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Police board passes budget with 2.6% increase

In an effort to meet rising demand for service and reduce costs, Greater Sudbury Police are planning to hire eight community safety officers this year.
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The Greater Sudbury Police Service is attempting to locate a vehicle and driver that were involved in a hit and run on Feb. 26. File photo.
In an effort to meet rising demand for service and reduce costs, Greater Sudbury Police are planning to hire eight community safety officers this year.

They are being hired instead of six full-time officers the force is currently short, in hopes they will be able to do non-emergency duties currently done by full-time police officers.

Chief Paul Pedersen said community safety officers will cost about $670,000, far cheaper than the cost of hiring and training six sworn police officers.

They will be responsible for specific non-emergency duties, with an eye of freeing up full-time police to focus on more urgent calls to service. The hiring should begin in the spring.

Even with the safety officers in place, the police services board budget for 2015 is increasing by 2.6 per cent, rising to a total of $52,527,925.

With 84 per cent of the police budget spent on salaries, Pedersen said 2.6 per cent is the minimum they can implement without affecting services. In addition to wage increases mandated by collective bargaining agreement, insurance costs are also increasing substantially. But that increase is partially offset by an anticipated savings in the police fuel budget, made possible by plunging oil prices.

“We are presenting a very, very lean budget,” Pedersen said. “We're not asking for newer guns, for fancier roof lights, we're not asking for new cars.”

While statistics show that crime rates are dropping, Pedersen said calls for service are increasing, with 60,000 calls last year alone.

“Only 15 per cent of our calls for service are directly related to criminal offences,” he said. “And when we see crime is dropping, it is only a small, small sampling of what we do.”

The other calls deal with non-criminal offences, which include traffic complaints, distracted driving, noisy parties, etc. All take up police time, but are not reflected in crime statistics, Pedersen said.

“And we haven't even counted the non-policing aspects of our service,” he said.

That includes speaking to high school students and other groups and community work they do as part of the evolving policing model in the city, such as visiting high schools and proactively working with community groups in targeted areas to try and prevent crime before it happens.

The community expects that work, as well as for police to response to emergency calls, he said.

“We have to change the way we do business,” Pedersen said. “We can't continue with the model in its existing form … (But) we don't get to say no to any of those core functions.

“We rarely hear that people want less police in their neighbourhood.”

Part of the answer, Pedersen said, are the new community safety officers, who can handle non-emergency roles that are an increasingly large part of what police do. The safety officers will handle such duties as delivering crime prevention presentations to schools, seniors groups and some missing persons investigation “functions.”

Generally speaking, Pedersen said they will be used when there's no expectations of “use of force, arrest or search and seizure.”

“Do we need a fully armed police officer to respond to every call? Our answer is no,” he said.

Police CAO Sharon Baiden said the budget includes plans for dash-mounted cameras in police cruisers to record all incidents with the public, Tasers for all front-line officers and maintenance costs for the force's 161 vehicles.

Board chair Gerry Lougheed Jr. said the officers allow them the opportunity to save money while doing more for less money,

“We can actually be improving the quality of policing,” Lougheed said. “That is the crux.”

The proposed budget was approved unanimously, and next goes to city council for review.

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Darren MacDonald

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