Randall Denley

Ottawa Citizen, February 27, 2002

The Ottawa police services board applied its rubber stamp Monday to the 12.6 per-cent expansion of the police service, as expected. The bill will follow. It's estimated at $16.6 million, most of that in 2003 and 2004.

Of the seven members on the board, only city Councillor Jacques Legendre saw the audacious expansion plan as one that required any tough questioning. Councillor Herb Kreling also had a few questions, some of which were clearly designed to allow Chief Vince Bevan to give better answers than he did last week. The third overseer of the public purse, Councillor Dwight Eastman, was elsewhere. The four government-appointed members of the board are either mute or merely dumbstruck by the magnificence of Bevan's plan.

No one managed to ask the obvious question, which is how is the city going to afford the big increase in police costs? That might have made a good starting point for the whole exercise, but the police don't operate within the same rules as the other city departments. The police's job is to want more; it's someone else's work • to figure out how to pay.

It's interesting to examine the statistical underpinning of the chief's plan to expand the force. He believes the city's population might dramatically increase, although it hasn't yet. He believes that crime rates might go up, although they have been going down. The only solid reason for adding more police lies in the calls for service, which are up about 10 per cent in the last year.

But then you look at what these calls for service consist of. Number one on the list is traffic enforcement, at 20.6 per cent. Considering the behaviour of drivers, you'd have to ask what's being accomplished. Next is administrative calls, things such as requests for phone numbers or inquiries about the Web site. That's 8.1 per cent. Burglar alarm calls, many of them false, are third at 7.9 per cent.

That's pretty mundane stuff, but rather than trying to reduce demand or meet it with lower-cost employees, the answer is to up the supply of officers and talk about service to the elderly, anti-terrorism squads and fighting gangs.

Asked why the force's computerized incident reporting takes 30 per cent more officer time than the old paper reports, the chief offered an anecdote about-how older officers found the system easy to use. His chief financial executive suggested that the move was actually saving money, because a dozen data-entry clerks were no longer required. No assessment was given of the cost of having higher-paid employees do the same work.

Board members were assured that the police expansion plan has been fully vetted by the police themselves and the groups in the community with which they work most closely, such as Neighbourhood Watch. Not surprisingly, they all say more police are necessary. If the city polled library staff and readers or arena staff and hockey players, they are likely to find similar results about those resources.

In this budget, every dime of expenditure is portrayed as vital. There are no second-tier priorities, we're assured, although the police service itself seems to have made such a decision by leaving some community policing jobs vacant and having fewer officers in the schools than it would like.

The police maintain two dozen little storefront offices across the city at a cost of $1,888,300. This exercise in creating the appearance of policing ties up the time of i8 officers. Now they are going to do more of it.

The board seemed to buy it. You have to admit, the chief is a great salesman. If he told these folks that they needed a rhinoceros for crowd control, they'd offer to buy two.

Not much is cut in this budget, but it does eliminate money the police services board had for independent policy analysis. Staff told the board that reinstating the analyst position would cost $90,000, surely heartening news to underpaid policy analysts across the city. Legendre suggested that a more modest $60,000 be set aside so that the board might get some information other than that which the police administration so helpfully supplies. His colleagues turned it down.

Perhaps that was wise. If they have no interest in how the police spend their money, analysis would be lost on them.

Contact Randall Denley at 596-3756 or bye email, rdenley@thecitizen.southam.ca.