget under control.

Salary and hiring freezes and an increased use of non-uniformed civilian police staff could be an important first step and it is something York council must consider.

NO
By Angelo N. Caravaggio, Executive director at C9Leadership

The radical changes being proposed for the Toronto Police Services reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of the police profession, why police services exist and the critical state of our social systems.

To begin with, any document that speaks of the “business of policing” brings its entire credibility into question.

Policing has never been a business. Policing is a public service.

Policing is a social enterprise and must be carried out person to person. Technology can enable but can never replace this person-to-person contact. Police officers cannot be casual encounters in the public they serve, but must be part of it.

Closing down precincts and removing a sustained presence in a community runs counter to the tenets of the community policing model.    

The reality is that the cost of policing has gone up. Mandated training and procedural costs to process a charge in time and money have increased. Most importantly, these additional burdens are focused on protecting the rights of Canadian citizens.

Eighty per cent of police calls deal with non-criminal related events/activities. Policing is one of a number of public services designed to serve society, but policing is designed to serve as the backstop when all other avenues fail.

Every time a police service has to respond, the response represents a breakdown of our social system. The police, once called, are morally and legally obligated to respond: they cannot say no regardless of cost.

The report fails to address the core issue in policing and that is the cost of salaries and benefits, which makes up anywhere from 85 to 95 per cent of a police service’s budget.

Dismantling the police profession through civilianization, stopping recruiting and promotions causes more problems than they actually solve.