Randall Denley

The Ottawa Citizen

Friday, February 22, 2002

The demand for increased policing is one of nature's strange constants. When the crime rate is down, as it is now, we need more police. When it's up, we need more police. One might wonder how this could be, but consider that the demand for policing is measured by the police. Historically, the list of bureaucratic organizations that have proposed reducing their size is rather small.

With that in mind, it's no surprise to see the Ottawa Police Service is proposing a substantial expansion. Without quite coming out and saying so, the police are calling for a 12.6-per-cent increase in staffing, mostly in the next five years. That amounts to 129 more police officers and 59 additional civilian employees.

The budget will receive the full scrutiny of the police services board, which ought to last several minutes. While the police expansion demand is thinly justified, it's likely to be approved. The city councillors who sit on the board -- Herb Kreling, Jacques Legendre and Dwight Eastman -- have already pronounced themselves pleased. Because of the curious way that police budgets are handled, the rest of city council doesn't have the right to scrutinize police spending. Council can only say yes or no to the total budget amount.

The police expansion plan is cleverly staged, so that the costs this year and next, totalling $1 million, will be covered by an internal rearrangement of spending. That fits with Mayor Bob Chiarelli's promise to freeze taxes through to the end of next year. Then the real cost bites. The proposed expansion will cost $4.7 million in 2004 and $7 million more in 2005. The total expansion bill through 2008 is $16.6 million.

Once the real costs kick in, the police expansion will eat up most of the new tax revenue the city gets from growth. Is this council's number-one priority?

One would think the best indicators of a need for more staff would be a rising volume of calls for service or an increasing caseload per officer. In a 75-page budget book and a 43-page expansion report, there is not a single statistic to support the idea that actual demand for service is increasing.

Instead, the police refer to things such as population growth, a statistically unsupported increase in abuse of the elderly, "unprecedented" retirement levels and increasing demands for maternal and parental leave.