Over the past several years, municipalities, provinces and states across North America have grown increasingly concerned about rising policing costs, at the same time they have faced little to no increase in local tax revenues. Frankly, in many cases it’s gone from a “do more with less” model to a “do everything with nothing” reality.
Increasing salaries as well as rising costs for technology, vehicles and fuel have caused police and political leaders to closely examine how to get the best bang for their dwindling dollar, through a variety of service delivery model options.
Most police chiefs and boards have been wrestling with this dilemma for at least 10 years. They’ve met in groups, shared ideas and best practices and consulted with academics and policing experts across jurisdictions to try and find valid solutions. It has been a difficult process and at a time when reported crime in a number of categories has actually dropped.
The falling crime rate argument is a bit of a misnomer. Firstly, crime is much more complex to investigate now than it was 30 years ago. In 2016 the police don’t only have to prove who committed the crime, they need to prove that every other person in the free world didn’t. Every interview is recorded and transcribed now. When charges are laid, terra-bytes of disclosure are prepared, under very tight timelines. The CSI world we live in also requires police to examine crime scenes in ways unimagined decades ago and must locate and process digital information in storage devices like tablets, phones and computers. Search warrant and production order processes are very complex. Hundreds of officers are most often involved in cases that years ago may have been staffed with a handful.
Secondly, falling crime rates don’t happen through the waving of a magic wand, but through an increased focus on prevention programs, which take time, people and funding. It is hugely cheaper to prevent crimes than it is to respond, investigate, prosecute and incarcerate. But the more important benefit is the reduction in victimization. Preventing vulnerable people from being exploited, harmed or robbed of their property is always the goal and current prevention models including crime abatement strategies and the “community mobilization” concept which brings police, various social service agencies, educators and community groups together to mitigate societal conditions that lead to crime, are having significant impacts. That work can’t be stopped on a dime however, or crime rates will grow rather than diminish.
New and demanding crimes are occurring, like cyber-crime – through organized crime groups that know no borders; child exploitation and internet bullying; as well as radicalization and terrorist attacks in western societies – just to name a few. They are all resource intensive and costly to address, to say the least.
From a staffing perspective, which encompasses the vast majority of most police budgets, in days gone by many police services didn’t have rigorous staffing methodologies, but simply had established complements that had existed for many years, combined with shift rosters that had consistent staff numbers working regardless of the day or time of the week. Sound minds know that this cannot continue and much work is underway at many levels to make significant change, however it is most often a very difficult collective bargaining issue, between the Police Services Boards and the police associations, or between the provinces/states and their police officers.
Technological solutions – which again cost money; “predictive-policing” (or intelligence-based, or data-driven policing) which impacts shift scheduling and the related staffing requirements; as well as focusing patrols and enforcement efforts to have the maximum benefit – are all recent enhancements to what used to be largely “best guess policing”. Having the right people in the right places and doing the right things to optimize policing energy are modern day musts.
Police need to stop doing some of the things they once proudly did. “No call to small” worked wonderfully at one time, but sadly that is now an unaffordable luxury. Citizen self-reporting of more minor incidents through the internet, with telephone follow-up by police personnel is quickly becoming the norm, and so it should.
Civilianization is not the panacea that some experts have claimed it to be. Police leaders need to have the best people performing the various roles within policing, and yes, some of those are best carried out by experts who are not cops, but the salary differential is not significant. There was a time when only 10% of police employees were civilians, as we then trained cops to do things we didn’t really need cops doing. Thankfully that has changed to 25 to 30% civilian staff in most cases. Civilian accountants, lab techs, I.T. personnel, administrators, communication centre staff and more, are vital parts of the overall policing team, bearing in mind that they are most often locked into those areas of expertise for an entire career, while they watch police officer colleagues move around between different assignments and promotional opportunities.
Most importantly, police services still need a critical mass of armed officers to provide patrols and response to a multitude of calls. Even in a large force, it is virtually impossible to send armed officers to some calls and unarmed officers to others, as some suggest. Many police services and OPP detachments only have a handful of staff working at any given time. The generalist constable has to be ready to respond to a variety of events, and yes the reality is that some of them may really not require a fully trained and armed police officer, but then again they might – and the next call probably will.
Police officers are well paid, and so they should be. We want the best of the best doing this work, not those that will simply fill a uniform and carry a gun at any price. Ontario’s police officers are all within a very tight salary range. In one year police service X is the highest paid, and the next year it is police service Y. Those salaries are challenging to control as associations try to leap-frog over other recently signed police contracts when doing so.
Police and community leaders need to continue to lead change before it leads them. The few that don’t want to should change careers. Police associations must accept that there is no new money out there and times are tough for everyone. Raises may not be as forthcoming as they would like. Shift schedules need to be based on the needs of the community, not the individual officer. At the same time, the public needs to know that a lot is happening to keep costs under control, while still preventing crime and keeping people and their property safe.
None of this is easy and cannot all happen at the flip of a switch, but laying off police officers and auctioning off police cars tomorrow isn’t the answer either.
Chris Lewis served as Commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police from 2010 until he retired in 2014. He can be seen regularly on CTV and CP24 giving his opinion as a public safety analyst.
